Fluorescent Lighting
Fluorescent lighting can look good if chosen and installed well. But the all too common choice of a bare bulbed butt ugly glowstart fitting in the centre of the room with a tube chosen at random is a recipe for unpleasant lighting.
Good fluorescent lighting needs the following points:
1 Hidden fittings & hidden bulb.
2 Uplighting
3 comfortable light level.
4 No flicker and flash
5 A tube of respectable quality. I like 3500K tubes, there are several good types to choose from, but there are also many unpleasant or poor quality types of tube on the market.
6 Spare tubes of a size that makes keeping a spare practical.
For 1 & 2 - use trough fittings.
For 3 - Choose around a quarter the power you would use with filament bulbs.
For 4 - An electronic ballast fitting avoids all the flicker and flash of cheap glowstart fittings.
For 5 - see the next section
For 6 - 2 foot tubes are easiest to store, 4' are next best. I would not normally recommend larger tubes for domestic use.
Fluorescent tube types
There are many different versions of white, ranging from excellent quality to dire. Buying tubes at random can give you unsatisfactory lighting. Tubes are normally marked with their colour on on the glass at one end. Many shop assistants are unaware that there are different versions of white, or that the tubes are thus marked.
Tubes marked simply as 'white' are not of the best quality, though not the worst. I can recommend 2700K and 3500K tubes, but I don't recommend higher colour temperature tubes for household use.
2700K is the colour of GLS filament bulbs, so it matches perfectly with traditional filament lighting. 2700K is a warm slightly yellowy white.
3000K is the colour of halogen bulbs, cleaner and crisper than 2700K. Some 3000K tubes don't have good CRI*, so if you want 3000K to match halogen its best to pick the more expensive triphosphor tubes rather than halophosphates.
3500K will not match other light sources, unless they're also 3500K fluorescent, but used alone they give a clean fresh and slightly cool look. These are my favourite halophosphate tubes for domestic lighting.
4000K look cold and anaemic, and 4500K and up are like the old fashioned 'cool white' tubes that once gave fluorescent lighting such a bad reputation. There are also proprietary numbering systems, such as the Philips system.
'Cool white' and 'daylight' are ill suited to domestic use.
- CRI = colour rendering index, a measurement of how well fluorescent tubes render colour. 100 is perfect, 50 is pretty grim. Triphosphor tubes have higher CRI than halophosphate and cost more.