Tunable Lighting: The Importance of Color Temperature & Brightness
How Smart Lighting Can Influence the Way Your Home Feels
Have you ever walked into a well-lit café or store and instantly felt happy to be there? You’re not the only one. Studies have found a correlation between light conditions and our emotions, showing that light can both positively and negatively impact our moods. After all, we’ve all noticed how gloomy it can feel during the darkest winter months.
Knowing this, does the lighting in your house influence how you feel, too?
As it turns out, your light bulbs’ brightness and color temperature can significantly affect your home's atmosphere and even the way walls, furniture, and artwork appear. If you’re illuminating your home with improper bulbs, it could negatively impact your environment and wellbeing.
Many people use any light bulbs they can find, resulting in a mismatched collection of warm and cool lights. But there’s a new way to approach home lighting. Smart solutions like Ketra LEDs allow you to automate lights for an experience called tunable lighting.
In this article, we’ll share all you need to know about tunable lighting, brightness and color settings, and how they can enhance your home in Beverly Hills and elsewhere in California.
SEE ALSO: 3 Ways to Enhance Your Home with Smart Lighting Design
What Is Tunable Lighting?
Smart lighting systems like Lutron ensure you’re never stuck with the same lighting all day. Instead, you can automate Lutron’s Ketra LED lights to automatically follow the sun’s patterns. In the morning, lights appear bright and cool, like a blue, sunny sky. And by the late afternoon and evening, LEDs will soften and turn warm, perfect for the golden hour.
Tunable lighting can be controlled manually from the Lutron app or automated to follow a schedule. You’ll find that as lights follow your circadian rhythm, you’ll feel more alert during the day and relaxed at night.
Controlling Brightness with Lumens
Brightness is measured by the unit lumens. The higher the number of lumens a bulb has, the brighter it will appear. On the Lutron smart system app, you can slide your finger and dim Ketra lights all the way down to 0.1 percent with ultimate precision.
Tunable lighting settings allow you to customize how bright your lights appear at different times of day. Bright lights intensify emotions, while low lighting keeps emotions steady and calm. You can program lights to start brighter earlier in the day, dimming gradually until bedtime.
Adjust Color Temperature with Kelvins
While lights may appear bright or dim, their color matters just as much. White light ranges from cool to warm tones, measured by the color temperature unit Kelvins. On the Lutron app, the fewer Kelvins a light has, the warmer it appears.
Since our circadian rhythms are guided by the sun, we need our indoor light bulbs to replicate natural light. Cool-toned lights from 5,000 to 10,000 K make us feel more energized during the day, and warm lighting from 2,000 to 4,000 K helps us sleep better at night. You can tell your Lutron lights to automatically adjust the color temperature on a schedule, so you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds.
If you’re curious about automated lighting, AUDIOVISIONS is your destination. We program and install smart lighting solutions in luxury homes in Beverly Hills and across the entire state of California.
