Different Brightness of Lighting Available

• Compact fluorescent bulbs use less energy than incandescents for similar brightness. Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images

  Watts are actually a measure of the energy used to create the light, not the brightness itself, but because incandescent lighting has been the standard for so long, many people think of brightness as comparable to wattage. With the introduction of compact fluorescent and LED lighting, wattage is becoming a less reliable measure of brightness, so check for lumens as well as watts when shopping for the right brightness of light for your home.

Dim Lights

• Night lights, decorative lamps and many appliances all cast dim light that is meant to illuminate a specific area. Night lights tend to use 4 or 7 watt light bulbs, while decorative lamps use 20 to 40 watt bulbs and appliances often fall into the 35 to 40 watt range. Compact fluorescent lighting (CFL) is not well developed in this area as of 2010, but many dim-range light fixtures are using LED technology to produce an equivalent brightness without using as much energy. LED night lights may use about 3 watts to produce the same brightness as a 45 watt incandescent light bulb. Different colors of LED will achieve different lumen outputs per watt of power used.

Household Brightness

• Standard household lighting ranges between 50 and 150 watts for incandescent light bulbs. Sixty watts is the standard for many fixtures, but 75, 100 and 150 watt bulbs are also readily available. Overhead fixtures may use two or more light bulbs of the same wattage to increase the available light. If you are using compact fluorescent bulbs, you may find them available in 900, 1100, 1200 and 1600 lumen models. The first two are roughly equivalent to 60 and 75 watt incandescent bulbs, while the third falls between a 75 and 100 watt incandescent and the fourth falls between a 100 and 150-watt incandescent.

Extra-bright Lighting

• Outdoor light and specialty light fixtures may use lamps that are far brighter than household bulbs. A T-3 quartz tube light, used for flood lighting outdoors and in some industrial interiors, features 5950-lumen brightness at 300 watts, while a 7200-lumen metal halide lamp only uses a third of that wattage for a significantly brighter output. By comparison, these are about six to nine times brighter than a standard household bulb. At the extreme end of the brightness spectrum, a 1000 watt high pressure sodium (HPS) light, used for plant nurseries and similar applications, puts out 140,000 lumens -- enough to trigger reactions in plants that are normally caused by the sun.