I have decided to go mostly with recessed can type LED fixtures in the kitchen (or Halogen if the LEDs are still too pricey). What is there to consider about the placement? Should the can be placed directly above the leading edge of the countertop? Farther to the back? It seems obvious you want it directly over your workstation, but then again your head might get in the way of the light...

Any other considerations?

A lot will depend on the photometrics of the fixture, ceiling height and the configuration of your kitchen, but you obviously don't want distinct shadows from your head. Accordingly, you probably can't be more than 6-12" back from the counter edge.

The other consideration is lighting the face of your cabinets. If you have dark wood cabinets, you will want some light there. Downlights close to walls create "scallops" of light which are determined by the fixture configuration (i.e., "flood" vs "spot") and the distance from the wall. These scallops are what will light the face of your cabinets, so the fixture spacing and distance from the upper cabinets should be looked at from that standpoint too, not just the amount of light on the counter surface. I have seen dreadful spaces that had lots of light on horizontal surgfaces but looked like caves because the walls or cabinets were not illuminated. Also, be cognizant of glare.

I have seen a dark wood kitchen that was illuminated with wall washers (rather than down lights) lighting the upper cabinets that provided good light (some spill, some direct) on the counter surface. Since the light was directed at the cabinets, glare was not a problem.

Most decent lighting stores have one or more persons who can help with photometrics, fixture spacing, etc.

My personal view is that the best general kitchen lighting is indirect if you have the ceiling height to make it work and the best work surface lighting is from undercounter fixtures or pendants. One of my pet peeves is poor lighting (insufficient, glare, shadows, not-uniformity, etc.)

Bruce

Thanks Bruce. The ceiling height will be 11 feet, so there is plenty of room to work with. Indirect general lighting could mean probably a large hanging fixture in the center of the room? I really need to stay away from fluorescent banks.

I was in a high-end kitchen over the weekend and there were recessed cans but they were set out about a foot or two from the edge of the countertop. The result was that they were totally ineffective at lighting anything - didn't shine on the work surface nor did they illuminate the cabinets. I guess they just pointed at the middle of the floor.

That may have been their purpose. General lighting. If you want overhead lighting to cover your work area, you'll need lights on both sides of you. I am not a fan of cans. Makes your ceiling look like its full of
gopher holes. A few well placed ones can be useful

I would consider CFL over LEDs or halogens.

Fluorescent light is fine for some, but the bad color and the flickering is a problem for us.

Cabinet-top uplighting using dimmable T5 or T8 fluorescent is a far superior method of providing ambient light to a kitchen than point-source downlighting of any type (halogen, CFL or LED). Using the ceiling paint as the diffusing element makes for a glare & shadow-free environment. With downligthing elements like recessed cans your hands will ALWAYS cast hard edged shadows over your work, and with shiny countertop surfaces the glare-factor of the reflections makes your pupils constrict a bit, causing you to need higher light to be able to see what you're doing.

For task lighting, under-cabinet T5s placed a the near edge of the cabinet directed toward the wall is similarly shadow & glare free. As long as you use only electronic-ballasted units there's no detectable flicker (even the slowest electronic ballasts run at ~27000 Hz- most are faster these days. This is in contrast to the flickery 100-120Hz magnetic ballasted stuff.) Most people install them against the wall facing the room, which puts the highest intensity light at the deepest recesses of the under-cabinet space, and compounds the problem by introducing the glare of the diffuser in your face, causing your pupils to constrict, making for lower contrast perception & lower general acuity.

No matter what tube may come with the fixture, in a kitchen stick with 3000 Kelvin as the color temperature, and don't go below 80 for a color rendering index (CRI) and both the food & people will be looking good. (If you're willing to spend a bit of money it's possible to buy T8 tubes with CRIs in the 90s, which is comparable to halogens, and better than most non-halogen incandescent technologies. It's not THAT much money- $15-20/tube vs. $6-7 for a 4' T8 with an 85 CRI.) Many CFL and LED downlights are in the 2700K range, but many others are 4000K & up, neither of which is "right" for looking at food. Food pigments have a lot of red, very little blue, and while 2700K is "redder" than 3000K it tends to oversaturate the reds and is tiring to the eye over time. Halogens tend to run in the 2800-3300K range if run at full intensity, but as you dim them the color temp falls off very quickly.

There are a lot of lighting design tips available at the rpi site:

http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/

http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/researchAreas/applicationDesign.asp

For your own home, you have to decide what is more important to you. The price of correct light should not be the deciding factor. The cost of opticians and pain relievers may need to be weighed in.
As far as color, I've been a florescent user for decades and you adjust to the color over time. The color of paint and furnishings go a long way too.

Dana, thanks for the reference. RPI is in my neighborhood. Maybe I can tap one of their students to help with my kitchen. Lighting is so important.

There are a lot of crappy/mousy fluorescents out there, but the cost of the good stuff just isn't all that huge, and is small compared to what you'd pay in power & bulbs for an incandescent/halogen solution.

In applications where you might WANT sharp edged shadows, halogen-style the better LED technologies deliver where CFLs simply can not. For R20 & R30 sized recessed downlights the Cree LR4 & LR6 are great options, with PAR-type optics, but may not be bright enough if mounted in an 11' ceiling.

I haven't been favorably impressed with LED under- cabinet lighting though, as compared to T5s with a decent tube. But at least they don't cook your hands while you work the way halogen under-cabinet lights can (it can feel like an oven after they've been on for awhile.)

Getting the lighting right can make or break the feel or utility of a room. Before installing indirect dimmable T8 linears in coves my living room was on the drab side after sundown even with a handful of R20 & R30 recessed cans and lamp lighting. As with the kitchen cabinet-top coves, we hardly EVER turn on the recessed cans anymore- they add points of glare rather than filling the room with usable ambient light. You COULD (and we did, for years) use them for functional working in the kitchen, but it's downright DEPRESSING compared to the "bright sky" effect of indirect uplighting.

Dana, thanks for the very useful input. I will never, ever use fluorescents! But I hope the discussion can go on nonetheless.

How about a situation where your work surface does not have a cabinet above it to mount the under-cabinet task lights? For example, commercial kitchen style prep tables with just shallow shelves and pan hooks above them. Would this be where a wall-washer could work, using the wall as a diffusing element. Or would I need to rely on the general lighting of the kitchen?

Hanging fixtures may not be trendy today but they do a lot to brighten up a space. As long as the light isn't being directed in just one direction. I see other peoples results and they went from a well lit space with relatively low wattage to a bunch of high wattage spot lights. Reminds me of the lighting of some of the trendy new shows. I hate it.

Posted By Jelly on 12 Jul 2010 10:17 PM
Fluorescent light is fine for some, but the bad color and the flickering is a problem for us.

You can find decent undercounter LED fixtures and you might consider to use "LED fluorescent replacement lamps" in place of fluorescent tubes.  We have (so far) not been impressed with the LED replacement tubes for large scale use use in offices, but they may facilitate an indirect sighting solution for you.

On a side note, it is no longer possible to buy 100w incandescent lamps where I live and I have been terribly unhappy with the 100w CFL replacements (slow, dim and ugly) that have been available....until last week.  I saw a "130w" replacement, low profile CFL by Phillips last week at the market and tried it.  It comes as close as I have seen to doing the work of a 100w incandescent.  It is quick to start, has decent color, the lamp is not visible, it has no flickering that I can discern and has about the same amount of lumens to my eye.

Unfortunately, my current batch of horrible CFLs screw-ins probably have thousands of hours of use left in them.

Bruce

Posted By Jelly on 14 Jul 2010 10:54 PM
Dana, thanks for the very useful input. I will never, ever use fluorescents! But I hope the discussion can go on nonetheless.

How about a situation where your work surface does not have a cabinet above it to mount the under-cabinet task lights? For example, commercial kitchen style prep tables with just shallow shelves and pan hooks above them. Would this be where a wall-washer could work, using the wall as a diffusing element. Or would I need to rely on the general lighting of the kitchen?

With 11' ceilings I wouldn't count on recessed lights for task, but well-directed pendants suspended 30" or so above the work surface could work if it doesn't interfere with your pan-hangers (but it probably will interfere.) With 11' ceilings using PAR rather than R with the fixtures well placed for work areas would be more effective- with a 40 degree cone the light it better bounded toward the center spot.  Most LED "R-bulb replacements" have similar optics to PARs (IIRC the Cree LR6 is about a 45 degree cone- the photometrics are available on line.)  Some are on the low-luminosity side in terms of total-lumens, but center-spot intensity would still be pretty good even at your ceiling height.  But DO look at those specs when considering what fixtures & lamps to get.  I'm not sure quite how to get reasonable lighting on a center-island counter without casting shadows on the work without cranking up the total ambient- a bunch of downlight fixtures would create a scattering of multiple shadows on the work area, but a bright diffuse-light ceiling would work.

Wall washing with floods or PAR spots can work well for filling in ambient levels and will reduce the glare-factor of center-ceiling recessed lights. Glare is created when the bright spots are many times the luminance of the surrounding field of view- upward-directed wall washing sconces at ~6-8' level would work best in your situation, brightening up both the upper wall and the ceiling. (A lighting cove with a stick of T8 would be better though. :-)  LED "T8 equivalents" that I've seen are all junk- crappy CRI, and very very low luminance, not suitable for uplighting.)  Any time you're using indirect light, the color rendering of the ambient becomes a function of the paints as well as the light source.  Using better quality high-reflectivity ceiling paint makes a perceptible difference, even if the wall paints aren't white.  The more indirect ambient is available, the more it fills in the shadows cast by highly directional task lighting like LEDs or halogens, making it easier to see your work. (Stark shadow is an important secondary aspect of glare in work spaces.)

The less inherent glare there is in the environment, the lower total luminosity is necessary to achieve the same visual efficacy.  The human eye has a logarithmic response, and in a zero-glare scenario we see just as well with 1/4-1/3 the total light as we do in a high-glare situation.  As a general rule of thumb, a mix of 2/3 uplighting or indirect lumens (measured at the source) to 1/3 downlighting lumens tends to work very well.  You say "never, ever", but uplighting with indirect electronically ballasted linear fluorescent, and downlighting with high-CRI LED can be very aesthetically pleasing, and will provide equal or higher efficacy of an all-downlighting halogen solution at 10-15% of the total power (==heat, in a Louisiana kitchen.)  I rarely have more than 150W of lighting lit in my kitchen (if I cranked it all on, including all task & ambient lighting at max dimming it might hit 450w), but it would take over a kilowatt- an electric space-heater's worth, to achieve the same light levels of ~150W of cabinet-top uplighting with 75W R30/PAR30 halogens in recessed cans, which would have much higher glare. At least wire-in for cabinet-top lighting, and set up for crown-moldings etc to shield the lamps from view. Experimenting with cheap (~$15 at box stores) T8 striplighting fixtures can tell you if that's going to work for you, but low-profile 1" high T5 fixtures can be easier to hide, allowing it to be placed further from the wall for a more even wall-washing/ceiling lighting effect.  If that just sucks for you, a row of cabinet-top R20 or MR16s directed at the wall & ceilings, not at the room can have a similar effect. (There are quite a few decent MR-replacement LED lamps these days, but look at total lumens, color temp, and CRI when buying.)

I never heard of high reflectivity ceiling paint. In my kitchen I covered the flat white ceiling paint with a satin white paint that is a shade off of bright white. It took time to get out all the imperfections but it has increased the brightness and allows easy cleanup of those accidents that land up there. Being tall I see more of the ceiling than most and some "spotless" houses are not so clean up there.

I see no mention of ceiling cans with wall washer hoods. Do you not like them?

Dana, thank you for the attention you give to your posts. The forum really benefits from them. I fully believe the conditions you're describing would be ideal. There must be an alternative way to achieve it. I'm going to look into the sconces, pendants, and ceiling-directed LEDs.

Under cabinet lighting is a great way to flood countertops with light. Under cabinets lights are fairly easy to install, and there are many types both high and low voltage. If you want to know how to install under cabinet lights, this column may give you some valuable tips. Under cabinet lighting will dramatically change the look of your kitchen.

Doing the rough in for my lighting right now. We ended up going with one large hanging light in the center of the kitchen, two pendants over the bar, and one pendant over the sink. The range hood has LED lights built in. I would like to use some under cabinet lighting but need to ask my electrician about the wiring options. Would it be easy to do hard-wired under cabinet lighting with IKEA type cabinets?

I am not familiar with IKEA cabinets, but ideally you will have a 1" or so valance around the lower edge of the cabinet to hide the fixture. After that, it is just creating points to feed power from. You will want continuous, or nearly so, fixtures to provide uniform lighting. I have not been in the market for undercounter fixtures for many years, but in the pre-LED days the "Little Inch" fluorescent fixtrures were the gold standards. They were (are?) available in several lengths.

I was actually thinking of this thread a few days ago when I was in a friend's house. He had closely spaced (about 24" OC) MR11 fixtures about 18" or so behind the edge of the lower cabinet (over the walking area). I expected that shadows would be a problem on the work surface, but because of the closely spaced fixtures the shadow was almost imperceptable.

Bruce