4 Tips for Maximizing Your Office Space Lighting

If you're renovating a commercial space to optimize it for your staff, it's essential that you pay the proper attention to your lighting and electrical needs. After all, the lighting in your workspace can have a significant effect on the well-being of your employees. For this reason, you should ensure that you have proper, balanced lighting with the help of a professional electrician.

Here's a look at some of the things you should know about your company's lighting and why it matters.

Change the Mood

Research indicates that the amount of light you are exposed to can directly affect your mood. The less light you're exposed to, the less serotonin your body produces. That means that you're likely to suffer from depression and poor moods when the light in your environment is poor. If you want to protect your employees from fatigue, migraine headaches, vision problems and poor moods, you should take some time to optimize the light both inside and outside your building.

Maximize the Natural Light

One of the things that your commercial electrician will tell you is that the more natural light you can channel into your building, the less power demand you're going to have during the day for artificial light. The best way to optimize this is by adding large skylights and big windows throughout the building. The more glass you have around the building, the better, particularly during peak daylight hours. This lets you focus natural sunlight in the building, which provides your staff with more vitamin D and mood-enhancing benefits.

Target and Focus the Task Lighting

If you've capitalized on the natural lighting in a sufficient manner, you'll have pretty reasonable ambient light for your daily business tasks and common areas. This doesn't always ensure enough light at each individual workstation, though. You'll want to be sure that each of your employees has task lighting focused for their work areas. A skilled electrician can help you wire LED lights for each of the workstations with an independent light control. That way, each employee has full control of their own lighting.

Soften the Supplemental Overhead Light

The natural sunlight won't be enough by itself in any building. Eventually, you're going to need light when it's dark outside. Talk with your electrician about the best overhead light fixtures to add soft lighting that won't hurt your staff's eyes. Fluorescent lighting can be harsh, so when you choose LED or full spectrum light instead, you'll have a good balance of light that isn't causing vision problems over the long run.

Just remember that you need to balance the light so that it isn't too soft. If you soften the artificial light too much, you're not going to have enough light. This will cause your employees to suffer vision strain from trying to compensate for low light. A commercial electrician can help you map out the best light placement ad direction to keep the lighting soft without creating dark spots that can interfere with your staff's productivity and vision.

Finding the right lighting for your commercial building is not always easy. When you want to maximize natural light, it means finding a balance between that sunlight and the artificial light that's intended as filler. The other thing to remember is that you'll need enough artificial lighting to compensate for dark, hazy or grey days. If you express your concerns to a commercial electrician, he or she can help you evaluate the way that the light flows through your building. Once the natural light path is determined, you can identify the spaces that are lacking to properly place the artificial lighting.