When lighting your home, the garage is often the forgotten room. That is until the night you bang your head against a shelf. Here’s what you need to know about lighting fixtures for your garage.

Additional Lighting

Before you begin planning your lighting design for your garage, keep in mind that you’ll always find yourself needing additional lighting fixtures later. Common places you may need extra light are:

• Above the garage door
• Hung items area
• Areas with appliances
• Workbenches
• Storage areas

Popular lighting fixtures include:

Clamp-On Lights

Clamp-on lights are economically efficient and easy to move. They’re perfect for small projects that involve detailed work.

Task Lights

Task lighting features can be installed right above your work areas. When installing, plan accordingly. Make sure the light won’t be in your eyes and that there won’t be any shadows that make it hard to see what you’re doing.

Under-Cabinet Light Fixtures

Under cabinet lighting can either be installed with tube lights or individual bulbs.

LED

More and more homeowners are switching to LED lighting for their garages and workspaces because of their long life, reduced energy use, brightness, and instantaneous even spread. Because of how long they last, LED lights save homeowners money.

Shop Lights

Shop lights are simple – they’re single bars of light fixtures either hung or mounted. Easy-installation shop lights can be plugged into an outlet and are a fast and economically efficient way to light your garage. If you want something more hard-wired, like motion sensors, you’ll have to be willing to pay more. The results are definitely worth the price.

Strip Light Fixtures

Strip light fixtures allow you to totally control your overhead garage lighting. The best part is, they’re easy to use. They provide instant lighting and have no warmup period.

Wraparound Lights

Is your garage ceiling low? Then you should consider wraparound lights. Instead of hanging, they mount to your ceiling so they won’t ever be in the way. This is good for more crowded garages. Wraparound light fixtures provide a lot of light from each side and the bottom.

Does your garage need lighting fixtures? Visit Premier Lighting today.

When you shop around for glass pendant lights in Scottsdale AZ, it can be tough to figure out which options are a good fit for your home. If you’re wondering which types of lighting to go for, here’s a look at common uses.

Task Lights

Check out pendant lights that you can use for task lighting. These lighting products allow you to focus on targeted areas. If you need more light to help you prepare meals in the kitchen or for when you work on something at the island or breakfast nook, then you should look around for task lighting options.

Ambient Lighting

A lot of people mistakenly believe that pendants don’t make for good general lighting. Using only one pendant lighting won’t do. You’ll be better off using multiple ones. That’s going to give you the ambient glow you want out of your pendant lights. This is ideal to set up over your kitchen island if you spend a lot of time preparing meals or even working at the counter.

Accent Lighting

Lighting in the right design and style can serve as an accent piece to your home. That kills two birds with one stone. You’re not just buying a lighting fixture to illuminate the room; you also get to buy one that generates a lot of visual interest.

Decorative Lighting

These are lighting products that add a decorative feature in your home. These can be big, stylish centerpieces or a couple of lights that add a bit of flourish and contemporary touches to the room.

Shopping for Lights

There are plenty of uses for pendant lighting. If you’re ready to shop around, make sure you pay attention to these buying tips.

• Check the height. Don’t buy anything unless you check the measurements of the room and find options that work with the right height.
• Get dimmers. Dimmers help you switch from one mood and tone to another. With dimmers in place, you can adjust the glow of your pendant lighting with ease, from a brilliant wash of light to something more romantic or cozy.
• Think about the colors. Color plays a huge role in your interiors. For easy options, you can go for neutrals and classics. They tend to go with everything. For something unique, go for bright and bold colors.

Have fun when you shop around. Look for glass pendant lights in Scottsdale AZ at Premier Lighting.

Homes in Arizona tend to have a specific, Southwestern aesthetic. But many are looking for a more modern, sleek, and trendy design. One secret to changing up the look of your home is actually through lighting design, which can be accomplished through the best interior design stores in Scottsdale, AZ.

Finding the Right Interior Design Stores Near Me

How can you get the most out of our space and team? By finding a team happy to work closely with you to create the space right for your unique needs.

What to Expect

When you visit Scottsdale interior design stores, lighting designers will work closely with you to obtain an idea of what you are after. They should offer everything you need to make your home exactly what you like.

For example, you should be able to ask about hanging lights, including the styles available, materials, and overall dimensions. They should be able to inform you that glass pendant lights can be an exceptional tool for adding light to a very specific area, such as a counter-top. They can also work well over a small table or desk.

How They Can Help

An expert lighting design team should be able to help you compare ceiling fixtures capable of offering the right amount of light for the specific area they will be placed in. They should be able to work with you to create a whole home lighting fixture scheme for your brand-new home.

Premier Lighting

When you are ready to find out what the interior design stores in Scottsdale, AZ can offer you, come visit our team at Premier Lighting. We are happy to work with you to determine what your needs are, what your goals might be, and how to move your project forward.

Come in to learn more about what we can offer you including one-on-one advice about what is best for your home, your ideas, and even the latest trends.

Concerns about light’s pernicious health effects are spreading as widely as the use of LEDs. You can buy software that prevents your computer from emitting blue light, and the lighting industry has worked hard to achieve warm, halogen-like hues. Blue-light hazard from solid-state lighting has been a concern of the occupational health industry since the disco era. It’s said to cause retinal reactions including inflammation, lesions, and cell death. Phototoxic response is speculated to be at its peak at 440 nanometers, but studies have produced scant evidence that LED lighting harms the eyes.

Research Behind Blue-Light Hazard

Blue light suppresses melatonin, the chemical that helps you to sleep at night. This effect can be devastating because it doesn’t only dictate your wakefulness cycles, but your organ function, too. This neurological hazard is so destructive that NASA is creating light-exposure schedules for its astronauts. Neuroscientist George Brainard links blue light exposure to depression, dementia, and eating disorders. While most of the chatter around shortwave light relates to eye damage, the most compelling studies are more consistent with Dr Brainard’s work. Delays in slow wave activity are seen after only half an hour of shortwave exposure.

The AMA Weighs In

The American Medical Association released a warning about blue-light hazard in 2013, and the Lighting Research Center’s recent study that suggests that LEDs don’t increase blue-light hazard risk. The AMA still advocates for color temperatures of 3000 K and above.

The entire truth about shortwave light will emerge in time. For the moment, appropriate light modulation that encourages circadian rhythm is certainly indicated. For people who suffer from migraines or seizures, warmer LEDs could help to prevent symptoms. Warm whites add a layer of ambiance, so if your health doesn’t win, your stylistic whims probably will.

Whether you’re designing for health, luxury, or both, Premier Lighting has got everything you need. Check out their site or show rooms around the valley.

If you think you’ve seen lighting at its most exquisite in NASA’s famous photographs of galaxies far, far away, you’ve probably not seen the work of Yayoi Kusama. The Japanese artist was born in the Roaring Twenties to a world dominated by psychedelic palettes. When the Swinging Sixties arrived, she’d developed a taste for environmental installations, the most famous of which is called “Infinity Mirrors.”

Lighting Up the Imagination

Kusama’s work was strongly influenced by the hallucinations of flashing lights she experienced in childhood. Her 1966 installations tried to echo the exquisiteness of her imagination using mirrors and lights, but her 2013 work, The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, achieved a level of beauty that even Mother Nature would struggle to compete with.

Kusama developed her work so far beyond the exceptional in the 21st century partly thanks to the magic of LED lighting. The finishing touches were achieved with the addition of metal, panels, water, and acrylic balls, and the effects are startling. Installations already come with the power of three-dimensional space, but with the right design, a room can be made to look as though it goes on forever. The Infinity Room does precisely this. If you experienced it, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re floating in space.

Lighting as Art

Kusama could inspire even the most skilled interior decorator. She’s proven how much power and versatility LED technology has, so her art has influenced designers all over the world. It’s no surprise that irregularly suspended lights and mirrors are now so trendy in the décor industry. Today, infinity mirrors are one of the most effective ways to add spaciousness and ambiance to a room.

You can see Kusama’s Firefly Room right here in Phoenix. Her work is also displayed in Washington, DC and Los Angeles.
With Premier Lighting, you can turn your own home into an art piece.

Lighting is décor’s latest superhero, capable of changing mood, affecting health, and improving productivity. Tunable white lighting is causing a revolution in the design world. It mimics natural patterns, adjusting its hue and brightness throughout the day so that visual comfort is always at its best. It’s become a preferred option for home lighting designers, but it’s equally useful for lighting architectural details.

How it Works

Standard LEDs arrive at their hue by mixing red, green, and blue. Tunable white lighting instead blends color temperature and light output to produce a range of different white lights. Basic tunable products use cross-dimming to blend warm and cool light, placing LED stripes next to one another and fitting a diffuser. More advanced options use multiple small LED chips to mix color, which means you can get away with smaller fittings. This is wonderful for layering task and ambient lighting.

Color and Channels

Not all tunable white LEDs are efficient enough to affect your health. Fewer channels cost less, but render color inaccurately. Five-channel versions deliver hue much more precisely, but you need advanced controls to obtain real benefits.

Dimming to Your Liking

Manual controls are typically operated with a wall panel, which requires you to change your hue to your taste throughout the day. Others dim via a filament source so that light output is muted while hue is changed. This way, your brightness range can be as subtle as you want it to be. Alternatively, sophisticated programmed controls designed to change your circadian rhythms operate themselves.

Today’s lighting world is no longer concerned with style and practicality alone. LEDs can dial up the moods of shoppers, keep workers more comfortable and alert, and affect residents’ sleep patterns. If you are designing for your home, Premier Lighting provides state-of-the-art lighting fixtures, style, and installation.

When trying to sell and market your home, photographing lighting features can be a nuisance. Light and darkness are two of the most annoying stones in photographers’ metaphorical shoes. They have the power to obliterate your photograph or transform it into a work of art. The challenge isn’t created by the light itself, but its excessive contrast, so all the tools that work towards a fantastic shot involve dragging that divergence down.

Flash

Your flash will bring hidden objects out of the shadows, but it will also dim the radiance of light. Keeping your flash off will make light your focal point, but if you’re an advanced photographer, you can have the best of both worlds. A manual flash with a handheld meter lets you control exposure. A TTL flash will nudge you towards the right exposure, after which you can adjust to suit your position and angles.

ISO

Your ISO setting influences light sensitivity. The higher it is, the more sensitive it will be, so experiment with levels of around 100 to 400 during the day and over 400 at night. ISO affects shutter speed, so you’ll need to find the right exposure. An external flash will let you gain more light here. Low ISOs will increase your color range and saturation, so use an external flash to minimize contrast at night.

Using Two Exposures

This is where your most inspired photographs will happen because blending exposures can create incredible results for night shots of lights. It’ll not only give you absolute control over your results, but introduce some fascinating possibilities when you overlay images. By refining exposure for each light source, you get to enjoy the best of every light level in your picture.

Photoshop can help you to correct botched pictures, but getting the settings right at the time of the click is the only way to produce truly stirring results.

Need lighting fixtures to boost your home’s residential worth? Contact Premier Lighting for products that will impress any potential home buyer.

The U.S. Department of Energy is driving a campaign to “ditch the switch.” The addition of simple vacancy sensors can reduce your power usage by 30%. That’s not all your light switch can achieve for your utility bills in today’s innovative environment.

Dimmers

Dimmers are the dinosaurs of the lighting industry, but they still pack plenty of punch. They improve the atmosphere of a room in seconds at a negligible investment. They’re only suited to incandescent and LED lights—compact fluorescent lamps are equally efficient regardless of whether or not you have a dimmer, and their lifespan is shortened by this kind of switch. LEDs are exceptionally efficient, but dimmers push savings to new heights. Today’s dimmers can even control an array of lights on a single circuit.

Motion Sensors

Motion sensors are as good for your pocket as they are for your security. They ensure that risky pathways are always lit when in use, and they discourage burglars. Motion sensors use less power than photosensor HID security lights. Since the latter take 10 minutes to light, they make sloppy security features.

The Multi-Tasking Approach

If one solution works, two are even better, and today’s market is heaving with switches that do more than one job at once. Occupancy sensing wall switches with dual voltages and infrared are perfect solutions for our tendency of forgetting to turn off lights when we leave a room. They’re budget-friendly, too. An off-timer does the job at an even lower price.

A power efficient light switch will earn its investment price back within mere months, and the long-term savings are especially apparent in multifamily buildings. Switching your switches can bring savings of 60%, freeing your budget for other amenities your residents will appreciate.
Any questions on the products mentioned above? Contact the experts at Premier Lighting for all your lighting inquiries.

Light can energize you, soothe your ragged edges, and deepen your sleep, but today’s bulbs are considerably more talented than that.
Philips’ Hue White will connect with your phone, respond to a range of platforms, and alter its tone intelligently. General Electric’s offering brings your home or building rich tones from white to cyan and blue. Hue tap and motion sensors can be automated to connect with smart home systems and even react to your voice. Both products climbed onto PC Mag’s highest rated products, along with models you can schedule, adjust for dispersal distance, and connect to a virtual assistant.

Unsurprisingly, Philips and General Electric made it to the top of the list, but Cree made the grade with its connected bulb, which functions via Wi-Fi, mobile phone, or a hub. The proprietary connection tool simply plugs into your outlet and comes with an app you can pick up from most devices. This is simplicity at its most elegant, and its affordability makes it an excellent entry level option.

LIFX was also rated well with its Color 1000 model, which connects with Alexa and other cyber assistants. Many consider this the premium smart bulb, but it also comes with a premium price. That said, it has enough bells and whistles to keep gadget fans happy, along with the best color changer on the market. It has a full range of whites for evening and work requirements.

At the bottom of the list is Ikea’s Tradfri, which also carries the heaviest price. MiPow Playbulb and Philips Hue White Ambiance are also in the top 10. These two models are best for those who want to achieve ambiance with the help of a wide range of hues.
Smart bulbs are here to stay, and play an important role in any residence designed with automated lighting.

As industry leading technologies become industry standards, Premier Lighting will continue to stay ahead of the curve. Interested in smart bulbs or other lighting for your home? Check out our site today.

Landscaping is more responsive to lighting than any interior. Well-placed illumination can bring magic and mystique to your gardens and exterior architecture, but it must also work harder to boost safety and security than any other lights in your home.

Floodlights, well lights, and other LEDs with a wide spread should form your first layer. Begin by identifying landscaping areas that pose security risks such as windows and entrances. Motion sensor lights can support these areas and work well on pathways.

Accents

Spotlights and accent lighting can turn an ordinary tree or fire pit into a mystical design feature while simultaneously keeping pathways safely lit. Remember that a hundred focal points are as useful as no focal points, so be stingy with the features you decide to highlight. Architectural details can be enlivened with recessed spotlights, which will safely accent stairs and other uneven land while adding vibrancy to the landscape.

Pathways and Unification

Lighting should draw the eye seamlessly across a scene, and pathways are the perfect tool for this. Path lights are a romantic way to add form to your landscape while simultaneously improving security.

Glare is as much of a security risk as darkness. Visitors must be able to move without losing visibility to over-enthusiastic floodlighting. One of the ways you can overcome light pollution while keeping your exterior well lit is by lighting outward with bulbs set into your architecture. Deck and step lights will accent stairs and hardscaping to keep guests safe as they enter your building.

Form should follow function, a tenet that applies as much to your lighting as any other part of your décor, so begin with practical considerations. Once you’ve taken care of your functional lighting needs, the aesthetics of your landscape will be much easier to refine.

Premier Lighting wants to keep you and your family safe. Contact us to begin work on your outdoor security lights.