Office Lighting: Guide on Choosing the Right Lighting for Your Office
The right lighting fixtures can take a cold and drab office space and change the atmosphere to appear more warm and lively. This simple addition can promote more employee productivity, increase security, customer satisfaction, and enhanced moods.
With so many options available, knowing where to start when selecting the best lighting fixtures for your office space can be a challenge.
That is why today in this post we will be going over how to find the ideal lighting fixtures for your office space that go beyond aesthetics. Our Office Lighting Guide includes four things to consider when choosing proper office lighting include:
Light Intensity
Energy Efficiency
Fixture Positioning
Dimming Control
Illuminate Your Workspace Today
Light Intensity
Office spaces that do not have sufficient lighting can cause tired vision and eye strain. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) are two agencies that set the standard office lighting for all businesses in the United States.
According to the GSA website, the normal work station spaces require at least 500 lumens per square meter.
According to the OHSA website, office spaces require a minimum illumination of 30 foot-candles.
In order to properly calculate the exact amount of lumens you require for your space, you will need to multiply the surface of the room in square feet by the foot-candles. From there you will need to calculate the exact number of light bulbs you will need to reach that lumen output. To calculate that is to divide the number of lumens by the lumens emitted from each bulb.
Energy Efficiency
Efficiency is something that you need to consider when the lights in your office space will be on for an average of 18 hours per day, maybe even longer. That is why LED lighting is the best option for your office spaces. LED light bulbs can offer powerful illumination for up to 100,000 hours, which reduces both upkeep and utility costs.
Fixture Positioning
You will need to consider the placement and orientation of new lighting fixtures in your office space. If the lighting fixtures in your office space are improperly placed, your employees and customers will be the ones to suffer.
It is important to take into consideration the tasks being completed in your office space. If your employees spend the majority of their days on their computers, more gentle and warm lighting would be beneficial. What you need to do is to ensure appropriate illumination and visibility for the tasks to be completed without issue.
Lighting fixtures can be grouped into one of the four categoriesdepending on where you want the light to hit:
Accent Lighting: Often used with paintings, plants, and pottery in order to highlight it.
Backlighting: Illuminates objects from behind, often used to display transparent graphics.
Downlighting: Often used with fixtures that are hung from the ceiling to cast the light directly downward.
Up lighting: Often used to bounce indirect lighting off the ceiling and back down.
When considering each lighting fixture’s positioning in your office space it is important to understand the benefits of layering. Layering combines multiple light sources with different intensities together to create a balanced illumination for your office space.
Dimming Control
Installing the right lighting controls in your office space can reduce energy usage, lower electricity costs, and avoid potential outages. Lighting controls such as manual and automatic daylight dimming controls can also improve your environment by changing the ambiance to provide a more aesthetically pleasing lighting.
Manual dimming controls are often used in areas requiring different light levels at varying times. Private offices and conference rooms are examples of office spaces where manual controls work best.
Automatic daylight dimming controls use a sensor to measure the amount of light in an area to adjust the light output to maintain a preset level of illumination.
Our Final Thoughts
Many factors must be considered when choosing the right lighting fixtures for office space. But, what is most important is selecting lighting fixtures that suit the demands of the workplace, while being aesthetically pleasing at the same time. To find out more about our commercial office lighting services, including new and replacement LED products, contact us at Stouch Lighting today.