Recessed spotlight spacing

[Aruffell]

Hi all,

Buying a new build house and we're looking to put recessed spotlights in every room in the new house but am a bit baffled about how many we need.

All of the guides I've found on working it out says to take the square footage and times by 1.5 to get the total wattage and then to divide by the wattage of the bulbs.

Based on a 14x8 foot room that says we need 3. I've been in the room and 3 will not cut it.

Here are the rooms (in mm):



Here are some rough plans that I drew up:

Upstairs



Downstairs



Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Andy

 

[Aruffell]

i would say dont follow any guides on how to set your lighting up, do what you feel is right.
Some customers of mine like lots of them with high wattage lamps as they love a bright room.
Others only like a few with lower wattage as they like downlights but dont want to fill the ceiling up with lights.

Its a hard thing to plan, i agree with maccapacca in bathrooms and kitchen place them were is needed, theres not much point in having shadows over sink for the wife she will only nag ya

Thanks for that. Is it bad that I'm a bit OCD when it comes to symmetry though? ha

The bathrooms are square so I'm thinking 4 should be perfect.

Lighting is a great way to break up rooms. As macca says put them where you want the most light and have them set up so different areas have greater lighting, rather than just x equally spaced lights.

We put 12 spots in our downstairs room (approx 17x30 with an L shape and bar one one side). Three over the bar area, four in one part of the L and another 4 in the other, with one at the bottom of the stairs. Spacing was around 4-5' between each, although most ended up being 600 lumen 5" LED spots, which give a bit more angle than the typical 3" ones.

Another useful point is aim for more light than you think you'll usually need, then fit a dimmer. It's a pain to add more light after fitting but it's easy to lower the lights with a dimmer if it's too bright. You can also vary light output depending on what you are doing. You also don't want to have the spots more than 2-3' from each corner otherwise they will be quite dark.

May be worth thinking about putting individual spots over each bed side table area if you know where it's going to be. I'm going to retrofit out master bedroom with LED spots at some point (the current light is woeful) and at the moment am thinking 6 spots (as well as the main lamp), one above each table then four evenly spaced in a square round the room.

We're making sure that we do the downstairs first before we need to put carpet in upstairs and can focus on the upstairs after and make sure we get the bedside tables etc...

We are going with LightwaveRF most likely so will all be dimmable so was thinking the same, adding more than needed and then dialing it down a little bit.

Thanks,

Andy