Many lighting websites recommend that you use low voltage lights for your outdoor lighting requirements because it reduces your power bills. Obviously you cannot do this for your interiors because it’s you cannot use a low voltage light in your ordinary light socket. In fact most CFL lights are low voltage and the reason why they cost so much is because they have a small transformer in each fixture that reduces the voltage.

Many people therefore go with low voltage outdoor lighting because they feel that it will reduce their electricity consumption. Well they’re in for a shock because their electricity consumption will not necessarily reduce.

The difference is that although there is a relationship between wattage and voltage, it is not necessarily a direct one. There is no guarantee that just because you reduce your voltage, your wattage too will reduce.

Without going into the science behind electricity, Voltage means the strength of the electricity, while wattage refers to the amount of electricity. Thus if you reduce the voltage it just means that you are reducing the strength of the current. By reducing the voltage from 120 to say 12 you are ensuring that you will not get a shock because the strength of the current has been reduced. The wattage however will remain the same, which means that the light fixture will consume the same amount of electricity.

If you see any light bulb it will give you both the Voltage as well as the Wattage. Thus a bulb that says 120 V and 60 W means that it will work at up to a current strength of 120 Volts and will consume 60 Watts.

If you reduce the Voltage to 12 but retain the same 60 Watts there is going to be no difference in the power consumption at all. The only advantage of going with low voltage bulbs is that nowadays you get very high efficiency low voltage bulbs that will give you more output with less electricity consumed. You get bulbs that need just 20 watts of power to give you as much light as a 100 Watt incandescent bulb.

If you go with these, you will obviously get a savings in terms of electricity consumed. Also you save a little more because low voltage bulbs tend to last longer which means that they don’t have to be replaced as often. As to whether this savings is sufficient to offset the additional expense of installing a transformer, getting new light fixtures, and rewiring is up to you.

A light table is a table that has a light incorporated into the table top. Generally this kind of a table is used by draftsmen for drawing, and by doctors to check x-rays, although more often than not they would use a light board for this.

A light table is very useful here because it throws up contrasts much better than if you had a general light on.

Lately, however, light tables have started being used for other purposes than purely practical ones. For example you get designer light tables that have been designed by large design houses. You also get simple night light tables that can double as a night light.

With LED’s becoming cheaper, you are also able to get light tables in any color you want, with some of them even offering different lights.

If you are the nerdy sort, you get light tables that can be controlled by your computer so that you can change the color to suit your mood. Imagine having your table swirl in different colors to the rhythm of your music, much like your music player does.

These light tables are actually very simple and can be made by you if you are a little handy with your hands. All it requires is a square of sturdy, translucent plastic material to serve as the table top, and a couple of lights installed below for you to have a reasonably effective light table.

In fact with LED’s costing less than a dollar apiece these days, you can purchase strips of whichever color LED light you like and connect them all together so that you can have whatever color you wish to.

To most of us having a light table may sound totally useless, but imagine having guests home for dinner. Everyone is sitting around your living room, having something to drink. This setting is nothing unusual and most of the time, everyone will be relaxing around a couple of sofas with a tea table in the center.

Just imagine how the whole thing will look if this tea table was a light table. You need not have a table lamp and the light table will give everyone the impression of sitting around a fire.

Or imagine having a small light table beside every chair where your guests can keep their glasses. If the light is sufficiently dim, the light table will allow them to find their glasses in the dark while still not spoiling the ambiance of the room.

There are a number of thing that you can do with a light table, and what can be done is limited only by the depth of your imagination. Just look at a few pictures online for ideas and who knows, you may want to have one yourself.

All of us want our homes to look nice, and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to make our homes look as good as we want them to. Usually this is not a very difficult proposition and as long as we get the kind of lighting fixtures we like we are able to succeed at this.

Only in the case of the kitchen and the bathroom is this a problem because both form and function has to coexist. In a kitchen, not only should the light be something that gives it a certain tone, it should also be bright enough for you to perform the functions used in cooking and preparing meals. It should also be practical enough that it is easy to keep clean.

Yes clean. If anyone is going to be cooking food, whether you like it or not, there’s going to be steam and smoke coating the outside of any light fixture that you have. Having kitchen pendant light fixtures right over your cooking range may look really cool in a picture, but within a week you’ll find that they’re a pain to keep clean.

This is not to say that pendant lights for the kitchen are not good, just that any lighting fixture that you use should be installed in such a way that it does not give you any more work than you need.

Take for instance fluorescent kitchen lighting. They are bright, and you can get them in different colors also if you are really that particular about that. For example, if you want to have orange light in your kitchen it is a good idea because orange light tends to cover dirt and stains very well, yet does not give the impression of being dim at all.

All said and done, most of us will have stains in the carpeting, or on the counter that no amount of scrubbing will remove. We may also not want to keep replacing stuff in our kitchen because one careless moment and your new carpet has a stain too. Colored lighting is therefore a very good idea for the kitchen.

You can even go with LED kitchen lights. Not only do you get LED’s in different colors, they are also super-efficient. Most of us like to keep some light in the kitchen on during the night, and an LED is a good option for this.

Kitchen ceiling lights need not be drab and purely functional. As long as you plan well, you can have a very pretty kitchen without increasing the amount of work you have to do. For example how many people would have thought of lighting their kitchen with a spotlight? If you focus the light on to the counter, not only does it give you good bright light where you need it, you’ll be leaving the rest of the room at a comfortable level for you too.

Build Your Own Chandelier

All of us want to have a chandelier. Granted they are very nice to look at even when they are not lit, and they give the whole room a certain tone.

The only problem with them is that they are a little on the expensive side. Even a halfway decent one costs around $200 and if you want a really nice looking one, you’ll have to shell out twice that amount. Making your own chandelier therefore can be very good idea.

And it isn’t all that difficult to make either. If you have an old one, it is very easy to refurbish it, give it a coat of paint, get some beads or new shades and fit it all together. You can probably do the whole thing for less than $100.

Of course this method requires that you purchase everything and just assemble it. And while it may not be as expensive as a new one, is still expensive because all the new parts cost money. It is also not a true DIY chandelier.

Once you know what exactly a chandelier is, it is easy to make one yourself. All you need is a sturdy frame on which you can suspend the lights and something to function as the shades/decorative element.

You can use anything you want to for the frame, including a dried out root of a plant. You get amazing shapes and if you trim them down to different sizes, you’ll have a frame that is pretty much unrepeatable.

All you need to do is to screw in the bulb holders and attach the wires along the upper part of the branches with tape or wire and you’ve got the frame done. You will of course have to get all these wires together into one socket so that it can work, but that’s not too difficult.

Or you can take an old lampshade frame and hang tassels from it so that they hang down in a circular pattern. This is probably the easiest to do and does not require anything other than an old lampshade frame and some time. Once you have it done to your satisfaction, simply fix it below the light and you are done. You can make your own chandelier with beads, or any thing that you will want.

There are a number of tutorials on how you can do this, and if you have the time to spare, will cost you less than $10 to make. What’s more, some of the designs are even better than the ones that you get in stores, or are very similar to ones that cost quite a packet of money.

An oil lamp is very similar to a candle and the physics behind the both of them are the same. Be it a candle, or an oil lamp, it has a container in which you pour the oil, or in the case of a candle, this is not required. You just add the wick inside it so that it absorbs the oil and brings it above the surface of the oil. You light the wick here and the oil vaporizes.

As the oil vaporizes, due to capillary action more oil is drawn up from the container and the whole cycles keeps going until there is oil left in the container.

Making an oil lamp therefore is very easy. There are a number of ways you can do this, with the simplest being you making a hole through the cap of a small bottle inserting the wick through it, and filling the bottle with oil. The oil can be anything from cooking oil to paraffin depending on your choice.

The flame is much brighter, and if you get a little experience in managing the length of the wick, there is very little to no smoke too. Olive oil has the least amount of smoke, and has no smell whatsoever. Most cooking oils do have some smell but smoke less than paraffin.

If you want a little more fancy oil lamp all you do is substitute the bottle for a more decorative container. For example you can pour some water into a tall cut glass tumbler and top it with a couple of ounces of oil. This will give it two different colors and if you choose the right kind of oil, can look very nice. Also because oil is more viscous than water, you can put things that will float within the oil, like flower petals or even very light beads.

If you want the flame to be within the container, all you do is put the wick inside. Punching a hole through a cork to keep the wick afloat is more than enough. You don’t have to think too much about an oil lamp chimney, as the only reason for chimney is to keep the flame from gutting in the breeze. For most indoor purposes keeping the flame within the container is more than enough.

Check online, and you will get a number of ideas to make your own oil lamp, and sometimes combining a couple of different ones will give you a really nice looking lamp.

What are sodium lights useful for?

Sodium vapor lamps are not new. They have been used for a number of years in places where good light was needed along with low cost of operation. Thus starting from street lighting, to floodlighting and interior lighting in commercial establishments, sodium vapor lamps have been used for decades.

There are two basic types of sodium lamps, the high pressure sodium lamps and low pressure sodium lights. The difference between the hps lamp and the lps lamps is in their output and the color rendering.

The way a sodium vapor lamp works is very simple. The lamp as such contains a small amount of some other vapor like argon, xenon, neon or even mercury which will start discharging light immediately when current is passed into the lamp. There is also sodium metal inside the light that gets warmed up when the other vapor inside the lamp starts discharging light. Once the sodium reaches optimum temperature, it takes over. That is why when a sodium vapor lamp is switched on, initially it glows reddish or pink first before switching to the typical yellow. The pink light is from neon or argon, while if the light is white or blue, it means that the lamp uses mercury to warm up the sodium.

A low pressure sodium light only emits light in a very small bandwidth. This means that the color of objects is never true under a low pressure sodium light. Many reception areas are lit by low pressure sodium lights because it gives good light, but the narrow spectrum of the light ensures that dust and dirt does not show up too well.
A high pressure sodium light emits light in a broader bandwidth. This is because of two reasons. When sodium vapor is pressurized it starts to increase the bandwidth of the light emitted. Secondly the starter gas used is mercury which continues to produce light. Mercury produces whitish light which when combined with the yellow of sodium gives a nearly sunlight-like spectrum of light.

Commercial establishments that require very good lighting generally go for these high pressure sodium light because they last an average of 20,000 hrs. Mercury vapor lamps do give out better light and last almost as long, but many cities prefer the yellow of the sodium vapor lamps because it causes lesser light pollution than the white light of a mercury vapor lamp.

Grow lights are not new. People have been growing plants in greenhouses for generations, and even if they had not used the lights inside consciously to help the plants grow, people have been using artificial light as a substitute for natural light since long.

Nowadays however, grow lights are finely engineered electronic items. You get wide spectrum grow lights that provide overall general lighting, and you also get single spectrum light meant for more specific purposes.

In order to understand grow lights, we therefore need to understand what the requirements of plants are. What most of us know is that plants need sunlight because they use sunlight to photosynthesize their food. Photosynthesis is actually a chemical reaction that combines simple elements to more complex ones that are used by the plants, and the sunlight is what provides the heat to cause this reaction.

Granted sunlight is not strong enough to provide the kind of heat that you can generate in the lab, but then plants have gotten around this by using enzymes that work as catalysts so that these reactions can take place at a lower temperature. This explanation is a very simple one but covers the ground admirably.

The only provision to this is that during different phases of the plant’s growth, it requires different kinds of light.

This light is not the same. Even though to us all light looks white, this white light is composed of different wavelengths. That is why when you put a prism in the path of white light, you get the colors of the rainbow, it gets split into its component wavelengths each of which has a different color. Thus red has the lowest wavelength while violet has the highest in our visible spectrum.

Why this is important is because the higher wavelengths tend to help the plants during their growth phase while the lower wavelengths tend to be more helpful during their flowering phase. More importantly the bluish “colored” lights help them in their vegetative phase while the orangish “colored” ones help them in the flowering phase.

It is therefore important that we install the right kind of grow lights for the plants that we are growing, and for the period that they are in. Thus if you could give them bluish light when they are in their vegetative phase and yellow light when they are in their fruiting phase it will reduce the time that the plants spend in each phase.

What many people do not realize is that light too is a sort of electromagnetic radiation and has a wavelength. White light is radiation between 4000 and 4200 ºK. The visible spectrum starts off at around 1500 ºK and is Red in color, while the maximum is around 8000 ºK and is dark Blue to purple in color.

When it comes to plants, they use light throughout the spectrum, but different colors for different purposes. For example research has showed that plants use the blue color for their vegetative propagation while the red to orange colors help them during their flowering and fruiting stage.

It is not possible to use red light during the plant’s vegetative phase and hope that the plant will start to flower. It is however possible to use red light to improve the flowering capacity, and to extend the flowering period of the plant.

Natural light is never constant, and varies a lot. This variation affects plants because there is a certain minimum amount of light that they need on a daily basis if they are to flower and fruit properly. By growing the plants in a greenhouse and giving it the kind of light that it requires, you are doing this, but without any variations thus improving plant growth.

There are a number of different kinds of grow lights that give you this option. The earliest grow lights were incandescent ones, but they were quickly phased out once better ones came into the market.

Incandescent Grow Lights

These lights are the same as the incandescent bulbs that you have at home, and people just used larger bulbs for grow lights, because they need larger bulbs. They however had a number of issues the main ones being listed below.

Firstly they are highly inefficient. On average you get between 2% and 3% efficiency out of them and most of the energy is wasted in the form of heat. This in turn caused other problems in terms of how far you needed to keep the light from the plant. One big problem with light that is true for all kinds of light is that for every unit of increase in distance, the amount of light reaching the object reduced by its square. That means that if you increase the distance by two feet, the amount of light reaching the plant reduces 4 times. However bringing the incandescent bulbs too close also had a problem in that the heat generated was not good for the plant.

Secondly they do not last long. Their average life span is around 750 hrs. While this may be ok for home lighting where the light is on for only a few hours a day, grow lights are different and need to be on for much longer. Replacing bulbs every couple of weeks is really not economically viable.

Lastly they have a very short wavelength of light that they emit. They emit light only around the 2700 ºK which may be very useful for flowering but not for anything else.

High Pressure Sodium Lights

These lights are commonly known by their acronym HPS lights or as sodium vapor lamps. These lights are also not new, but they are still used because of their high efficiency as well as long life.

HPS lamps work with the use of sodium inside the lamp. An inert gas like neon or argon is used to start up the lamp and warm the sodium to the right temperature where it will start to discharge light. Once this happens, a sodium vapor lamp is incredibly efficient, and all that is required is that the current is kept constant so that the arc formed does not collapse.

Generally when a HPS lamp is started up, it glows pinkish. This is the neon or or other metal vapor that is discharging the light. Because of the small quantities of these vapors, they glow very softly. Yet within a couple of minutes they have warmed up the sodium inside to the temperature where it starts to emit light.

Advantages of High Pressure Sodium Grow Lights

The HPS grow lights have a number of advantages. Firstly they are incredibly efficient. A sodium vapor lamp, can reach efficiency levels of up to 30% which is 10 times greater than an incandescent bulb.

Secondly they last a long time. Their average life span is around 20,000 hrs and there is just no comparison with an incandescent light here.

Thirdly, they release much less heat than incandescent bulbs which means that they can be kept closer to the plants. This in itself gives a twofold advantage. The closer you keep the light, the lower the light output needs to be to give the same benefit which also means a reduction in the electricity used and consequently the power bills. Not only are they more efficient, they give additional savings by producing less heat and allowing you to use a lower wattage bulb than you would otherwise need to use.

Disadvantages of the HPS Lamps

There is only one real disadvantage that you can think of here and that is that the sodium vapor lamps do not give you a wide color rendering. The low pressure sodium grow lights only give out light in the red/orange spectrum. The high pressure sodium grow lights do give out light in a wider spectrum, but they cannot compare with natural sunlight.

Yet this is not so much a disadvantage because in most greenhouses, the plants get enough and more light in the blue spectrum from natural sunlight itself. They only need light in the lower red/orange spectrum so the HPS lamps come in useful here.

You cannot also choose the wavelength of the light you want as you can with newer kinds of grow lights.

Fluorescent Grow Lights

Along with HPS grow lights, fluorescent grow lights are the most commonly used lights in greenhouses. The simplest reason for this is due to their efficiency levels. Fluorescent lights can reach efficiency levels of up to 15%, which may be lower than HPS lights, but they have the advantage of emitting much lesser heat than sodium vapor lamps. This means that they can be kept even closer to the plants.

You are also able to get lights with different color renderings, and when it comes to grow lights you can even get one single light that gives you good rendering in a wide range. Fluorescent lights can emit light between 2700 ºK and 7800 ºK. This means that you can get specific lights for your specific needs. For example if you live in high latitudes that do not get much sunlight during certain times of the year, using fluorescent grow lights that give light in the blue spectrum will help the plants grow vegetables.

The same way, going in for the warm colored ones that give light in the red/orange colors will help with the flowering and fruit growing.

Many commercial greenhouse owners use a combination of fluorescent grow lights and HPS grow lights to get the best combination of efficiency and productivity.

Metal Halide Grow Lights

These lights are very similar to the sodium vapor lamps, but use other metals than sodium. For instance mercury is used to give our white light and light in a higher spectrum than sodium does. They too suffer from the same problem in that they emit light only in one single wavelength which means that if you want a wide spectrum of light you’ll have to get a number of different bulbs.

Many people do not go with metal halide lamps because the fluorescent grow lights are as good, last as long, and consume as low electricity as they do. The fluorescent lamps however are better because they give out light in a wider spectrum thus being better for overall plant growth.

LED Grow Lights

LED grow lights are the latest when it comes to lighting technology. LED’s are catching on very fast because they do everything much better and cost much less too.

LED’s are not new. The technology has been around since the early 1900′s. In fact most calculators and digital watches used LED’s to light the display. The biggest problem with them was that they did not emit much light and they were too expensive.

Lately however with advances in LED technology, the output has been steadily increasing so that nowadays you get LED’s that are able to emit quite bright light. Where the output is not enough, banks of LED’s can be used to increase the overall output.

The biggest advantage of LED’s is that they do not give off much heat. If you go in for the high output ones, the heat generated is quite high and the price of the bulb too is consequently higher because they need aluminum heat sinks to dissipate the heat.

If you go in for the lower output ones though, the amount of heat is so negligible so that the distance that they need to be kept from the plants can be measured in inches rather than feet.

Then you get different colors in LED’s. If you want red, you get red, and blue means blue. This means that you can have the exact kind of light combination that you want. For instance if you want to have red and blue in the combination of 60:40, you can install them in that numbers.

Even if the output is low, because they can be kept so close to the plant, often just two inches from the plant, it is sufficient for the plant to grow well.

The biggest advantage though is that they are very cheap. You get LED’s that cost less than a dollar a piece, and whole banks of LED’s can be purchased for less than the price of one HPS lamp.

They are also much more efficient than the sodium vapor lamps, albeit not by much. Most growers who already have HPS or fluorescent grow lights installed are just waiting until their lifespan runs out before switching to the LED’s.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using the different kinds of grow lights so that your needs have to be taken into consideration. For instance if you are interested more in the vegetative growth of the plant than in their flowering, sticking to the HPS lamps may be a good idea because for some reason they give much more leafy growth than any other kind of lamp, including LED’s.

All things considered there are a number of different options that you have, unlike the past when all you had was the incandescent variety. Depending on your specific needs, you need to choose exactly what you want.

Frankly this question can only be answered by you. There are some people who would feel that they cannot do without it while others think that it is just a waste of money.

Almost everyone likes a garden. It is only when it comes to having one that many of us have misgivings. This has nothing to do with the garden as such;  just the additional work that comes with a garden is not something that we need.

We are therefore going to assume that you already have a garden. Garden accessories are useful only to those that do, and although they can be used even without a garden per say, we’re not going to debate on that.

A well-kept garden is a rare sight, and many of us actually spend quite a bit of money to maintain it. We may think that putting in garden accessories is like trying to guild a lily, and you may very well be correct in a number of cases.

Yet there are certain instances when having accessories will actually make the lily look even better. For example if you have a herbaceous area with plants that do not flower, just installing a pollard light strategically in the middle will give it a whole different look.

Or an earthen urn placed in a small lawn will improve the whole tone of the area. A simple solar powered fountain (if you choose the right color) will brighten up the drab greenery of a hedge.

A few bird houses hung strategically here and there too will give the place a different look. They may not attract birds, but then they’re meant more to attract people than birds.

And you don’t even have to spend a lot of money to buy the really impressive looking stuff that you see in magazines. A solar powered fountain costs less than $50, and a solar powered pollard light around $15. Why, you don’t even have to spend any money. If you know a place where you can get smooth pebbles of different sizes, you can construct your own rockery and you wouldn’t have spent anything other than time on it.

As every gardener knows, it isn’t the money that you spend on your garden that makes the plants grow well; it is the amount of time that you spend in it. Even when it comes to garden accessories, it is the same. Spending a lot of money will only make it look like a hotel. A self-maintained garden has a whole different look and cannot be replicated.

All of us know that light is white, at least the light that comes from the sun. We have also studied how putting a prism in the path of sunlight will split it into its component colors. Thus the white light we see is actually based on a number of different colored light all combined into one.

What most of us do not know is that light as such is an electromagnetic radiation, and therefore has a wavelength. Depending on how large this wavelength is the color of the light differs. Thus red light is light in the range of 1500 to 2000 ºK while dark blue to purple light is about 8000 ºK. White light is around 4000 to 4200 ºK.

The ºK is there because the radiation is measured in temperature, and when it comes to light it is called color temperature. So if we take any light bulb, if we’re interested enough we can find out what the color temperature is for the light that it emits.

For example a low pressure sodium vapor lamp emits light around the 2700 ºK mark, while a high pressure sodium vapor lamp emits light up to 6000 ºK. Even here the color rendering is not constant because there are large gaps in-between in the radiation.

Fluorescent light on the other hand gives better color rendering and although we can see only white light, the light is available between 2700 and 6000 ºK for the warm white ones and between 4000 and 8000 ºK for the cool white ones.

Xenon lights are the best when it comes to color rendering and give out a full spectrum light which means that the light that it emits encompasses the full range of the visible and invisible spectrum. Of course it is still not equal to the sun. It is however the closest in terms of artificial light to the sun.

Getting full spectrum light is not easy artificially. Nowadays LED’s are used because it is possible to combine a number of different colors to obtain the color spectrum that is wanted. With the pace of advancements in lighting technology however the day when we are able to mimic the sun and get full spectrum light is not far.

Lighting that qualifies under the Energy Star are those that help save energy, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These not only help cut down on your utility bills, they help protect the environment in the long haul, while not depleting the earth’s resources rapidly. 

Who sets up the standards for testing whether a product is qualified to be sold under Energy Star lighting or not? 

Energy Star lights must adhere to the stringent guidelines set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as the United States Department of Energy.

Standards of Energy Star lighting

• Energy Star CFLs and LEDs conserve up to 75% more energy when compared to normal lights.
• Energy Star CFLs generate 75% less heat when compared with regular bulbs.

How much do Energy Star lights cost? 

Energy Star lights and products tend to be a bit more expensive, mainly because a lot more research and thought goes into making these products more environmentally friendly and consuming lesser energy. The bulbs cost an average of between $35 and $50, while the fixtures tend to cost a lot more. However, when you consider that you wont need to change the bulbs as often, as these last an average of 10 times more when compared with regular lights, they are well worth the money you end up paying for them.

Where can I buy Energy star lights?

You can purchase Energy star lights almost anywhere, at your local light store or any other store that retails lighting products. You could even order these online, all you need to do is type in Energy Star lights and you will most probably be able to find an online retailer you can purchase from.

How Energy star lighting makes a difference?

This company states that if everyone replaces just one of their regular bulbs with an Energy Star bulb, the country as a whole would be saving $600 million a year only on electricity bills. Apart from that, you would also reduce the emission of harmful greenhouse gases equivalent to the emission produced by about 800,000 cars. Which is certainly a big deal and that is how Energy Star makes a difference. Join them in their journey and become a part of this great conservation project.