While lighting is an essential component of interior decoration, it helps if you get your bathroom lighting right. A type of lighting that’s growing in popularity lately is recessed lighting, and they’re a great choice for bathrooms. So, how do you choose recessed lights for a bathroom?
When choosing recessed lighting for your bathroom, you may want to go for a 3-inch or 4-inch light. Also, you want the lights to be around 600 lumens bright with a CRI that’s over 90. Getting all of these variables right will help light your bathroom perfectly using only recessed lights.
If you are working on installing recessed lighting for your bathroom, you may choose to use the services of an expert. Alternatively, you may want to learn the rules about choosing recessed lighting for very specific results. This piece will outline some of the merits of recessed lights and some factors to consider when selecting them.
How To Select The Best Recessed Lighting For Bathroom
Contents
When choosing recessed lighting for your bedroom, there are many factors to consider to ensure that you’re making the right choice. Here are five of the most recognized specifications to pay attention to when choosing recessed lighting for your bathroom.
Size
Recessed lightings come in different sizes, which is logical since most rooms vary significantly in size. However, using recessed lighting made for the living room in your bathroom will make it unnecessarily bright and inconveniently distracting.
If you have a bathroom of regular size, a 3-inch or 4-inch light should work perfectly. While there are much bigger options like the 9-inch lights, you’ll rarely need them that big for your bath.
Realistically, you can only choose between 4-inch and 6-inch lights when buying yourself. Other sizes are harder to come by, and you won’t need them unless for very specific purposes.
You shouldn’t need more than two 4-inch recessed lights, regardless of your bathroom’s size. Of course, 4-inch lights can also work since the size isn’t the only factor that matters.
Color
You may be surprised to see color making it here, as you probably already know all recessed lights are white. When referring to the temperature of recessed lights, it’s more about the color temperature than the color hue itself.
The color temperature differs from the brightness in several ways. Firstly, color temperature is measured in kelvins, while brightness is measured in lumens. The temperature only determines the whiteness of the room; it doesn’t make it brighter.
Recessed lights with a higher color temperature will appear brighter, even at similar lumens as one with a lower temperature. However, the brightness doesn’t change by an increase or decrease in kelvins, even if it appears so.
Getting any temperature of light is possible but not always feasible. The only ones widely available for bathroom use include 2700k (warm white), soft white (3000k), and neutral white (3500k). You can also get bright white (4000k) and daylight (5000k) recessed lights, but they’re too cold for the regular bathroom.
If you’re unsure what color temperature will work for you, simply choose a tunable LED recessed light. That way, you can adjust the color temperature after installing the lights to get what’s perfect for your bathroom.
Brightness
While most people confuse brightness with color temperature, both variables are very different. The temperature determines how white the light is, and the brightness determines the intensity of the light from the source.
Unlike temperature, brightness is measured in lumens, which uses kelvin as its unit.
Although incandescent bulbs use watts to measure brightness, they’re practically nonexistent now. So when choosing a brightness level for recessed lighting to be installed in your bathroom, you should try going natural. You can buy a led recessed lighting with an effective brightness limit or a dimmable one.
You should generally aim for around 600 lumens for a bathroom, as that level best mimics daylight. If your ceilings are too high, you may need brighter bulbs to get enough light around. Otherwise, you can never go wrong with 500 to 600 lumens.
Type
While the type might sound like a significant factor, it’s not something you should be concerned about. There are two major types of recessed lights; fixed and adjustable lights, and the names already gave away their differences.
The lens on a fixed recessed light is usually not mobile. So once you fix the light in the trim, it stays like that forever unless you decide to remove it completely. However, adjustable recessed lights can tilt for up to 35 degrees after being fixed.
While those are the two widely-known types of recessed lights, other types aren’t as important. However, most other kinds of recessed lights usually step into the territory of other kinds of lights.
Since your bathroom will typically have a flat ceiling, it’s generally recommended to go with fixed recessed lights. However, you can experiment with adjustable ones since you don’t have anything to lose.
Light Quality
The quality of the light is another factor to consider when choosing recessed lighting for your bathroom. Measured in color rendering index (CRI), light can reproduce accurate colors compared to natural light sources.
Unless you read or do anything that requires accurate colors in the bathroom, you shouldn’t worry about it. It should be good enough for your bathroom as long as it doesn’t make the lighting look too inaccurate.
If your budget is reasonable, you should consider shooting for recessed lighting with a CRI of 90 or higher.
However, if you’re trying to save cost, you can probably get sufficient lights with reasonably good quality. Since the light quality isn’t an essential characteristic of bathroom lights, you can do without the quality of expensive options.
Advantages Of Recessed Lighting In The Bathroom
Recessed lights aren’t a common sight in most bathrooms, but they look perfect in rare cases when they appear. When placed correctly, recessed lighting can make your bathrooms look more alluring.
Here are some ways by which recessed lighting adds extra flair to a bathroom to make them look better:
They’re aesthetically pleasing
Finding lights that give you as much control over your lighting as recessed lights can be pretty demanding. However, you can control every variable and make your bathroom look different with the flip of a switch. Since most people have different ideas of a beautiful bathroom, you can tweak yours to become excellent by your standards.
They make the room look more spacious
Recessed lights are generally installed in the ceiling, technically taking up less space. This is even more advantageous when you start going into the advanced aspects of home decoration.
For instance, only recessed lights can light up the room uniformly without any shadows behind the lights. The fact that shadows are cut out from the bathroom area also gives the illusion of a larger bathroom.
Recessed lighting is also great when you want your light sources to be as subtle as possible. They take up virtually no space, softly lighting up your bathroom without drawing unnecessary attention.
If you install the lights expertly, they should light up the room uniformly, giving your bathroom a natural look.
