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Lighting up Your Home: Cool or Warm White Light?

4 minutes
Good lighting is a must for a safe and practical home. Should you go with white light or warm white (yellow) light? We'll fill you in on what you need to know about these kinds of lights.
Lighting up Your Home: Cool or Warm White Light?
Last update: 09 October, 2018

Choosing between cool or warm white for our home lighting isn’t always an easy task. We often find ourselves leaning for one or the other without even considering the needs of a given room. Different rooms require different things; lighting up a kitchen isn’t the same thing as lighting up a bedroom or study.

In light of that, we really should think about which rooms are the ones that we really want to light up and how we could do that in the most efficient way possible?

Choosing our home lighting carefully is crucial. Before diving into this tough job, you need to analyze all kinds of lighting, light-bulbs, etc. for each room.

We know how difficult that can be, so we’re dedicating today’s post to help you choose between cool and warm white light.

Different spaces, different lighting

As we lightly touched on before, lighting needs to meet the needs of the room and the activities that’ll take place there.

If our home has the same kind of light fixture throughout, we often just use the same kind of light for all of the areas in our home.

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Light is forgotten aspect in home design. It has, however, been becoming a hotter topic recently.

Securing good lighting in each and every room is essential as we can’t always count on natural light nor can we just give up nighttime activities just because of light issues. However, our home has different spaces with different purposes.

We might have work areas, such as the kitchen or study. There are also spaces for relaxing and rest, like our bedrooms.

But we also have multi-purpose rooms like the living room. Our living room provides us with both a space to relax and have fun, and a space for meetings or work.

We need either cool or warm white light for each and every one of our rooms because they can meet our needs. In just one room, we might even need both kinds of lights.

Cool white or warm white light

When we refer to cool or warm white light, we’re talking about the light’s color temperature. It’s how the human eye perceives light.

We perceive warm light in an amber tone, similar to the color of incandescent light-bulbs (not used anymore).

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Warm light works well for the rooms where we want a cozy lighting, such as a bedroom or living room. Warm light creates a lot of warmth, making spaces seem cozier and relaxing.

Warm light can also help highlight architectural details like decorations because it can spotlight embossing, texture and colors.

On the other hand, we perceive cool white light as blue tones. This kind of lighting is perfect for work areas where we need to see what we’re doing with clarity.

For example, a place that could use cool light is a kitchen or study. Cool lighting also works well in the garage or bathroom as well. It can help with concentration. As we mentioned earlier, you can use both cool and warm light together according to your needs. 

You could use a warm white light as the main lighting and add a cool white light lamp in the reading corner to read.

On a further note, using cool and warm white lights together balance out the lighting in our home. Setting them up in the right places will prevent bothersome shadows as well as using too much light in an area.

Which white?

Choosing is never easy. When it comes to light, the best thing is that you don’t have to choose between cool or warm white light because, as we said before, you can use them together with no problem; neither is better than the other.

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But you need to know which rooms that you want to light up. You also need to consider the activities that will normally take place in those spaces.

Of course, choosing the right lights is also essential for good lighting.

Conclusion

Home lighting is fundamental for being as efficient as we can in our everyday activities. Whether it’s lighting up the hallway or work areas, good lighting can help prevent accidents.

Furthermore, it can also help us cut down on house bills. Lastly, you don’t always have to choose between cool or warm white light because you can use both in multi-purpose areas.