A traditional light bulb isn’t bright or energy-efficient and doesn’t have extra capabilities. If you need these features, an LED bulb might suit your needs. Whether you’re looking for maximum brightness in the darker rooms of your home or want a light source that can be programmed to dim according to your schedule, we’ve found the best LED lights for long-term use, offering warm white, cool white and even multiple colors.
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So how do you choose the right LED lights for the job, especially with so many energy-efficient LED bulbs lining the shelves? The answer depends on how much time you use the light in a particular room. For example, if you’re a foodie who spends most downtime in the kitchen, you’ll need a brighter, more intense light. Or maybe you wind down and relax in your bedroom, where more intimate, warm lighting is key. With these thoughts in mind, you’ll be able to narrow down the options for your lighting needs.
If you’re still unsure of what to pick, here are some room-specific tips to help you zero in on the right LED lights for your living space. I’ve also included links so you can easily buy the light bulbs from our tests. I’ll keep them updated as I test new products.
If you have high ceilings, you’ll want floodlights that shine nice and bright in a single direction.
Chris Monroe/CNETLots of height? Make it super bright
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If you have rooms with high ceilings or recessed lighting — an entryway, for instance, or maybe a staircase with overhead lights or a candelabra up above — you’ll want to prioritize brightness over softness in your light bulbs. After all, the higher up your light bulbs are, the brighter they’ll need to be in order to light up the room.
The most common products for overhead lighting are BR30-shaped floodlights. The “BR” stands for “bulging reflector,” and it means that the light inside the bulb sits above a reflective bowl, sort of like a little satellite dish. Screw a bulb like that up into your ceiling, and that bowl will catch all of the upward cast light, then reflect it back down and out the bottom, which bulges outward to produce the widest possible pool of bright light across the room. It’s the same trick your car’s headlights use to produce as much light output as possible out in front of you as you drive.
You’ve got plenty of energy saving BR30-shaped LED options in the lighting aisle. The most common choice among them are 65-watt replacement bulbs that typically put out about 650 lumens of light each. That’s a good, average number, and fine for average-height ceilings with at least a few bulbs shining overhead. Among the ones I’ve tested, 65-watt replacement floodlights from Cree and Philips are the two I’d recommend. They’re good values and they’re highly energy efficient for the money (each draws less than 10 watts). These dimmable bulbs also work well with dimmer switches and — most important for overhead lighting — they’re both nice and bright, each putting out comfortably more than 700 lumens. As of writing this, Home Depot has those Cree bulbs on sale in a two-pack for less than $6 each — they’re the ones I’d go with in my own home if it were me buying.
Watch this: Coolest alternative smart light fixtures
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Dimmability means versatility for your living room and bedroom
Some rooms serve just one or two basic functions, but other rooms get used in all sorts of ways. For instance, you might use your living room for watching TV, reading books, playing board games with the kids, or any other number of activities. Rooms like that can really benefit from quality lights that can adapt to whatever’s going on.
The old-fashioned way to do it is to use a mix of different lamps and fixtures that serve different purposes — a reading lamp beside your favorite armchair, overhead lights for board game night, everything off when you’re watching a movie, and so on. That’s all well and good, but it limits you to a binary, “on/off” lighting mentality.
The better approach? Give yourself a full spectrum of lighting possibilities by making sure all of those lights are dimmable.
Upgrading your light switches to dimmer switches is one way to do it (and not nearly as intimidating as you might be thinking if you’ve never switched one out before). There are also smart plugs from brands like Lutron that’ll let you dim your fixtures and lamps up and down. The easiest way, however, is simply to replace your bulbs with dimmable smart bulbs. It’s a great time to do it — costs have come way down in recent years, and the advent of voice controls has given people a quick, easy way to jump to whatever dimmer setting they like, whenever they like.
Best of all, just about every smart bulb on the market is dimmable without flickering or buzzing, eliminating a common headache that comes with an in-wall dimmer switch. That also makes smart bulbs quality picks for bedrooms, where strong dimming performance and things like prescheduled wake-up fades can do wonders for your mood in the morning.
