Recessed lights that fill room with light

Hi,

I have a slight contradiction of goals which I am hoping to resolve.

I would like to have recessed lights that are as inconspicuous as possible yet fill the room with nice soft light.

Do there exist recessed lights that are small (3" or 4"), yet do what I want them to do?

Many thanks in advance,

Aaron

Reply to
Aaron Fude
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I would consider incandescent light as "soft", and in a four inch fixture, the largest lamp you'll get is 65 watt BR30. IMO, you'd need an impractical number of these to "fill" the room, and still be inconspicuous, unless it's a pretty small room

Reply to
RBM

The softness of a light source is a function of its size relative to what it is illuminating. Lights 3-4" will always emit light that is "hard" in relation to people (flies, no if they are close to the light; people, yes). You can use many of them to get *even* light over a given area but unless they are ganged very close together the light will still be hard (sharp shadow edges, specular reflections).

To get "nice soft light" you need reflected light, preferably big. Fluorescents are often used for your purpose by blocking frontal and downward light in some manner thereby illuminating the entire ceiling (which needs to be white or a very light neutral color). If the area you want to illuminate is smallish and has fairly high ceilings you could use "eyeball" incandescents directed at the upper walls to get a similar effect.

Again if you have high ceilings, you could use regular cans but with large diffusers below them to get a similar effect.

Reply to
dadiOH

Halo makes a 3" can, but it is much more expensive than a 6" can. When you go smaller the spread of light is smaller and to get even illumination you need to install more cans which will fill up a ceiling. In order to get a decent amount of light with the smaller cans you must use halogen bulbs which tend to be a hard light.

If you want to be inconspicuous I would suggest that you use a 6" can and adjust the socket so that the bulb is recessed up inside the fixture. Don't buy the contractor packs that you see at Home Depot as they provide trims that limit your choices.

Reply to
John Grabowski

How about using floor mounted lights shinning onto the ceiling?

Reply to
jmeehan

Consider tubular fluorescent cove lighting around the room perimeter reflecting off the white ceiling.

Reply to
Pete C.

One of the biggest mistakes that I made was putting recessed lights in my home. I have over 100, 4 or 5 inch recessed incandescent lights through out our house and find that they are useless unless we're directly under them. They don't fill the room with light.

Boden

Reply to
Boden

I would recommend checking their adjustments. Recessed lights have an adjustment for the lamp socket position, which if it's set too far back greatly reduces the beam width of the light emitted. Move the socket position lower and you can get a much better beam spread while still keeping the lamp out of regular view.

Reply to
Pete C.

Not all recessed fixtures have adjustable sockets. For those that don't, you can buy ceramic socket extensions to bring the lamp nearer to the plane of the ceiling

Reply to
RBM

There were recessed lights in the kitchen when we bought the house, and it was always dark, even in broad daylight with no overhead cabinets and 6 large windows. The first thing we did was remove those lights and replace with track lighting. What a difference!

Reply to
h

These are Lightolier fixtures and they don't have any adjustment capability. I have even put one, and then two socket extenders in to lower the lamps but they still dont work as well as a hanging light. I guess nothing beats isotropy.

Boden

Reply to
Boden

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