The Main Error New Electricians Make When Spacing Recessed Lights

Recessed lights have several advantages:

• They make a room bigger. With no fixture hanging down from the ceiling they don’t intrude on the space that a room has.

• They are less maintenance. As most of the unit is above the ceiling it doesn’t require dusting like a typical light fixture does.

• You don’t get lights blinding you as you do with a track light set up.

• Recessed lights are now made with built in LED units so one isn’t having to pull out a ladder and constantly change light bulbs.

• They light a room more evenly as opposed to a standard fixture where all the light is coming from one source.

“They make a room bigger. With no fixture hanging down from the ceiling they don’t intrude on the space that a room has.”

It is very common to take a 15 foot wide room with a 10 foot high ceiling and do some quick math, then space the lights evenly every 5 feet from the wall, but this is incorrect.

Light emitted from a recessed line is conical (cone shaped), with this not factored in one gets dark shadowed walls & corners and an unevenly lit room. I’ve drawn up a diagram to illustrate this point:

“then space the lights evenly every 5 feet from the wall, but this is incorrect.”

The correct method is to install the lights that will be nearest to the walls at 1/2 the distance from the walls as the lights are spaced from each other in the field. This allows the walls and corners of the room to be properly lit whilst creating more even lighting all around.

“install the lights that will be nearest to the walls at 1/2 the distance from the walls as the lights are spaced from each other in the field.”

Our brains are wired to appreciate the aesthetic quality of symmetry plus mathematically evenly spacing everything seems correct, but in practice it doesn’t work as well.

Here is an above view of the wrong way to space recessed lights

You can see in my diagram below the evenly spaced lights leave the walls and corners with no light and uneven light in the field.

Wrong spacing showing uneven lighting, dark corners and walls

You’ll see in this diagram that by doing the spacing correctly there is much better illumination of the walls & corners and the field is more evenly lit.

What are your thoughts about this technique? Do you have any experiences you have had with recessed lighting that you would like to share?

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