Lighting is an essential part of any commercial kitchen design.
Good lighting can improve safety, enhance aesthetics, and make tasks easier to complete. This blog post will discuss the importance of lighting in a kitchen and how you can find the right balance of style and functionality with your fixtures.
Why Lighting is Important in the Kitchen
Kitchen lighting plays an essential role in both safety and productivity.
Proper lighting makes it easier to see what you’re doing when preparing food or performing other tasks in the kitchen. Poorly lit spaces can also lead to slips, trips, falls, and other injuries that could have been prevented with better visibility.
Appropriate lighting makes it easier to perform everyday kitchen tasks safely and efficiently.
Safety Considerations for Kitchen Lighting
When selecting lights for a kitchen space, it’s essential to prioritise safety first.
Investing in shatterproof lamps is one way to reduce the risk of injury due to broken glass or bulbs falling on someone while cooking or cleaning up after a meal. Additionally, warm temperatures (2700–3000 Kelvin) can help reduce eye strain and make you see clearly without straining your eyes too much when completing tasks like chopping vegetables or reading recipes off a laptop screen.
Aesthetic Considerations for Kitchen Lighting
Recessed lighting is often used as an easy-to-clean option for commercial kitchens because it doesn’t collect dust like traditional fixtures.
This type of light fixture also provides a subtle ambience that creates a pleasant atmosphere for guests who come into the space. Additionally, if you want more dramatic effects from your kitchen lights, you can opt for track lighting, which allows you to adjust individual heads so that you have more control over where the light falls on surfaces within the room.
The Need for Task Lighting in the Kitchen
Task lighting is essential for precision work, such as cutting vegetables or measuring out ingredients accurately when baking or cooking meals from scratch.
For this reason, investing in additional light sources explicitly designed for task-oriented activities is necessary to ensure everything is done correctly without having to strain your eyes too much while working on intricate projects within your commercial kitchen space.
Accent Lighting
This type of lighting provides several benefits in commercial kitchens.
For example, because it focuses on specific areas of the space, it can help draw attention to certain features or focal points that may have been missed otherwise. Accent lighting can make small spaces appear larger by emphasising their existing features without making them appear cluttered or cramped.
It can also add depth and dimension to any room by emphasising shadows and creating exciting shapes. Accent lighting can reduce energy costs since it only uses low light levels instead of flooding an entire area with bright overhead lights.
This makes it particularly useful in large kitchens, where having multiple overhead lights running throughout the day could quickly add up to energy bills.
Keeping Cool with Low Heat Emitting Options
When selecting lights for a commercial kitchen space, it’s important to remember that some fixtures emit more heat than others—especially those made from metal materials rather than plastic ones, which don’t conduct heat as quickly as metal does when exposed to the high temperatures generated by stoves and ovens.
Therefore, choosing appropriate fixtures that don’t cause too much heat output is key if you want to keep your kitchen cool during operation hours!
Natural Lighting
Natural lighting can be a great supplemental light source to offset the general illuminance created by artificial lights.
By allowing natural light into the workplace, kitchen staff experience an improved working environment, including reduced glare. When installing new commercial kitchen lighting, window and skylight placement should be considered.
Windows should account for at least 10% of the total wall area in the kitchen and should look out onto open space or the sky. Careful thought should also be given to how these sources of natural lighting will interact with artificial lights to create an adequate illumination level without creating undesirable effects such as glare.
Conclusion
When selecting kitchen lighting, it’s essential to consider the type of fixtures you choose, their light source, and their brightness level.
Depending on your budget and preferences, there are a variety of options available that can provide adequate illumination while still complementing the overall design aesthetic. If you want more information on our kitchen design services, please contact us for more details.
Thank you for taking the time to learn about your lighting options for commercial kitchen spaces!