When you’re setting up your dream home you want to have the best décor, appliances & fittings. The right lighting can make a great difference for new homes, renovated homes, or even when you are carrying out minor improvements. Ideal lighting makes a place bright, welcoming, and can do so much to make a house a home. The right lighting can even ensure you save on your energy bills. We all know, keeping an electricity bill low can be a task, however, LED lights can help you achieve this easily! Making the switch from regular incandescent or CFL light bulbs to LED lights is simpler than you think. While it is often overlooked by homeowners when redecorating, the lighting that you choose plays an important role in bringing out the best of your home. The right lighting can help decorate your home in style, bring life to lesser-used rooms, and even help small spaces appear bigger, while all the while saving on your electricity bills. Let’s see exactly how you can do it.

First of all, make a proper count of how many lights you have in your home. Make note of what kind of lights they are as well. Count how many tube lights, how may bulbs, and how many smaller lights. Make sure you count all the small table lamps and other lights too. At the same time find out how many watts or how much electricity they use per hour. The watt rating will also be useful at a later stage when you need to decide how bright your home needs to be. Now that you have all this information, do the math. Calculate how much each of those lights cost, and how much they add to your electricity bill over their lifetime. You will find that some lights increase the bill because they use more electricity or you use them more often.

To help consumers, Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) has launched standards for LED lights, under which it is compulsory for brands to affix energy efficiency rating label given by BEE. Like any other product, the energy efficiency of these lights is denoted in stars ranging from one to five. Thus, more stars a LED light has, denotes it is more energy-efficient. As per BEE standards, LED lights having 79 to 90 lumen per watt fall in the two-star rating while those more than 120 lumens per watt are rated five stars. A large number of LED lights available in the market have lumen ranging from 80 to 105 per watt. Besides energy efficiency, BEE ensures that producers have to meet various such standards set for purposes like photo-biological safety

Now that you’ve understood how to check for the brightness of a LED, it’s time to understand how the warmth or feeling of light matters. Yellow lights lend a warmer, cosier feel to a room while bright white ones make them lively and full of energy. And it’s more than the feel of the room you’re looking for. On the range of yellow to white to blue, yellow LEDs emit less heat while blue release the most heat. Consider this while deciding the colour of LEDs you might want. Whatever the choice, an LED light produces far less heat than an incandescent bulb for every lumen.

The shape and size of an LED are important too. You will be familiar with most of the light fixtures around your home, and so will know what shape and size are appropriate most of the time. However, some items such as table lamps might have oddly shaped bulb sockets or not enough space for a bigger bulb. Carry your current bulb along while shopping to make sure you get the correct fit. In the process of switching over to LEDs, also remember that certain closed spaces are not ideal for LEDs, and you must avoid installing LEDs is fully enclosed light fixtures as they can cause the LEDs to fail

Dimmer switches are the craze and are quite useful especially with smart home controls like Google Home or Alexa. Check with the store if a particular LED is compatible with dimmers as some LEDs might flicker or hum when used with a dimmer. If you’re using transformers, make sure you’ve considered this as well while buying your LEDs. A lot of transformers require a certain number of watts to operate and your LEDs might not work properly since they require less energy.

The biggest reason for the transition to LEDs is taking time, is because the initial investment is relatively higher. But the reality is that the prices of LEDs have gone down quite a bit over the last few years. At the same time LEDs also consume much less electricity which means you will be paying lower electricity bills in no time. This is especially useful given that the electricity prices seem to be going up. Finally, LEDs last much longer than other lights. This is what makes their lifetime cost much lower than CFLs or incandescent bulbs. Now, while this is the basis for changing over to LEDs, you should also keep track of your expenses. Keep note of the purchase costs & your electricity bills in an excel sheet so that you can be more aware of how much you’re spending, and how much of impact LEDs are making on your beautiful home

The last tip we have for you is to replace LEDs gradually if the immediate cost seems too high. Start off by changing lights that are on for most of the day. Slowly replace any lights that stop functioning as well. You will soon find that LEDs have replaced most of the lights in your home within no time at all. Do remember an LED from a reputable brand is much more reliable than one made by a generic manufacturer. The significant difference between branded and non-branded LED bulbs is that non-branded bulbs have lower quality power supply, lower lumen per watt output and lesser life span. Now that you’re armed with this information to make a BIG change, start looking at some of the best-LED lights from Finolex