7 Tips for Better Bathroom Lighting


7 Tips for Better Bathroom Lighting

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7 Tips for Better Bathroom Lighting

When it comes to proper lighting, one of the most critical rooms in the home is the bathroom. It’s most often the first place people go to when they wake up in the morning, and it can set the mood for the day. The bathroom is where you wash and groom, and many people take their morning medications there—all strong cases for optimized bright lighting and daylighting. The other reason is that light, particularly daylight, is what sets our circadian rhythms, which play an important part in overall health. Get more news about Bathroom Lamp,you can vist our website!

Helping people see well is also critical for safety, since the bathroom is where 80 percent of older adults experience a fall. Fortunately, good bathroom lighting design for seniors is good bathroom lighting design for everyone. Let’s look at seven opportunities for the best bathroom illumination: daylighting, overall light, vanity lighting, lighting over a tub, light in the shower, lighting at the water closet, and night lighting.How much light is needed in the bath? The answer depends on the person and the task they’re performing. For someone just waking up and shuffling in to the water closet, 10 footcandles (fc) might be plenty. After a shower, when it’s time to shave, 100fc is probably needed for better visibility.

1. Daylighting
Nothing beats natural daylight for brightening your mood and setting the circadian rhythms that regulate wake/sleep cycles. There’s a huge and growing body of scientific literature around this phenomenon. That’s why it’s ideal to design a bathroom with as much natural light as possible. If planning to include one window, why not have two?—especially if they can be on adjacent or opposite walls to balance the illumination. To circumvent the common issue of large windows over the tub that are always covered to provide privacy, why not switch to bottom-up shades so you have daylight and views with privacy?
2. Overall Bath Lighting
Many homeowners like the luxury feel that a chandelier or pendant fixture can bring to a space. To prevent code issues, make sure that the fixture is at least 3 feet from the tub and 7 feet or more above the high-water level. In addition, put it on its own switch, with a dimmer. Depending on the layout, this might be the fixture used in the middle of the night, and it’s best if you can dim it to about 20 percent.
3. Vanity Lighting
Bathroom lighting

The best possible lighting for activities in front of the bathroom mirror comes from fixtures mounted on either side roughly at the user’s eye level. This leaves no part of the face in shadow, as happens with an overhead fixture. If the mirror wall isn’t an option, move the light fixtures to the side walls, or hang pendants from the ceiling; just try to get the light to either side where it will do the most good.
4. Lighting at the Tub
Building codes are very strict about lights over tubs and whirlpools. There can be no open or hanging fixtures within 8 feet above the tub, nor for another 3 feet in front of it. Since most bathroom ceilings aren’t more than 8 feet tall, this generally precludes having open or hanging lights above tubs.
5. Light in the Shower
Great news for people who don’t like showering in the near-dark: There are any number of very bright, open shower trim lights available, which means you can put in cans that punch light down and dim to the desired level, instead of struggling to see with the standard-for-years lensed 60-watt maximum cans. We used to put two, or even more, cans in a shower just to get decent lighting; now one good one can do the trick. Gasketed glass or acrylic surface-type fixtures rated for shower use are also available.
6. Lighting at the Water Closet
Bathroom lighting

This is most easily achieved with a fan/light combination fixture. If the customer wants more light, perhaps to read by, we’ll specify an additional recessed can light in front of the water closet, almost always on a dimmer. Another good trick is to “borrow” daylight via a frosted-glass door or transom windows that allow light but preserve privacy.
7. Night Lighting
Since the bathroom is sometimes used in the middle of the night, it’s critical to provide some, but not too much, light by which to safely maneuver. When the eyes are adjusted to darkness, as they are when waking up from a sound sleep, very few footcandles are needed. (A full moon is just .01fc!) Flipping on bright overhead lights will be blinding and disruptive. A 5-watt nightlight may be just right.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to provide a low-wattage light source that either is on all night or that responds to motion. Many exhaust fan/lights have such a feature, or you could wire some step lights in the wall, or simply purchase some plug-in motion-sensor nightlights.

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