Office Lighting: Tips For Good Lighting For Office space

The right office lighting can make a big difference in how your office feels. Try to use 6500K daylight lighting to mimic natural light as much as possible. You can also use task lighting to help your employees focus better on on their tasks. For your entrance area, you can consider using some yellow lighting create a warm, inviting atmosphere. 

When it comes to lighting for your office space, it is actually quite simple to calculate – all you need to do is to determine the amount of foot candles, lumens and wattage you need for your space.

Do ‘Foot candles’, ‘Lumens’ and ‘Wattage’ sound foreign? If you are seeing these words for the first time, it is highly likely thats you will find these terms foreign.

In this article, I will share with you what ‘Foot candles’, ‘Lumens’ and ‘Wattage’ are. I will also share how you can accurately calculate the amount of office lighting for office space.

1. Foot Candles

For our office, the first step that we did to determine the amount of lighting required for our space was to identify the amount of foot candles for each space. There is no practical physical way to calculate foot candles but as a rule of thumb, foot candles are based on the light intensity you want for your space. For example, a study room or work area will require more lumens than a bedroom or even a living room.

The table below shows how we planned the foot candles for each office lighting zone:

2. Lumens

In simple terms, Lumens (denoted by lm) are a measure of the total amount of visible light (to the human eye) from a lamp or light source. Once you have identified the amount of foot candles for each space AND also measured out the dimensions for each space, you can now easily calculate the amount of lumens required for each space.

Here is a table that shows how we calculated the amount of lumens required for the various zones in our office.

3. Wattage

Now that we have identified the amount of lumens required for each zone, it is time to determine the amount of wattage required.

In simple terms, Wattage refers to the amount of electricity used by a light bulb to release the lumens required. LED light bulbs and incandescent light bulbs are some of the most common types of light bulbs out there.

LEDs are generally about 7 times more efficient at producing light than incandescent bulbs. A LED bulb uses only 2.5 watts to produce a light output of 115 lumen. As for incandescent bulbs, the amount of wattage used is estimated to be 7 times more than a LED light bulb to produce the same amount of lumens. Incandescent light bulbs are also known to get hotter much faster as compared to LED light bulbs.

Therefore, I highly recommend that you get LED light bulbs if you want something more cost efficient and durable.

The following table shows how we calculated the amount of LED Wattage required.