Problem with lightbulbs I ordered to brighten up dark space...

3 years ago

I ordered lightbulbs that are 4000k to brighten up our kitchen and dining room. They are way too bright in the dining room chandelier as there are about 16 bulbs on the chandelier. Is it as simple as going down to 3000k?

The bulbs I ordered for my pendant lights and chandelier in the kitchen look great but there is a major problem. As soon as I place the final lightbulb in either spot, all of the lights go out and just have a flicker in the bottom of the bulb. Are these defective bulbs or am I doing something wrong? Please help! We really want to brighten up our kitchen. Thanks!

Featured Answer

cawaps

3 years ago

last modified: 3 years ago

To clarify what JuneKnow wrote, lamp brightness (light output is measured in lumens). With old-school incandescents, a 25 W bulb was about 200 lumens, 40 W was about 450 lumens, 60W was about 800 lumens, 75 W was about 1100 lumens, 100W was about 1600 lumens. With 16 lamps in the fixture, you probably want relatively low lumens per lamp, probably 200 or lower. 200 will give 3200 lumens for the fixture, which is like two old-school 100W incandescents. Depending on the size of your room, that sounds totally appropriate (you can look up articles about illuminance levels for different types of spaces; here is one article, you want to look for optimal lumens per square foot, aka footcandles). If instead, you chose lamps that were 800 lumens per lamp, then you have a total of 12,800 lumens. Which is an insane amount of lumens from one fixture.

Kelvin (K) measures color temperature, which is how warm or cool the light appears and has nothing to do with brightness.

CRI, or color rendering index, is another important number, and measures how well the light produced by the lamp reveals the colors of things it illuminates. Incandescent lamps were uniformly good at this, but fluorescents, CFLs, HID, and LED lamps all have varying degrees of performance. For example, and LED lamp might not put out a lot of light at certain wavelengths in the yellow spectrum, which would distort certain colors compared to daylight. CRI is on a scale of 1 to 100. Anything under 80 is flat out unacceptable, and I try to find lamps with CRIs over 90.

Watts, of course, measures electricity use. With old-school incandescent, watts correlated with light output (lumens) so we were sloppy and talked about lamp watts as if they measured brightness. And we got away with it for most of a century because incandescents were pretty much all there were. Now everybody is trying to learn a new lighting language that seems really complicated because with new technology there are far more CRI and color temperature options than there were before, and we need to use unfamiliar metrics for actual brightness instead of sloppy metrics for electricity consumption.

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Comments (13)

User
3 years ago
Color temperature is not lumens. Or CRI.
Tanya Shelly thanked User
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Sammy
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Are the lights in the dining room too bright or too cool/blue? If the former, decrease the wattage or install a dimmer switch. If the latter, try a warmer color temperature, like 2700K, 3000K, etc. As far as the flickering goes, are the new bulbs LED?
cawaps
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Sorry, I work in energy efficiency and use lumens per watt all the time (you want more, not less). I meant lumens per lamp. I'm going to go back to my post and edit.
Tanya Shelly
Original Author
3 years ago
Thanks everyone! I did buy LED and the dining room is insanely bright even on the lowest dimmer setting. Think an outdoor spotlight on a football field brightness lol. I think I have a better idea of what I need to get.

Could the lights turning off be caused by bulbs with too high lumens? I only paid attention to wattage when I bought them. The lights in the kitchen do not seem too bright so I don't understand why they turn off when the final light is installed.
wdccruise
3 years ago
"They are way too bright in the dining room chandelier..."

Buy a dimmer if the lamp isn't controlled by one. If you know the bulb manufacturer and model, you can often find compatible dimmers on the manufacturer's website. The 1000bulbs.com website also has links to compatible dimmers for many bulbs it sells. If you want to just buy and try a dimmer, I've had recent good luck with the Lutron DVCL-153P.

"As soon as I place the final light bulb in either spot, all of the lights go out..."

Are the light controlled by a dimmer? If the new bulbs are LED, you must be sure the dimmer supports them.
maddielee
3 years ago
When we switched to LEDs we found we had to change our dimmer switch. For some reason our old dimmer would not work correctly with the new lights.
Olychick
3 years ago
Yes, some bulbs don't work with dimmers - or at least with all dimmers.
Tanya Shelly
Original Author
3 years ago
Thank you all so much. It must be the dimmers. They were installed in 2005. We are staging the house to sell it so now we need to decide if it’s worth replacing them. What a bummer!
lucky998877
3 years ago
A $30 LED dimmer will do the trick. I noticed the same thing when I was trying to use an older dimmer switch, As long as I had a regular light bulb among the LEDs everything worked. As soon as I switch the last light bulb to LED, nothing but flickering.
Tanya Shelly thanked lucky998877
cawaps
3 years ago
last modified: 3 years ago
Do you know what the wattage is for each lamp? I wonder if the "last lamp" problem is one of total wattage. Normally I would expect that to trip a breaker, but maybe you are overloading your dimmer switch or something. Even with LEDs, 16 lamps adds up to a fair amount of wattage, especially if you bought brighter/higher wattage lamps.
Tanya Shelly thanked cawaps
wdccruise
3 years ago
"now we need to decide if it’s worth replacing them."

The Lutron DVCL-153P is less than $30 and you can install it yourself. You can even buy a pair and save a few bucks.
Tanya Shelly thanked wdccruise
mtvhike
3 years ago
Cawaps is correct in that lumen is the measure of brightness. But most LEDs have an "incandescent equivalent" listed on the package. Look at that number and compare it with lumens to see how efficient your lights are.
Tanya Shelly thanked mtvhike

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