wrote:
Hi

More about my basement level ...

Spent an afternoon at John Lewis looking at pendant lighting for the
basement bedroom. Nice stuff but alot of it hangs down 55 cms or more.
My ceiling's very low - 230 cm! The room is 5m x 4m and the light is
right in the middle of the room, just at the end of the bed.

Does anyone know of any guidelines or tips on how to choose a pendant
in this sort of situation? Or is the sort of thing like this

http://www.johnlewis.com/Electrical/...4/Product.aspx

totally the wrong way to go anyway in a low ceiling situation?

Lights pointing upwards? Downwards? My favourite has a minimum drop of
40 cms but this seems far too low but I don't know anything about this
stuff. Is it too low? I'm totally design blind! I'm just trying to make
the place look sensible.

Cheers

Emma


Did you get your door sorted out?

I've never heard almost 8' described as low before. 6', yes.

Leola will cause glare and uneven illumination. Most centre fittings in
a 4x5m room would give uneven ilumination. In a room that size I'd go
for a handful of smaller fittings around he periphery. If you arent
interested in wiring for those, either use plugins or else accept that
youre not going to get decent even illumination and fit whatever looks
nice in the middle. Lights pointing up and outwards are going to give
you the best light spread, down pointers will give worse lightspread
and lower energy efficiency.

Stay well away from mains halogens.

Also leola has an excessive number of lamps. To nmake that sensible
you'd have to fit lots of very low power lamps, giving frequent dead
bulbs, poor efficiency and elevated bills.

If youre daring you could fit something like metal guttering suspended
below the ceiling, running down the room, and put cfls in it at regular
intervals. Would give much better illumination than any central
fitting, but trying to make the fitting look good would be a fair
challenge. Perhaps cover it in velvet. I dunno!

Another push the boat out option is simply a central light with very
long arms. You could use chromed plumbing pipe giving 4 arms, perhaps
each 4 ft long, each running level 1' below the ceiling, with an
uplight on the end of each arm, globes or if youre more daring, maybe
cubes.

Fancy plumbing your own for something much better than you could buy?


NT