Sorry for the third post everyone, but this has given me something to occupy some time on a cold boring night.
So anyways, I've been crunching some numbers...and it turns out that my living room area is about 1000 lumen short of what would be considered the "baseline" for a decently lit room.
I've got 302.5 square feet, approximately, of space. Probably a bit more, so I'll just say 310.
To get decent lighting, most home improvement places are telling me I want about 20 lumens per square foot. That means that in order to get good lighting in this room, I would need 6200 lumens.
Before the new lights I put in yesterday and today, I was running 375 lumen bulbs in four different lamps. I had a total of 1500 lumens with that setup, which is WELL below the light threshold that I should have. No wonder I was always needing my LED headband lamp in order to see anything I was doing in this dim room.
So I upgraded to some bigger lights, and those put out 1260 lumens per bulb. That's almost as much from one light as all four had been before!! However, that still works me out to 5040 lumens, still well short of the 6200 that I really kind of need this room to have. One more of the bright lights would get me to about the recommended level...but here's the catch...
The darker the carpet, furniture, and accessories in the room are, the MORE lumens are needed to actually make the room be lit correctly. I've got dark blue carpet in the room, a dark maroon chair, REALLY DARK blue curtains covering the sliding glass door, black appliances in the attached kitchen portion of the room, and darkly stained cabinets. So basically, my room is really dark...so even that 6200 lumens would most likely not be enough light for this room to be considered well lit.
All of this is starting to make sense to me. Ever since I moved into this house with my wife, I've felt that at night it was dark in here, even with all the lights on. I ended up getting used to it, but even when preparing dinner in the kitchen in the winter time while it's dark out, it's really hard to see what I'm doing. I've long wanted to upgrade the lighting in the kitchen portion of the room, but now I'm realizing that all of the lighting in this room needs to be upgraded.
No wonder Pearl has trouble seeing when it's dark in here...it's TOO dark in here to be considered marginally well lit...let alone WELL lit.
I've been wanting to do new lights in this room for years...I think that maybe this is going to give me an excuse to actually do it. The kitchen will especially be a candidate, as we've wanted to do that for a while. While we're doing that, we may as well go ahead and put something nicer up in the living room half of the room as well.
To think, a robot not being able to operate correctly in a room at night would help me come to the realization that this room is woefully poorly lit. Amazing!!
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Topic: How Bright Does it Need to Be? (Read 7688 times)