Five Reasons to Incorporate Mood Lighting Into Your Home

Standard light fixtures are there to serve a practical purpose – for example, helping food preparation in the kitchen. They are often bright and fixed in one position.

With mood lighting, you have far more choice. You can dim them to your required brightness, position them to highlight features of a room or even change colours for entertaining.

At SONA, we’re experts in lighting installations. You can adapt the room to your mood using a remote device, such as a tablet – ideal for relaxing and entertaining. That’s not the only benefit either…

If you’re partial to bolder colours, mood lighting can help to soften the décor – ideal for evenings in chilling out or hosting parties. Likewise, you can play with colours to create your desired mood. Our bodies react differently to certain colours. For example, yellow fatigues the eye, ideal for getting you ready for sleep, whereas blue lighting may increase productivity.

Playing with dimmer lamps in corners of the room can open up small spaces. Try to position them up high if you’re short on space. By placing them in the middle of a right angle, you’ll attract your guests’ gaze across the room. Similarly, wall lamps scatter more light across the room, rather than focusing on the ceiling or floor. Mood spotlights can also add little highlights to parts of your room where you can’t fit a lamp, and don’t want a big light fitting. These spotlights will enhance the mood lighting of a room and can be dimmed or brightened whenever you want and to your preference.

Our bodies rely on circadian rhythms to help regulate our sleep. Exposure to light has a dramatic effect on this – too light in the evening and we risk disrupted sleep, too dark in the morning and we can’t get out of bed. With mood lighting, you can automate the lights in your home to work with your daily schedule. Set them to wake you up gently in the morning (particularly on winter days before the sun has risen) or to help you wind down slowly after a hard day at work. Again, colours also play a key role here – green, for example, is ideal for home offices as it aids concentration.

Smart LED mood lighting isn’t just convenient and mood-lifting. It can also save money! Consider dimming lights to 5% for the perfect warming ambience. Additionally, many mood lights use LED technology, which consumes far less energy than normal lightbulbs. The statistics speak for themselves: an LED bulb needs just one for 25,000 hours of lighting. By comparison, this would equate to 21 incandescent bulbs!

Mood lighting doesn’t have to be constrained to the indoors! Beyond standard spotlights and floodlights, you can also use mood lighting outdoors for summer entertaining. You can fit IP lights into outdoor decking for ambient uplighting, or consider highlighting certain areas like water features. A good outdoor mood light installation will allow you to play with colours, adjust your entertainment and get more done in the home. Here are a few tips on how to get started.

• Always speak to a trained specialist: as a CEDIA Member of Excellence, we can advise you on the latest technology to suit your home
• Choose lighting with fully customisable mobile technology, for example controlling dimmers from an iPad
• Combine your lighting with other technologies such as automated blinds to create a ‘scene’
• Use light colours to boost productivity and help you wake up, classic good mood lighting
• Dim the lights for entertaining or winding down to sleep
• Use warm and cool whites for a productive kitchen space
• Add sensors to automate lights coming on in bathrooms
• Make customised settings for example ‘morning’, ‘afternoon’ and ‘evening’ to save time.