Lighting for working from home: things to keep in mind
All the products necessary to adequately illuminate your workspace
Working from home, also called "teleworking", is becoming more common. The demands of modern society mean that the need to have a designated area in the home to work increases. There are several alternatives depending on the space we have available in the home. Many people are lucky enough to have a room that they use as an office, many other people (the majority) work from the living room, there are even many other people who work from the same room! All these cases are possible but if we organize it well, we can have adequate lighting to be able to get through the entire work day without any problem.
1 How to choose the right lighting if you work from home
The first thing we must take into account is the level of lighting necessary for a work space. The most common average lighting level in a workspace (and one that is rarely met) is around 500Lux. This is what we normally find in an office where we work with the computer and need an optimal and sufficient level of light to write and read documents. However, things change in homes. In a room, or in our living room at home, the average lighting is usually lower (200 – 300lux), even less in some cases. This means that if we want to use any of these rooms as a work area, it is necessary to add certain elements that allow us to achieve the appropriate lighting levels. Regarding color temperature, we must find a balance between comfort and aesthetics. We recommend a color temperature between 3000 and 4500K (warm white and natural white) to work with, to avoid the fatigue caused by cold tones when the eye is exposed to them for prolonged periods of time. Of course, you don't need to change the lighting throughout your home to get the right light levels, just make small "tweaks." Following the regulations established for lighting in work areas, the recommended light level must be on the work surface. Using the layered lighting technique we can easily solve this.
2 What is the Layered Lighting technique?
Layered lighting simply refers to the fact that in an environment we can find several layers of light, each one responsible for a specific function. The layers in an environment can be divided into:
- General Lighting: This type of light seeks to give the area a uniformity between shadows and light, added to giving the sensation of large space. In general terms, this is the type of lighting that is present in all environments. Colloquially, we could say that they are the lights that we find in any room with no other purpose than to provide light in a generic way.
- Area Lighting: The purpose of area lighting is to highlight places where specific activities are carried out. For example, a point of light close to a desk table, which provides additional luminosity that the lights in the room cannot provide.
- Spot Lighting: With spot lighting, the aim is to draw attention to a specific point in the room, it could be the table, the computer keyboard, etc. It is the lighting that will be directly focused on the workplace.
3 Conclusions
Taking into account the three main layers that we can have in our future workplace, we probably already have the first layer (general lighting), which can be made up of the lighting in the place and natural lighting if it exists. Based on the layered lighting technique, we could add a next layer of lighting (area lighting), which could consist of a lamp suspended above the desk or we could even use a lane spotlight, we can achieve this by adding table lamps or reading lamps. Taking this technique into account and adding the aforementioned layers, we can achieve lighting to have an ideal workplace in our home that provides us with sufficient lighting, thus protecting our eyesight and avoiding the fatigue caused by having inadequate lighting.
