Picture this: you finally found your dream light fixture. In fact, it’s getting so much attention that your guests aren’t even noticing your expensive Persian rug! After a few months, however, you pause your spring cleaning and notice that your alluring fixture is FILTHY! Here are a few tips to get that fixture sparkling like new.

1. Be Safe

First, turn off power to the fixture to avoid any risk of shock. If you need a ladder, secure all four feet on a level surface before ascending. In addition, move the ladder as you work instead of stretching to clean beyond your reach. Never twist or spin your fixture as it may loosen the support. 

2. Avoid Chemicals on Metal

Chemicals damage the lacquer coating on fixtures, so grab a microfiber/soft cloth and mild detergent soap. Wipe the metal parts of the fixture with the cloth without scrubbing or being too abrasive. Again, do not use an all-purpose cleaner or anything that contains ammonia or alcohol, or you’ll damage the appearance of your fixture.

3. Use Glass-Specific Products

Truly clean glass can be hard to achieve, but there are plenty of great products to help. For example, one favorite at Hobrecht Lighting is pre-moistened, ammonia-free glass cleaning wipes. If possible, remove the glass from the fixture and wipe it clean. If not, just wipe the glass as-is. Remember to avoid spraying cleaner on the fixture to ensure that chemicals do not touch the metal.

4. Try the Vacuum

If your fixture has a fabric or beaded shade, don’t be afraid to use the vacuum! We like to use a hose attachment to reach up high and vacuum the shade clean. If your delicate fixture has a more serious stain, we recommend professional dry cleaning (and yes, that does exist for light fixtures)!

5. Don’t Forget the Bulbs

The most oft-neglected step for a sparkling fixture is a clean light bulb! After cleaning the rest of the fixture, unscrew each bulb and gently wipe it clean. Your microfiber cloth and gentle cleaner will work wonders here! This ensures that you get the full light output that your bulb has to offer.

6. If Possible, Dust Regularly

Give yourself a pat on the back! Now that you’ve deep-cleaned your fixture, it’ll be much easier to maintain. We highly recommend weekly dusting, though we realize that it’s not everyone’s favorite chore. However, with an extendable-arm duster, it’s much easier to reach those high hanging fixtures and give a quick dust in even the most awkward spots. 
Finding the right fit for your style, space, and taste can be challenging, but you nailed it. With a few expert cleaning tips, you can keep it sparkling all year long. If you have any questions about cleaning your unique fixture, reach out to us online or give us a call. We’re here for all your lighting needs!

Let’s face it. Life is hard and sometimes it can bring us down. Work, family, and other responsibilities are all factors that affect our mood. But what are the best ways to improve your mood? Although feeling sad is a common and should not make you feel any shame—feeling this way is but a small part of life—it should not dictate how we feel every day. Luckily, there’s an easy and little-known trick to help boost your mood without harsh prescriptions. And it all has to do with something you use every day:lighting. How we choose to use (or not use) lighting surprisingly has a big effect on how we feel inside. 

“Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.” ― Helen Keller

How does it work? It’s simple.

The Secret to a Better Mood is Easier Than You Think

Lighting is responsible for modulating our body’s circadian rhythm (also known as our body clock). When we’re in brighter environments, our bodies see it as a sign to stay awake and be active. Likewise, dim and poorly lit environments are a signal to our body to rest. The light our body is exposed to actually changes the chemical response inside – hence the link between lighting and our mood. 

An article in ArchDaily explains this effect as it relates to our mood as well: brighter lights give us a mood boost and poor lighting contributes to deficiencies and can even cause depression.

So, how do you pick the right types of light to boost your mood?

One Light, Two Light, Red Light, Blue Light

Get this: it’s not just about the brightness of the bulbs or the number of bulbs there are in the room. The color of our environment also plays a huge role in determining how we feel. In fact, it may even be the most important part of lighting as it affects our mood. While some people choose to repaint their walls to see this effect, changing out your light bulbs is a much easier solution.

The goal of artificial light is to mimic the pattern of the sun. In the morning, bluish-white lighting can help the body transition into the day as the sun begins to rise. During the day, bright lights positioned directly overhead help keep you alert and productive. And at night, warmer bulbs offer the best color light for sleeping as they make us feel cozy and help us tune into “sleep mode”. Again, the idea is to use colors that mimic the sun’s natural light and position in the sky at different times throughout the day. For example, wall lighting such as sconces are great during the morning and evening as they mimic a sunrise and sunset. 

Find great wall lighting options here

GearBrain mentions a Harvard study that clarifies how this works: blue light wavelengths keep us awake by causing our body to suppress melatonin. In contrast, an increase in the melatonin hormone means it’s time to sleep. So using low blue light bulbs in the bedroom, in and around bedtime, is key to winding down effectively before attempting to sleep.

During the day, bright whiter overhead lights are the key. In spaces where people are interacting throughout the day, ensuring these spaces are well lit, with the appropriate amount of light will ensure your body is producing the positive chemicals that will naturally lift your mood. Look for low blue light bulbs that have a CRI around 90, 4000-5000 Kelvin, and are full spectrum. Then ensure your room has enough light. Here is a quick formula to help you determine how much light is needed in a particular room.

For the average living space of 250 square feet, you’ll need roughly a total of 5,000 lumens as your primary light source (20 lumens x 250 square feet). In kitchen and dining room, you generally more light, so try to achieve 30-40 lumens per square foot. Each bulb or light will have a lumen rating, simply add them all up to be sure you have enough general lighting to feel your very best.

Better Lighting, Better Sleep, Better Mood

You already know that your quality of sleep affects your mood the next day. It’s why we tell kids to take a nap when they’re starting to get grouchy. So, if lighting affects how well you sleep, it makes sense that it would also be one of the best ways to improve your mood, right?

But it’s not that easy.

You’ve changed all your bulbs and you’re using only warm lighting, controlled with a dimmer switch before bed, but you’re still having trouble sleeping.

Now what?

It may not be the types of light from your walls and ceilings that are keeping you awake at night. Blue light from cell phones and other electronic devices can also suppress melatonin and affect our circadian rhythm. Here’s a tip: Disconnect long before you plan to sleep and use a book to wind down instead. While you’re reading, use the warm light from a bedside lamp to keep your body clock in order.

Make your evenings more stylish (and comfortable) with a decorative table lamp

Stay Focused with Task Lighting

When you’re feeling down, it can be hard to focus on specific tasks. With the right focus lights, you can stay focused and in a better mood all day long. Working with natural light may be sufficient in the morning or afternoon, but when focusing on a specific task, bright, direct lighting is needed. For all-day focus lighting, use an adjustable wall or floor lamp to shed bright light on your work.

Find lamps to fit your style here

Although we cannot control the natural light in our environment, using artificial lighting can help make up for what is lacking. Take advantage of the light around you and begin incorporating its patterns into your life. You’ll see a boost in your mood in both the short and long term!

Contact us to learn more about what lighting can do for you!

Are you tired of the bedtime battle? You know, the daily conflict that occurs between you and your children to get them to sleep? Perhaps your child is anti-bedtime and creates a skirmish to get to the bedroom, but then deals ok with it. Or, maybe your child is the type to leave their bed several times to tell you they can’t sleep, before wearing themselves out and finally catching zzz’s a few hours later? No matter what you and your child’s bedtime struggle looks like, there are some scientific studies that show why bedtime can be difficult for kids. While you may not realize it, one primary factor is melatonin production, which can be thrown off by the type and tone of lighting in the home. Specifically, the light around and in the child’s bedroom, and how much blue light (emanating from technology), is taken in just before bedtime. Blue light can be found in high amounts from technology screens as well as ordinary light bulbs of lower quality. 

One of the biggest factors affecting a child’s bedtime routine? Light.

Studies show that the more blue light a child is susceptible to, the harder the body has to work to produce melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep. According to a New York Times article, the general consensus is that “Children’s eyes let in more light than adults’ eyes do.” If the blue light radiating off of our technological devices affects adults so much, that only means that children are that much more affected the same light. So, those bedtime videos, games and stories that may come from a phone, tablet, or TV, all are stunting melatonin production in the child, resulting in a more difficult bedtime transition. 

In the study that the NY Times cited, it showed that the average beginning of the child’s biological night (when melatonin secretion began) was approximately 7:47 P.M  with the average bedtime being about 8:27 P.M. This scenario occurred when the children were exposed to a living situation of being in a dim-lit “cave” of sorts, where no bright light interfered with the beginning of their biological night. However, they alternatively studied how light exposure suppressed melatonin production and found that the rate suppressed production by 90%, with the effects lingering long after the children retired into a dim-lit space. 

What does that mean? It means that blue light exposure before bedtime should be restricted, and that will result in a more seamless transition from day to night. Nowadays, you can go into your phone settings and set “night mode”, which will change the screen light from a harsh blue to a warm yellow at a time that you choose. If technology is a big part of your bedtime routine, this solution may behoove you,  but you might find it more beneficial to eliminate all exposure to blue light within an hour of bedtime.

Turning the Sleep Space into a Dark Cave

So, you’re interested in the idea of a “dark cave” to help with the bedtime battle, but you don’t want to rewire or renovate in an expensive way. We’re here to tell you that this doesn’t have to be a big budget blow. After researching the best color light for sleep, results show that warm LED lights take the cake. If you think about it (and think about the color wheel) warm tones (red, orange, yellow) are the direct opposite of cooler colors (green, blue, purple) so naturally, you’d think warm light would act inversely to cool light. The authors of a Life Hack article suggest that in the evening, a switch should be made from bright, abrasive overhead lights in favor of table lamps, or smaller sconces would held  to maintain a proper circadian rhythm. Typically, these smaller light sources are accompanied by warmer bulbs (under 3000k), which is the crux of the matter. Warm light more closely mimics the setting sun and is gentler on the eyes (and better for the melatonin production) and encourages a smooth transition from being awake to falling asleep. Keeping these warmer, eye level light sources on around the home after sunset can yield a simpler, smoother transition, especially for children, from day to night. 

A supplementary behavior that will take time to adjust would be down a similar vein to restricting blue-light technology would be to adjust the amount of direct light on the child’s eyes. Illuminated technology (e-readers, tablets, phones, televisions, computers) could and should be used indirectly in relation to a child at nighttime (say, the parent reads off of the tablet while the child lays tucked in, or audio is played without video). This reduces the direct blue light shining into the eyes of a child, and will, therefore, reduce the suffocation of melatonin production.  Using book lights or table lamps to light an activity (say, reading an old-fashioned bedtime story) indirectly lights the source of activity, so there is less strain on the child’s eyes. To reiterate, the best color light to promote sleep is any variant of warm light, perhaps yellow or amber light. 

A third option would be installing dimmer switches around the house so that you can control when the lights go from high to low. If you have these switches around the house, you can ensure that even the overhead lights go from bold and bright to soft and low consistently across your house. It saves the necessity to purchase additional table lamps or installing hallway sconces if you’d rather have a holistic household solution. 

Quick Tips for Lighting a House to Promote Sleep

So, maybe your child is afraid of the dark. We all know we had our bouts of fear for monsters in the bed or in the closet, waiting for the parents to slink away and for the lights to go off. There’s no discounting a child’s fear here. Instead, we propose simple solutions to combat that with night lights. The quick tip here is to ensure that bedtime lights are kept low in location and low in brightness. If they’re out of the direct line of sight of the child, they won’t harm the melatonin production and general sleep cycle of the child, and the light provides that safety blanket from the scaries lurking in the dark. Keep in mind what we’ve explored about light temperature, and seek out night lights that contain (or can be mounted with) warmer light bulbs rather than cool bulbs (many can be found marked as low blue light bulbs). 

Shop Warm Light Bulbs

We Have the Products to make Bedtime a Breeze

The fact of the matter is that light affects sleep and that children’s eyes are more susceptible to light, which makes their nighttime transition bumpier. Luckily, light is something you can control, for the most part. You can buy blackout shades, change out light bulbs, opt for the best color light to promote sleep, enhance melatonin production with warm LED lights, and set an off-time for electronics. Whatever you choose to do, Hobrecht Lighting can help you control your homes’ light. Making small changes like the ones mentioned earlier can be the first step toward putting your kids to bed (and getting them to fall asleep) with no hiccups. 

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Have you ever noticed how certain lights make things look different? Take a hair salon, for example. The stylist dyes your hair and it looks great in the salon, but when you go outside, it’s a completely different color! That isn’t bad styling— but it might be caused by bad lighting. Here’s an in-depth review of the Color Rendering Index and how it might affect your business.

Visible Color and Light Color: The Basics

You may remember this from school-age science classes, but what we perceive as white light is actually all the visible colors of light mixed together. Natural light sources, like the sun, produce all these colors, as shown through any prism, while artificial light sources often emit only a few colors. The color we perceive in objects depends on the colors absorbed and reflected by the object, so objects unable to absorb the usual spectrum of light will appear a different color than usual.

Keeping Track of Color: The Color Rendering Index

The Color Rendering Index is a measurement of light’s effect on colors. It measures how many of the usual colors emitted by white light are emitted by a given light source. Light sources that are very similar to full-spectrum natural light have a high CRI rating, up to 100. Lights that lack certain colors and aren’t full-spectrum have a low CRI rating, somewhere below 70.

How CRI Affects Business

Having high CRI lights in your place of business can be extremely important, especially when perception and image is at stake. Businesses such as hair or nail salons, art galleries, car dealerships, and photography studios must be especially careful to install high CRI lights. If a customer invests in a product, hair color, car, or anything else color-dependent, only to find out that it isn’t what they originally saw… That unhappy customer poses a risk to your reputation and future business. 

Low CRI lights aren’t defective or universally undesirable, but they do have specific uses. You may see low CRI lights in street lamps, light posts, or stadium lights.

Another Note: Color Rendering Index vs Kelvin Scale

Because color and light have a huge impact on our perceptions and opinions, CRI isn’t the only way to rank a light’s quality. While the CRI measures how a light affects an object’s color, the Kelvin scale measures the color of the light itself, providing the correlated color temperature (CCT) of the light source. Oftentimes CCT and CRI get confused with one another, but they’re just different measurements of light quality that are relevant to different situations.

Don’t Stress- Just Check the Package

Now that we’ve learned what CRI and CCT are, let’s imagine you’re picking out a lightbulb. Each package should tell you the CRI and CCT ratings for the bulb, and you may see some common trends. Typically, high CRI lights are also fairly high in CCT. For example, a light bulb that emits light at 2700K (warm light) usually has a lower CRI (less true color) than that of a 4000K light bulb (blueish light) with a higher CRI (truer object color). This is not always the case, but it is common.

If you have doubts about selecting the right bulbs for your business, or any other questions, our lighting experts at Hobrecht Lighting are here to help. Reach out to us and we’ll make sure your business puts its best foot, and best color-quality lighting, forward!

We promise that we can show you a super-easy way to boost your productivity. Hang with us as we lay a little bit of background, but don’t worry. It’ll be worth it (an much easier than you think).

Sooo… have you ever heard of the Kelvin scale? Vaguely familiar? Blank? Well, not to worry…most of us retain don’t retain a lot from science classes, but believe it or not, it is an integral part of our daily experience. In fact, even a very basic understanding of the Kelvin scale, and applying it in your home lighting can improve your mood, productivity, and even long-term health. Yes! All from lighting. Read on for some applicable science and a few trivia-friendly facts from your friends here.

1. What It Is

Let’s start with the very basics. What is the Kelvin scale? Most used as a temperature measurement that ranges from absolute zero to the heat of the sun, Kelvin also measures the color temperature of light, both artificial and natural. Its applications are widespread, stretching from astrology to photography to biology.

There is plenty of in-depth science to explain how one scale can measure the temperature of celestial bodies and also classify light bulbs… But for now, let’s just keep it super simple to understand the basic concept. Just imagine an experiment where a metal is subjected to various levels of heat.

Depending on the Kelvin temperature (amount of heat that it absorbs), the metal glows in colors such as amber, yellow or blue. So, a certain temperature of heated metal = certain color of light emitted. So even though light bulbs don’t usually function at those exact temperatures, we use Kelvin because it’s an exact way to classify the color of light emitted by different light sources. Kelvin then is the color of light…and as it turns out…it matters a lot.

2. Why It Matters

Moving on from the background science… Why worry about the Kelvin and color of light? First, check out the scale itself. (The higher the number, the cooler/bluer the light. The lower the number, the warmer/redder the light.) Color temperatures of the Kelvin scale range from 1,000K-10,000K.

• 1000K-1900K is candle light hue
• 2000K-2900K is a warm, yellowish white.
• 3000K-4500K is a cool white.
• 4600K-6500K is comparable to daylight.
• Above 6500K the light has increasingly more blue tones.
• 10,000K is the color of the blue sky.

Imagine if your home was lit only by candles, or if it was constantly filled with bright daylight. Because our bodies are programmed to react to different light temperatures in different ways, it makes a huge difference in your mood, energy, daily tasks, ambiance, ability to concentrate, and even your sleep. This is not to say that any one type of light is better than another—simply that the color temperature impacts us…. the functionality and atmosphere of our homes and workplaces.

Different light bulbs emit different colors. Not all light bulbs are created equal. And the color of light emitted by your light bulbs is making its impact right now, though it may go unnoticed. Excessively cool tones, insufficient quantity of light, or excessive artificial light before sleep can impact mood, productivity, and even increase chances of disease. Fortunately, your new knowledge of the Kelvin scale can help you fine tune your home lighting.

3. How to Use It

Thanks to a little help from science, you can use the Kelvin scale to choose lighting that maximizes your health and productivity at home. Consider your daily activities and form a home lighting plan that suits your family’s needs—which rooms are meant for productivity, and which for relaxing?

In residential lighting, the most common color temperatures that people use and prefer are 2700K to 3000K. Why? Warmer colors create an atmosphere of coziness, calm, and comfort. Consider warm lighting for your bedrooms, family room, and other rooms for social gathering. For an office, garage, or workspace, cool lighting can create a more clean, precise atmosphere to facilitate productivity.

As for the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry ad hobby rooms where you need most productive so it’s a good choice to mimic natural light around noon with warmer light around 3000-4000K.

Here is an easy rule to follow:

In areas where you need higher degrees of concentration and productivity, you need a higher Kelvin (up to 3500-4000k), where you need lower levels of concentration and productivity, use a lower Kelvin (1500k – 3000k).

Need advice? Feel free to discuss your ideas with one of our lighting experts. We’re here to help you build a home atmosphere that’s best for you.