The best night lights

Every other page on this site is about getting enough light. A night light is the opposite problem: the goal is the smallest amount of light that lets you see the floor on the way to the bathroom at 2am, without fully waking you or anyone else.

Three specifications decide whether a night light does that, and none of them is peak brightness.

• Warmth. Around 3000K or lower. Warm light at night is far less disruptive than the cool blue-white most cheap night lights emit.
• How low it goes. The best dim to near zero. A night light that bottoms out bright is a small lamp, not a night light.
• Automatic switching. A dusk-to-dawn or motion sensor means it is on when it should be with nobody remembering.

L LOHAS, 2-pack - the pick. Warm 3000K with brightness control from 0 to 100 lumens and a dusk-to-dawn sensor. The range is the point: it goes low enough to be a faint glow beside a bed and high enough to light a hallway floor, and it runs itself.
Cons: it occupies the outlet, and its up-and-down light casts onto the wall above the socket.

AUVON motion, 4-pack - for a route you walk. Motion plus dusk-to-dawn sensing with output adjustable from 1 to 50 lumens. It stays dark until you move, then gives exactly enough to see the floor - and capping at 50 lumens means it cannot over-light a hallway. Four in a pack covers a whole route from bedroom to bathroom.
Cons: motion lights click on for pets and restless sleepers, and no Kelvin figure beyond warm white.

easuntec - for choosing the color yourself. Three switchable color temperatures - 3000K, 4500K and 6000K - with four dimming levels and a dusk-to-dawn sensor. Use the 3000K setting at night.
Cons: no lumen figure published, and the cooler settings are the wrong color for a bedroom at night.

Low, and along the route. A night light plugged in near the floor lights the floor, which is what you need to see. Place them along the path you actually walk at night - bedroom door, hallway, bathroom - rather than scattered.

Aim away from the bed. A night light in a bedroom should sit where its glow reaches the floor but not the pillow. Across the room and low is usually right.

Warm in bedrooms and nurseries. These are the rooms where the light is seen at the moment you are trying to stay asleep, so warmth matters most there. The nursery case is in nursery lighting, and the wider point about light and sleep is in circadian and tunable white lighting.

Motion in hallways, steady in bedrooms. A motion light suits a corridor you walk occasionally; a steady faint glow suits a bedroom, where a light clicking on can wake someone. For stairs, see stair and landing lighting.