Great kitchen lighting design typically utilises a large amount of lighting (which means more than just installing a few extra ceiling roses). Kitchen lighting needs a variety of types of lighting for different areas and purposes. The absolutely worst way to illuminate a kitchen is using bright fluorescent ceiling strip lights. They’re certainly very bright – but also flat, cold and guaranteed to give you a headache into the bargain.
The most obvious issue with having central ceiling-rose fittings in a kitchen is that they produce dark spots, most noticeably where you cast your own shadow onto work surfaces. A solution seen in many kitchens involves fitting halogen down lamps in a uniform pattern across the ceiling then adding task-specific lighting for workareas, hobs and so on.
This does indeed work quite well, but brings its own set of problem: halogen lamps run at very high temperatures; they don’t last well; and they are pretty much the most expensive possible way to light a kitchen. Over ninety percent of the cost of incandescent lighting in general (and halogen lamps in particular) is the electricity they consume.
This in large part explains the rise in popularity of ultra low energy, cool running, LED kitchen lighting. For mains voltage lighting, all that is required is to replace existing GU10 spotlights in-situ with GU10 LEDs. For low voltage systems, replace existing 12v transformers with one (or more, depending on the number of lights involved) constant voltage 12v LED driver and then change over to LED light bulbs.
There are 3 principal qualities to consider when evaluating LED spotlights, namely: luminosity (or brightness); color temperature (how blue and cool or yellow and warm the light seems); and light beam angle. Try to obtain as good a match as possible to the performance of your halogen lamps in these 3 areas.
It has become the norm to measure brightness according to wattage, but the wattage ratings for LED light bulbs are approximately 10% compared to normal incandescent or halogen bulbs of the same brightness. Accordingly you should look to replace a 35w halogen lamp with 3-4w LED and a 50w with probably a 5w LED.
How cool or warm a light appears is graded according to “color temperature”. LED lights come in a wide range of white color temperatures (not to mention actual “colors”), but historically it was easier to manufacture blue LEDs and hence many cheap LEDs exhibit a cold/bluish tint. However, if you specify warm white (technically a temperature below 3,500 Kelvins) you should get a fair approximation of the white light normally created by halogen lamps.
The narrower the beam angle (45 degrees for example) the tighter and more spot-like any light will appear, while 120 degrees gives an even spread of light and eliminates hot-spots and glare. Arguably the best LED spotlight presently on the market as a direct replacement for halogen spots is the Zenigata LED from Sharp.
Determining how artificial light appears to the eye often owes less to the light itself than to the surface it is aimed at. A warm feeling is easily obtained by pointing spot lighting at areas that are themselves warmly colored, such as terracotta tiling, any type of wood or even just a warmly painted wall. By contrast, a dramatic effect can be had by simply throwing blue LED light against dark or hard surfaces – blue or green tiles, granite, enamel and steel all lend themselves to this treatment.
Use lights with differing characteristics against different textures and colors to obtain different effects in specific zones in the kitchen. There are so many options, especially with LED strip lighting systems for accenting plinths, coving, worktops and just about anything else you could think of. The best advice though is stick with just one or two ideas – you’ll be surprised how stunning even a modicum of LED kitchen lighting looks.
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