A Few Ways to Know if Lighting in Your Office is Right or Too Dim
If you are employed in an office, store or workshop for normal times, i.e., nine to five every weekday, you are expending about a fourth of your life there. And because whatever your job may be you have to use your vision all the while, the illumination in your shop should concern you. With incorrect lighting you could lose your vision quicker than typical or your work suffers. This holds correct in all kinds of workplaces, be it a pi kappa alpha shop of special items, a basement carpentry space, or a dental office design to quieted down tense patients.
Insufficient lighting overworks the eyes; everyone grants that. It can often produces inaccurate work performance, or lower efficiency. Wrong lighting does almost the same, altering the atmosphere of the space and its people at the same time, which is the why rooms of various purposes use different lighting systems. A few have subdued reddish ambience, others may lean to blue, and some will not use any source other than natural light, such as artist ateliers. Yet, it extends way beyond that simple division.
Lighting is determined by several means, among them lumens, CRI, foot candles and, erstwhile, candlepower. Lumen is the quantity of light emitted by a light source. Color rendition index (CRI) is the measurement of color acuity of an eye (and therefore not readily quantifiable). Foot candle is how much light reaches an object, based on one lumen per square foot. Candle power is naturally how much light is emitted by a source as contrasted to one lighted candle. It is analogous to horsepower in internal combustion engines.
Additionally, all lights have coloration, from ultraviolet of longer wavelengths labeled often as cool, to white which is warm. Warmer lighting usually has elevated hotness and better lighting, but uses more energy to produce it. High efficiency lamps may skimp on energy and therefore emit less bright lighting. This kind is not appropriate for areas that require good lighting, such as factories or machine shops, apart from non-work spaces like corridors. Certain work places require universal lighting so ceiling lighting should be supplemented with area specific lighting methods. Thin beam flood lights should be very good for such requirements.
Bright sunlight creates light at around 5,000 foot candles (fc) at around ground level. If cloudy, lighting will range around 2,000 fc, and indirectly lighted space on a bright day should have 200-500 fc, just the right amount for easy work. On man-made lighting, the higher the lumens the higher the foot-candle there is and the better lighting will be at your work area. While this might, on paper, cost relatively more than high efficiency lighting designs, it would be more than made up for by employee efficiency that advances good business.
It is thus crucial to compute the foot-candle lighting that is at the work level in the workplace, store or office to the right levels, so that worker efficiency will be at optimum. Lighting up the place where they use up a fourth of their lives should, in the final analysis, redound to the advantage of your business. And worker efficiency is what business is much concerned on.