Guides

Every product recommendation on this site rests on two pieces of reasoning, and rather than restating them on forty pages, they live here and get linked.

The first is how much light a room needs, which is a multiplication almost nobody publishes: floor area times the published footcandle target for that room's use. It turns "this room feels dark" into a number you can compare against the boxes on a shelf.

The second is where that light goes. The number from the first guide is a budget to spend across a room, not a target for one fixture. Three or four sources at different heights, sharing the same total, produce a room that reads as evenly lit. One source producing all of it produces glare, hard shadows and dark corners - which is why rooms with a ceiling light so often still need lamps.

Together they are the reason a recommendation on this site can be checked. If a page says a room needs roughly 2,500 lumens across four sources, you can redo the multiplication, disagree with the assumption, and reach your own figure.

The two rows marked as task areas are the ones that change how a room is planned. You do not light a whole kitchen to 100 footcandles - you light the room to the general figure and put a separate light on the counter, which is precisely why under-cabinet lighting exists as a product category rather than as an upgrade.

Every site in this category will tell you it tested twenty lamps. We have not tested any, and we say so. What we do instead is published in full on how we pick, and these two guides are the part of it that does the actual work:

• Compile the published specifications - lumens, kelvin, CRI, R9 where it exists, power source and mounting method - from the manufacturer or retailer, with the page we took them from linked on every pick.
• Compute what the room needs using the method above, so a recommendation is sized to a space rather than asserted.
• Classify by what installing it requires - plugs in, screws into an existing socket, adhesive, needs a ceiling box, needs a neutral wire - and flag anything requiring permission at the point of recommendation.
• Write "Not published" where a figure does not exist. Never an estimate, never a substituted guess. The omission is itself useful information about a product.

The result is checkable. If a number here is wrong you can find that out, which is not true of a testing claim you have no way to verify.

If a room feels dark, read how many lumens does a room need first, then count what the room currently produces. If a room hits its number and still feels wrong, read layered lighting explained - the problem is distribution rather than quantity, and no additional lumens will fix it.

If it is bright, evenly lit and somehow still drab, neither guide is your answer: that is a color rendering problem, and it is covered in high-CRI LED bulbs.

Four guides that answer a single question with published figures rather than principles.

• How far apart to space recessed lights - the spacing rules, and where they disagree.
• What size chandelier or pendant - diameter and hanging height, from the makers.
• Can you put a 100W LED in a 60W fixture? - why the rating is about actual watts.
• How long LED bulbs actually last - what 25,000 hours means, and what a warranty covers.

A guide written for a set of circumstances rather than a room.

• Lighting for aging in place - more light, less glare, and nothing that needs a ladder.

Two guides for the half of the year when the daylight stops doing the work.

• Lighting a home through winter - fix the morning, warm the evening, and the bulb swap that does more than any lamp.
• The best lighting gifts - picks from $10 to $80, chosen on whether they survive the novelty.