Both. Both are good.
Daylight for the work rooms and things like home-office or homework desks, warm light for cozy couch corners and bedrooms.
Or go full high-tech and install lights with adjustable color temperature.
Or go full high-tech and install lights with adjustable color temperature.
I may be ahead of the curve a bit. Adjustable colour temp didn’t seem enough. My whole apartment has RGB bulbs since about 5-6 years ago. I just couldn’t go back to on/off one shade lights ugh.
Also I rock a 300w LED panel to get a bit more brightness in my winter days, but that’s not RGB though.
Most strips are RGB. The one you are looking for is RGBWW. Full RGB and Warm & White. But they are expensive ><
I mean yeah they are RGBWW if you put it like that but wouldn’t RGB already include different temps of white? So all of my bulbs are Hue, and yes, they were somewhat of an investment even though my apt is not that huge. Like 300e total years ago though, for uhmm the basic 250e colour set, 5 e27 bulbs hub and remote, and then later I also bought two e14s.
But the LED panel I have is actually a 300w growlight. I couldn’t put it on full I’d burn my eyes. But it serves very well as light therapy on the mildest setting. It’s not got any adjustments except a dimmer though.
I’ve been rocking my same hue lights for 8 years. I love having blue and red in the same light fixture. Creates a nice night purple with funny shadows.
Yeah I’ve had mine for roughly the same time. It’s kinda annyoing being anywhere without smart lighting. You have to shut off lights before going to bed, instead of shutting them off after you’ve climbed under the covers.
And having to put on the lights just to go have a piss in the middle of the night? That would wake me up too much. So I just put on a few red low lights to roughly see where things are without waking myself up.
Then again anyone super into privacy wouldn’t probably love these, as as far as I know, having several WiFi using bulbs on the ceiling also means that anyone with access to the data could actually function as movement sensors. So the metadata Hue has about me (or at least could access if they wanted to) would tell them when I’m in bed or in the kitchen or having guests or whatnot. Apparently it’s based on the attenuation of the signal strength and based on those numbers you can “see” the object moving from the signal strength changes.
Oh apparently to use it myself I’d need a Hue Pro Bridge, but they came up with the system on the old one. Now the pro version has an analyser in it so makes it work better.
wouldn’t RGB already include different temps of white?
Well yes, but actually no. You can produce white-looking light with just RGB, but the quality is going to be shit. Sunlight is made up of the whole spectrum of visible wavelengths, while an RGB will only produce a much sparser spectrum with strong peaks at green, red and blue, and not much else. Looking directly into the light you might not be able to tell, but once the light bounces off colored objects things start looking weird compared to natural light. That’s what rgbww lights are fixing by adding wider-spectrum white LEDs into the mix. For white lights, there is a number called the Color Rendering Index (CRI) that tells you how closely a light’s output spectrum resembles natural sunlight. CRI 100 is perfect sunlight, less than CRI 80 is already pretty crappy looking light.
I sort of knew some of this, I think, but definitely not all of it, nor as succinctly.
Thanks!
We have a “sunshine” script in Home Assistant that sets all bulbs to daylight and 100%. Great for livening up overcast days.
Take a look at the Adaptive Lighting integration if you haven’t already. You can set the colour/temp/brightness of your bulbs for daytime and nighttime, per zone if you want, and it will nicely fade over a set period around dawn and dusk.
Also, the first time I wrote that last sentence it got autocorrected to “around dawn and dick”.
Hah, yea I have some automations I’ve used (including a modifiable sunrise) since before that existed, but basically has the same effect.
I’m like this, home office, kitchen, bathroom etc is daylight like 5k, only the bedroom and a corner lamp in the couch room are 3k.
This. My wife loves warm light, but I dislike it. I find my visual acuity better under daylight lights, and find myself cursing if I’m trying to work on something (screws in kids toys or whatever)
Dear god no, you never want mixed light, it’s like walking into an alien space ship or from the Arctic to the Sahara desert just by going to a different room.
Wow, didn’t think about it this way…
But for me: Hell, yeah! Added bonus!
Signals the primeval parts of your brain:
“Here you have to fight to survive the horrors of the pleistocean ice shield!”Or, after changing the room:
“This is your dimly fire-lid cave, here you are save to relax!”
Wyze light bulbs for the win. I can pick 255 colors.
Oh no, 8-bit is back again… 🫣
I installed Wiz, they can do RGB, but the real trick is to program double tap.
click on, warm white 70%
click on, off, on Daylight 100%
Bonus: Home assistant, throw a rave
R G B R B R G B G…
I use red bulb (or just leds now) unironically, I can see good enough to walk at night and they don’t fucking hurt my eyes like dumbass white bulbs. Seriously how do people use those white bulbs? Just going to a hospital is painful.
This is why I don’t use them.
The paint in my living room looks diarrhea brown and corpse gray under warm light. It’s purple and blue, and there are a lot of windows so I can’t plan for warm light as a default like I can in bedrooms. Daylight bulbs keep the color what it should be.
I wasn’t expecting to feel so seen at this ungodly hour
Cold light is so clinical and miserable, and I refuse to have it in my vicinity at night if I can help it.
Happy cake day!
🎉
It’s curious seeing people equate warm lighting with old people and old homes. Maybe it’s just my region but everybody (especially boomers) switched to CFLs when those came out and then to the cheapest, nastiest cool LEDs with cornea-melting levels of blue light after that. Sometimes I feel like the only sane person when I’m walking around and seeing the insides of houses lit up the same color as you’d get from a $5 flashlight 15 years ago.
I have 4000k in the kitchen and bathroom and 2700K or 3000K everywhere else. After reading this thread I’m considering finding some high CRI adjustables because I also find the 4000k lights pretty harsh at night.
2700K is the closest to firelight. I refuse to abandon thousands of years of archetypal affection for cheap LED false suns.
2700K kin checking in. Fuck those false gods.
the only smart house thing I envy is temperature adjustable lights automaticly adjusting the temperature according to the time of day
some thing like that could bring the best of both worlds easily, I find higher temperatures more pleasing at day but like you they are too harsh for me at night
I have a couple lifx bulbs and my partner brought like 8 cheapo Chinese ones with her when we moved in together. It is quite nice. The LIFX bulbs give much higher quality light and better color, but the ability to schedule lights out and wake up to artificial sunrise is incredibly nice regardless. As cool as that is I would not recommend WiFi bulbs to anyone for the following reasons:
- They are horribly insecure. I have them walled off in their own little VLAN but it still makes me paranoid. I’m no hacker but they have Internet access and radios, so I’m sure there’s a server in Shenzhen that knows our comings and goings, when we have guests over, etc. They also have my IP address and all of my neighbors’ SSIDs so they know exactly where I live.
- They are a pain in the ass to set up. You have to power cycle the bulb five times, then wait for it to enter a pairing mode, then you have to wait for the stupid app to find the bulb,which doesn’t always work. After that, you have to select your wifi network from the list, which again it might not always actually detect, even if it’s a 2.4GHz network (because almost none of them support 5GHz). Then you have to type in your wifi password. Repeat this entire process for every. Single. Bulb. You’d think the process for the LIFX bulbs would be more streamlined because they’re six times the price, but you’d be wrong. In theory they’re Homekit enabled, which is cool if you have an iPhone unless you lost the barcode they put in the box. Or unless you have an older model. And again, sometimes they’ll just refuse to work. I have a Color Mini that just stopped being smart one day. It’s a really expensive normal bulb now.
- If you put too many of them on the router your ISP gave you there’s a good chance you’ll start overwhelming it and your performance will degrade. More than like 15 devices total (including the bulbs, smart speakers, TVs, gaming consoles, phones, laptops, etc) and a bottom range router is going to start begging for death.
I’m keeping them because the lady likes them and at present, everything works so long as I don’t touch anything. I’d like to try using zigbee bulbs because they solve a lot of the problems I have with WiFi bulbs but replacing the system I have would be expensive, even after liquidating the old ones on eBay.
Short take: you don’t have to clean as hard for company.
Just heard about a phenomenon where people paint their houses white right before selling them (I assume apartments too) and then the new people won’t paint on fairly new paint so they end up keeping the bland colors.
Some people probably depend on their lightbulbs to make the walls look yellow instead of white, I can see those cases comparing the light to a hospital.
I personally like cooler lighting, but there’s too much color around to feel like a hospital in my case.
They remind me of the old style fluorescent circle lights from the 50s, where they were almost green.
More than even color temperature I’m shocked at the number of people who illuminate their rooms with four clear-glass bulbs in the ceiling fan, so bright you can’t even look at them from the sidewalk. Have these people never heard of a lamp? You can practically see the shadows of dust motes in the air against the sterile white walls.
I dunno why, but warm lighting at night just makes me feel depressed. I need daylight bulbs across my house. Adjustable brightness preferred though, so I’m not blinding myself at night.
Daylight bulbs are everywhere in Japan and it’s so strange. I tried looking for warm light bulbs at a local store and they don’t even stock them as an option. I do see them used in some people’s houses so I’m sure it’s not universal, but the prevalence of daylight/cool bulbs is weird to me, I’m very much warm bulb gang.
Could you find adjustable LED bulbs? Those are honestly the best of both worlds. Daylight is great for things like cleaning, but I much prefer warm light for general living.
Part of my job is selling lighting.
The following conversation takes place at least once a day without falter:
X: I’d like one light like this please (puts some form of light on the table)
ME: ok (goes through the script to make sure they know what they want/it’s compatible/…yaddayadda).
X: oh and it needs to be warm in colour.
ME: 2700k got it.
X: yes, but like warm right? Because it’s led.
(Variant: the rando looking for something small for his toilet. “Oh you know, something like 18000 lumens and 60000k”
You value your eyes at all?)
Take them up on their offer of lumen output and show off one of these bad boys.
That’s a neat form factor.
I have something like this mounted in a torchiere floor lamp. high output (something like 15000LM) and a cool color temp (6500K I think). My office has daylight when I turn it on, but it’s aimed up, indirect and high enough it’s not generally in line of sight. Probably would have used the bulb above if I could find cob lights when I bought this one.
Oh yeah I’ve seen those before! I kind of figured they’d give off some uneven light, but I never did try one to find that out.
Modern society is telling me I need to take melatonin.
I tell modern society I make my own melatonin, and sleep perfectly fine because my lights are warm in the evening.WoHo, míster not addicted to your phone who doesn’t watch it in bed.
We can’t all be like you.
I can’t help you with your addiction, I can only offer warm glow.
Jokes aside, swtiching to a eink reader helped my sleep so much it’s not funny
I’m fully addicted to my phone, but, if I try to watch it in bed… I’ll be laying on it in 20 minutes. Don’t know what it is, I hit the bed, I pass the fuck out. pretty sure it could be on fire and i’d just die there.
White light is a must for makeup, or any time where you need to see colors accurately. Otherwise give me yellow all the way lol. I love the coziness.
High CRI is what you want. This is the number corresponding with ability see colors accurately.
I have an actual full-spectrum daylight bulb and it’s pretty good. I use it when the days get really short, seems modestly effective. It’s not the typical “warm” lighting, it’s much more actual daylight. I can’t stand those hard white almost blueish light bulbs. Makes things feel industrial and cold. No idea why anyone calls them “daylight”.
can you name the model? am interested in fielding the winter blues away
Sunsy Shine.
The optimal “daylight” is about 5700-5800K. It’s not blue then, but pure white.
(I know this because that’s the optimal for parrots. They also have to have UV lights as an extra though, they need that for health and to see their full spectrum)
I just want to be able to slaughter a pig if I need to. Gotta do that under cool whites my guy.
I’m surprised to see pretty much all the comments stating that they prefer the warm lights. It hurts my eyes and feels very awkward to have light coming in through windows into a room with warm lighting, so I mostly use daylight bulbs.
Do warm lighting people just keep the lights off when their curtains are open, or am I alone in this issue?
When my curtains are open, I’m getting ample sunlight and don’t need lighting. When it’s night time, I don’t want light which emulates daylight in my home.
Yes, we only turn the lights on after the sun’s color temperature matches our 2700K lights. During the cloudy winter days we spend the entire day in darkness to avoid mismatched temperature.
Sometimes I really want to get adjustable LEDs for winter, but it is hard enough to find warm ones with a high enough CRI. I once ordered and returned about 8 different bulbs which had price points from €2 to €100, before going to Ikea and buying bulbs there.
I am going to be redoing the lighting in a house I just bought. I went down the rabbit hole of learning about all the options. It’s hard to find but it is possible to find dimmable, tunable LEDs with a high cri and have matter support so I could use them with Home Assistant. I haven’t actually purchased any though so I can’t report my experience.
Please share your experience when you get to it! I try to avoid iot stuff though and thought of something simpler like dimmable lights that get warmer when dimmed - like the Ikea ones, but with 2700k as the highest point it does not really work.
I thought that maybe the ideal solution would be to wire DC lightning with relays controlling groups of different temperature LEDs. Maybe glueing LED strips to the ceiling and a translucent film under them to diffuse it a bit? I feel like ordering a giant bin of random LEDs should lead to the best possible CRI.
Also each of the 8 bulbs I ordered had Ra>95 written on the box and they just lie because I can instantly tell that the light is wrong. Bad CRI is so prevalent that friends come to my house and think my lights are incandescent.
I did buy a super expensive dimmable tunable led strip from Yuji LEDs. It was expensive even before the tariff situation, so really bad now probably. But the LED was top notch. I followed a guide someone had posted to reddit to make a SAD lamp, and used ESP Home to make it so it made a sunrise effect starting all the way as far yellow as it went and ending at the brightest point. It is just a strip with 2 different temperature LEDs on it and it combines them with directions from ESPHome (oh I had to get a controller for the ESPHome connection. It’s just a “dumb” strip that you have to control the voltage to change).
Since programming it was rough for me, I had some fun experiences where it would just randomly go from super dim to full bright while I was sleeping and hoping for a gentle wake up from a nap. My half asleep brain really thought someone had opened the curtain to the sunny outside. I started thinking of my project as “sunlight in a can”.
Anyways I happily shipped that expensive project off to my brother who suffers from SAD and he never used it even once.
I’m a mixed light person and I prefer to keep my lights off when the windows are open. Modern bright lights tend to hurt my eyes, especially as my wife has a nasty habit of standing right next to one when talking to me.
i put one of these in a ceiling fan and my roommate started referring to it as The Sun
she’s not wrong but i like to be able to easily see the stuff on my desk I’m tinkering with ffs
Overhead lighting makes it so much worse.
whole house is setup with daylight bulbs except the dining hall. it has warm lights. I hate it. it’s like I’m eating in the dark.
Am I the only one who doesn’t replace light bulbs based on color temperature? I usually keep around whatever is already in the rental unit/whatever spares the last tenants left around, because I usually move every year anyway.
In the rare chance I get a choice, I usually choose daylight though.
Most people I know who do care.
Change all of the bulbs when they move in. Throw the old bulbs in a box.
Put the old bulbs back when you move out.
Use the new bulbs at the next apartment.
Some of them also have smart bulbs and those are way too expensive to give away.
I don’t go out of my way to replace light bulbs with all these smartbulbs that have day/night cycles.
That being said, if they go out, I normally pick a smartbulb because the price difference isn’t that much for all it offers in return.
I’ve been working remotely from 3 to 10 PM and the gradual change in color temperature both from the smartbulb and my screen really helps me take it easy as my shift is ending.
I definitely have four different temperatures in my tiny studio. I imagine that would set a sort of person on edge.
