LED lighting for your home

LED’s can be found just about everywhere you look — from digital clocks to remote controls, television screens to traffic lights.

The acronym stands for Light Emitting Diode, and they are simply tiny light bulbs that plug into an electrical circuit.  Unlike the ordinary light bulb, these last for tens of thousands of hours, hardly heat up, and use a fraction of the energy. Which is why these lights are being found more and more in the home.

LED lighting is not powerful enough as yet to be used in place of fluorescent bulbs or bright floodlights, but they can still be used to provide focused light to a smaller area, or as amenity lighting.  LED lighting strips are a good choice for accent lighting over a temperature-sensitive painting, because of their brightness and lack of heat.

They provide very focused task-based light that work well in hallways or walkways. If your light is hung in a high and hard-to-reach place, an LED light is a good choice—you won’t have to change any bulbs.

In addition, LED lights offer good choices for outdoor lighting.  They are often produced in strings of light that can be threaded over a trellis or a railing, wound around an umbrella, or hung in trees. They provide colourful, brilliant light that looks great in an outdoor setting, and they are extremely durable.

Perhaps the most common application of LED lights in the home is as Christmas tree lighting.  Because the bulbs are so long-lasting, you’ll never have to search for that one burned-out bulb.  In addition, they are much safer than traditional lights, because their heat output is much lower.

Generally, LED lights provide a modern, contemporary look that’s remarkably low-maintenance.  The light is bright and steady, and although the cost of the bulbs can be higher than incandescent lights or fluorescents, you’ll use much less energy and you do not have to worry about replacing the bulbs.  They’re a unique and modern choice that’s sure to become more mainstream in the future as the meet the requirement for dedicated low energy lighting required by the building regulations.