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High Performance Lighting Guide

This guide is a tool to help understand the use of HPL strategies. Click on a question or scroll through the page for details on using this guide.

• How do I use this guide?
• What type of lighting does this apply to?
• How complete are these guidelines?
• What approaches are recommended to designing lighting for a room?

How do I use this guide?
This guide presents HPL recommendations at three levels of detail.

• Room-by-Room Designs. Explore the floor plans and lighting designs of 8 rooms. This will help you understand how to design the lighting in specific areas of a house. A limited number of fixtures and lamp types have generally been used throughout the room designs to simplify purchasing and installation.
• Specifications for Fixtures. Explore a listing of fixture types and sources, which includes representative products and manufacturers for consideration.
• Specifications for Lamps and Bulbs. Discover how to improve energy use in the home by using the appropriate lamps and bulbs. Lamps are listed that offer high quality light color and color rendering characteristics.

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What type of lighting does this apply to?
There are three fundamental categories of lighting: ambient, task, and accent lighting. Ambient lighting allows general use and circulation within a room. Task lighting is specific for routine tasks done within the room. Accent lighting adds emphasis, sparkle, and delight to the visual setting. These guidelines focus primarily on ambient lighting and touch upon task lighting for key, high use areas.

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How complete are these guidelines?

1. There is a great range to the completeness of lighting systems built into a house at initial construction, represented by the following levels:
   • Code compliance (lowest level). At this level, you may only be installing the lighting required to meet the building code, which typically includes the fixtures that are installed along circulation paths, such as outdoor entry lights, halls, and stairs, and a single light in the kitchen and bathrooms. All other rooms may simply have a switched outlet that would control an owner-supplied portable lamp. At this level, you may offer a lighting allowance for homeowners to select a limited number of additional built-in, hardwired fixtures. This level of built-in lighting cannot provide the minimum illumination to meet the levels recommended by the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), which are outlined in the IESNA Guidelines Section.
   • Key room lighting (mid level). At this level, in addition to code compliance lighting, you may install light fixtures in rooms where the fixtures, cabinetry, and appliances generally determine the principal use patterns. This includes lighting in the kitchen and bathrooms, as well as an entry hall chandelier and dining room chandelier. Much of a lighting allowance may be used in making these selections. Similar to the code-compliance level, this approach may not offer sufficient coverage to meet the IESNA Guidelines throughout the house.
   • Whole house lighting (highest level). Increasingly, builders are working with homebuyers, lighting suppliers, and designers to install basic, built-in lighting in each room. To a considerable degree, this lighting consists of the use of recessed downlights of various sorts (reflectors, wall washers, accent spots, etc.) but also includes many types of ceiling fixtures, pendants, and wall sconces. This level typically meets all the needs for ambient lighting and satisfies many of the needs for task and accent lighting, as well. Upon completion, there will be relatively little need for additional portable lighting. When combined with an HPL approach, whole house lighting offers the most complete performance and efficiency.
2. These designs are for built-in or hardwired lighting fixtures which you install and over which you have control. While you may suggest this approach, homeowners may subsequently install portable lamps and draw upon the bulb recommendations.
3. The focus of these guidelines is interior lighting, as there are currently very limited offerings in high efficiency exterior lighting fixtures. Furthermore, exterior lighting is often of a decorative nature, and is selected by the homeowner for aesthetic reasons.
4. The lighting designs in this guide are effective in rooms with relatively light-colored surfaces: walls, ceiling, and floor. Dark colored room surfaces will reduce illumination levels, and in some cases, drastically. To achieve the same illumination levels, more fixtures or higher wattage fixtures may be necessary in dark color rooms. The amount of increase necessary is dependent on the extent and intensity of dark surfaces in the room.
5. The guide does not currently have recommendations for the application of LED's (light emitting drodes). Threse recently developed light sources hold great promise for some residential applications, but are not mature enough to meet the performance and efficiency levels of HPL design. As small point light sources, LED's may offer a substitute for the popular accent lighting of MR-11, MR-16, and PAR-20 lamps.
   
   The current shortcoming of LED's for residential applications is getting white light at an appropriate color temperature, approximately 3000K, that also offers good lumen efficiency. The white LED's that have high lumen efficiency, similar to fluorescents, are at the very cool end of the color temperature reank (5000-7000K) and are thus not suitable to light residential spaces. The LED's that offer color tempatures near 3000K, and are thus suitable for residential applications, ar at the low end of the lumen efficiency range and are very similar to incandescents in their lumen/watt light output. Thus, they offer no improvement over incandescent lamps.
   
   This is a young technology, however, and holds real promise of improvement in the efficiency of providing white light in the color range suitable for resdiential applications. When this occurs, LED's will offer an excellent new light source for application in HPL designs.

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What approaches are recommended for designing lighting for a room?

The most effective way to employ HPL for a given room is to change the design in accordance with one of the three design packages:

Direct Lighting. This package is the simplest and, in some respects, the most efficient as it floods the entire room with light from a surface-mounted ceiling or wall fixture or white reflector recessed downlights. The main concern with this raw light is glare, which can be unpleasant or even debilitating, with bright sources. The most appropriate application of this design is in service areas such as the laundry, closets, garage, and basement.

Direct Lighting. Click for a larger image.

Recessed Lighting. This package involves the use of ceiling recessed downlights with clear reflectors. The clear reflector functions much like a PAR30 or PAR38 lamp in controlling the spread of the light from the fixture and directing it downward. Light for the room comes from the objects illuminated by this downlight, typically the room furnishings and the floor. Light colored furnishings and floor surfaces help to produce good illumination in the room. Dark furnishings and surfaces, however, reduce illumination. Recessed downlights with clear reflectors provide an elegant appearance to the room and, as concealed sources, they greatly reduce glare. With this type of lighting, the ceiling will be somewhat dimmed (depending largely on the brightness of the room furnishings and floor surface) and may appear lower. Wall surfaces may or may not be illuminated, depending on fixture position in the ceiling. When turned off, these fixtures present a dark circle in the ceiling.

Recessed Lighting. Click for a larger image.

Indirect Lighting. In this package, room surfaces—ceiling, walls, and floor—are illuminated by concealed source, indirect lighting from source types such as coves, valances, soffits, and ceiling recessed wall washers. For example, above kitchen cabinets there is often a natural cove created where linear fluorescents may easily provide an excellent wash of light across the ceiling for room ambient lighting. Coves may also be found as a clean extension of framing for a coffered or “tray” ceiling area. A cove or valance may fit readily to either side of a fireplace and can offer a logical emphasis to this key feature of a room. A typical, and effective, application of soffit lighting is above the vanity mirror in a bathroom, where its lighting quality can be excellent. Although they are useful in many locations, recessed wall wash downlights should not be aimed toward windows or doors because they can cause a blinding glare when viewed directly.

The great advantages of lighting room surfaces are the inherent “naturalness” of the concealed source indirect light, its control of glare, and the ability to relate to and reinforce the visual forms of a room. The construction of coves, valances, and soffits requires some effort, but the reward is great in terms of the quality of the illuminated room.

Coves, valances, or soffits can be applied in a single location in a room, or in several locations. Valances flanking a fireplace, for example, will provide ambient light that tapers to the far side of the room, and can be quite effective as long as its lowest levels still meet the IESNA Guidelines. A cove in a raised ceiling area will generally continue all around the room and may offer quite even lighting conditions. Wall washers are excellent for giving emphasis to one or more surfaces of a room. Pairing a cove along one side of a room with wall washers along adjacent walls is an effective combination that gives a rich visual play of ceiling and wall emphasis—all inherent, logical components of the room.

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Indirect Lighting . Click for a larger image.