In this episode, John Maher speaks with Joe Malone, a master electrician with Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical, about indoor lighting solutions for various spaces. Joe covers the importance of customizing lighting based on functionality—task, ambiance, or aesthetic—and explains popular lighting styles like recessed, directional, and LED options. He highlights the benefits of energy-efficient LEDs, dimmer switches, and color-tunable lighting, as well as solutions for common lighting issues and recessed lighting limitations. For more details, visit Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical.
John Maher: Hi, I am John Maher and I’m here today with Joe Malone, master electrician with Cape Cod Heat Pumps and Electrical, an HVAC and electrical contractor in Marstons Mills, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, focused on detail quality and professionalism. Today, our topic is indoor lighting services. Welcome, Joe.
Joe Malone: Hey John.
Approaching Lighting Design for Indoor Spaces
Maher: So, Joe, how do you approach lighting design for various indoor spaces?
Malone: So, one of the big things is communication, just talking to the homeowners especially if it’s a married couple, both parties make sure everybody’s present. What are they looking to get out of it? Are they looking for task lighting, general area lighting? Are they looking for ambiance? Are they looking to make cooking easier?
So, it’s the layout of the house, it’s what’s in the house, but it all comes down to what are they trying to accomplish? What is the end customer looking to get out of adding lights? Because generally there was a reason why they’re looking to add it. Is it for aesthetics or is it for a task?
Styles of Indoor Lighting
Maher: What do you typically see in terms of different styles of lighting? You have recessed lighting that you might have anywhere in a house really, then lighting fixtures and chandeliers and things like that. What are some of the typical styles that you see?
Malone: Yeah, like you said, there’s such a wide spectrum now of different types of lighting you can do. One of the most popular ones now is recessed lighting. Fixtures are recessed into ceiling structure. There’s nothing protruding down to stick out. It lights up areas very well for tasks or general lighting. Then you get into decorative lighting, which can be anywhere from just a standard half round fixture that sticks down out of your ceiling to some elaborate, beautiful crystal chandelier that’s hanging in a 20-foot-tall foyer.
Under cabinet lighting in a kitchen to light up your countertop so you can see what you’re chopping vegetables. In cabinet lighting to show off some older collector dishes and teacups and different cool stuff like that. You can have trim lighting around LEDs in your kid’s room, so it looks cool when they’re doing the video game stuff. Studio lighting for everybody that’s doing all their livestreaming and gaming and everything. Garage, you finally want to have a couple of giant bright LED lights in there because it’s now a workshop. It’s not just where you store the cars. Basement lighting, so you can actually see going on where you’re putting things away.
Indoor Directional Lighting Options
Maher: Do you do a lot of directional lighting where you’re aiming almost like a spotlight at a specific place, whether it’s a kitchen counter or maybe a piece of artwork on a wall or something like that?
Malone: Yeah, it’s not as common as most folks seem to want to just generally light up a room instead of having to have lamps. They just want to add a few lights in the ceiling. But we do occasionally get the folks who are looking to spotlight a piece of artwork like you said, or they have a slope ceiling coming down a staircase and they want to be able to light up the stairs instead of just blinding you as you come down. So, you put in a directional light that you can actually turn and focus to the places where the lighting is needed to go.
Energy Efficient Indoor Lighting
Maher: What about energy efficiency? What types of energy efficient lighting is available now? What do you recommend?
Malone: So, the biggest thing nowadays is LED lights. LED lighting uses significantly less electricity than even the fluorescent lights of a few years ago. It gives a better quality of light, more consistent delivery of lights. So, you don’t have the flickering lights like you used to get with fluorescence. A lot of the problem with the energy efficient fluorescent lighting was you turn them on and they take a minute, two minutes to warm up and get up to full brightness.
LED light is you flip a switch and it’s just instantaneous bright light or as bright as you want it to be. LED is definitely the way to go. Standard halogen lighting or incandescent lighting is very inefficient. It does have its place for certain people with certain things, to each their own. LED lighting can be tuned and you can pick out the color that you want. It’s more of the bright blue for certain situations or a softer, almost yellow daylight type of color if you’re going for more of a relaxed look in a house.
Indoor LED Lighting Options
Maher: Yeah, I was going to say that I think when the LEDs first came out, you typically had that sort of bright blue type of light and a lot of people found that very harsh, but they’ve really come a long way where you can get different colored lights.
Malone: Yeah, actually a lot of the manufacturers have realized that for each situation there’s a different color flavor that people are looking to have. So, a lot of the different LED lighting that comes out now actually has a color selection switch on it. So, if you don’t know what color light you want in your house, you can install these lights and actually just change a switch on the back and it goes from being the super blue hospital operating room color down to anywhere in between. So, it can look like almost a standard incandescent light bulb.
Maher: Are those typically just switches with a few options or are they almost like a dimmer switch where you have a sliding scale of the light color?
Malone: It’s more of a selective switch where you’ll have 2,700K, that’s a warmer yellowy type of light. 3000, 3,500, 4,000, the typical residential side of things. Commercially, you get up into like a 5,000. That’s, like I said, it’s more of the blue hospital grade type of color.
LED Lights and Dimmer Switches
Maher: And one nice thing with LEDs as opposed to those compact fluorescents that you mentioned before is that you can install those with the dimming switches right? So, can you explain the benefits of using dimming switches and other types of maybe control systems that you’re installing now for lighting?
Malone: Yeah, absolutely. Dimmer switches are fantastic. I have every light in my house is on a dimmer and much to my wife’s chagrin, when I first installed them, she was very annoyed with the fact that there was dimmers everywhere. But within the first few months, everybody loves the dimmers because you can tune the room to where you want it to be.
First thing in the morning, you may not want to have full bright lights on in the house. You just want to kind of turn everything on at 10% brightness. So, it’s not a harsh light that’s hitting you in the eyes, but you can brighten up the room as you need it. So, you can just dim the switch up and all of a sudden now you have full brightness as opposed to just on or just off. It lets you select and customize how you want your room to look.
Maher: Do you typically install those with those switches that now have just a little slider that’s right next to the switch? Is that what’s typically used in those? Because you don’t even notice that the dimmer is part of the switch in those cases right?
Malone: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s one of the big manufacturers. A lot of the manufacturers going in that way. But the biggest one is Lutron. They’re the number one dimming brand. There’s like that where it looks like a standard switch. It blends in with every other switch that’s in your house. You don’t even really notice it until you get up to it. And there’s a little slider on the side of the actual switch itself. So you can still turn your light on and turn your light off, but on the side of it is a little selector switch that you can slide up and down to get to that level that you’re looking for.
Maher: So, you don’t have those big knobs anymore that you would like do a quick push button on and off and turn the dial or whatever that-
Malone: Well, you can still buy those if that’s what you’re looking for. If that’s what you want, we can absolutely get that for you. But nine out of 10 times, or I should say 99 of 100 times, you’re going to have the standard switch that has the little slider on the side.
Common Lighting Problems
Maher: Do you ever see any issues with lighting problems in a house that you might have to come in and diagnose the problem and repair or replace something?
Malone: Yeah, usually that’s a defective piece of equipment somewhere. Whether it’s a light bulb is bad and people just don’t realize that something has a light bulb in it or it’s like everything else, you make a million of something, there’s bound to be one of them that’s not 100% perfect all the time.
So, there may be a slightly defective LED light bulb. There might be an old fluorescent light bulb that people had no idea was fluorescent, and now it’s on a dimmer, so it will flicker and go crazy. A light fixture itself, its light is made by creating heat, especially on the older light bulbs. So, any connection point to that is going to have a little bit of a hot spot on it. And sometimes light sockets will wear out if you change the bulbs a lot, especially in a moist environment like a bathroom, sometimes you’ll have to change bulbs more often, ceiling like an exhaust fan in your bathroom, you’ll have to change bulbs because of the vibrating fan behind the light bulb will wear things out.
Recessed Lighting
Maher: And can anybody install recessed lighting if you wanted that in your living room or your den or your kitchen or wherever? Can most homes accommodate recessed lighting or are there some times when maybe you don’t have the space for it or something like that or you can’t get the wires to it? What are some of the issues that you encounter?
Malone: Yeah, there used to be recessed lights were these big cans like upside-down trash cans that went up in your ceiling and had to create a void and you had to have enough room in between the framing members in order to get this canister up in the ceiling that held the light bulb and all the wiring and all that. Fantastic brand-new things, they’re like wafer lights. They’re razor-thin and it’s the depth of the sheet rock or finished ceiling.
So, you drill a hole pretty much anywhere. And even if you land right underneath a piece of framing, most of the time you can actually put these razor lights there so you don’t have to move things around to accommodate things that are in the ceiling behind it. Now, the only time you really have to not put a light in a certain place is sometimes you’ll pop a hole in a ceiling and there’ll be a plumbing pipe there, a water pipe. You don’t really want to have a light right there. So, you then have to reconfigure where you are. But the overwhelming majority of homes now can accommodate these new wafer lights pretty much anywhere you want them.
Maher: And that’s because of the LED technology. It can be so small, right?
Malone: Yeah, because an LED is just a chip on an electronics computer, electronics board. Instead of being a giant light bulb that has to get screwed into a light socket, it’s just a chip that’s micrometers thin and goes into a housing that’s waterproof. You can even put these things in shower enclosures, and we put them in garages and all sorts of crazy places now.
Maher: That’s great. All right. Well that’s really great information, Joe. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Malone: Oh, thanks for having me.
Information About Cape Cod Heat Pumps
Maher: And for more information, you can visit the Cape Cod Heat Pumps website at cceatpumps.com or call (508) 833-HVAC. That’s (508) 833-4822.