If you’ve reached this guide on home office lighting, then I am assuming you’ve read our guide on perfecting your desktop lighting. In that article, we give some general tips on how to ensure the lighting on your desk is balanced and ergonomic. In this article, I intend to dive deeper and give more ideas on how to improve the ambient light as well as the overall look and feel of your home office. If you need help putting together your office, read our ultimate guide on home office setups. Anyways, Let’s get started, shall we?
1 – You need a monitor lamp.
If you don’t know what a monitor lamp or monitor light bar is, I can quickly explain it. It’s basically a light bar that sits ontop of your monitor like in the following picture, to help you save space on your desk but also to light up your desk with the appropriate colour temperature. Why is colour temperature of the light important? If you get too much blue light when you work during the night, it will affect your sleep and also your productivity for the next day. The lightbar is also designed to focus light on your desk rather than the monitor – ensuring that there is no glare if you’re sitting front on with the monitor.
There are two monitor lights that we generally rate as the top selection.
The Xiaomi Monitor Light bar
Coming in at roughly $70 USD. Overall one of the highest performing monitor lights for its price. Built with aluminium and comes with a wireless control dial that adds to the aesthetics of your table. Full brightness and colour temperature control are also included. We go in-depth with a video review linked below. You can find it on Banggoods or at ELGNT who ship globally.
The BenQ Screen Bar
The cost of the BenQ screen bar is more expensive coming in at $109 USD but packs a few more features that are quite average in terms of performance. It comes with an auto-dimming function which has been said to cause the light to be brighter when the room is dark than what people preferred. Other than that, the build quality of this monitor light bar is superior and BenQ has certainly taken care of it in a thoughtful manner. It looks good but most importantly it’s functional. Just to note that this monitor lamp was one of the first lights to be introduced specifically for home office lighting. This light bar can be found on Amazon US. see below.
2 – Have some natural lighting but not too much.
Whilst everyone would love to have a skylight and be sitting next to a window that is absolutely massive, in reality thats not really what people are able to do. The following image is probably a singularity of perfection when it comes to home office lighting.
Whilst we encourage this sort of lighting through skylights and you end up looking much nicer on your online zoom conferences, it’s kinda unrealistic in that no everyone is going to be in a location with a perfect skylight sitting over your desk. In reality, it’s probably going to be closer to the image below
You want some light coming from the window, but the most important part is to make sure your monitor is NOT facing the window, because when the light is coming in during the day, it will most likely cause glare and would require your monitor to be extremely bright to ensure that the glare is not blinding you. This is an even bigger issue when your window is facing the sun during the sunset, as the sunlight will just end up blinding you.
3- Create a balanced combination of ambient lighting.
For your home office lighting, I generally like to recommend you looking into some floor lamps fitted with Smart lamps because then you can also control the colour temperature of the lamps. On top of that you may also want to look into having some backlighting for your desk and monitor, both of these options can contribute adequately to your home office lighting.
Having the light behind the monitor like the following setup will also help brighten your video feed during your video calls.
For the floor lamp, I would consider looking at the IKEA range and their lighting options because it’s sometimes cheap but rather stylish. I say sometimes because IKEA doesn’t always dish out the cheapest goods especailly when it comes to electronics. Off Amazon, I’ve got a few ideas to get you started.
This one comes with some storage and also a powerboard to provide you with some extra functionality
These next two come with some pretty nice designs but more importantly, it gives the light enough elevation to ambiently light up your table.
In terms of backlighting your desk, these are what other’s have done
The best value option for the backlighting your home office:
The highest quality backlighting with the best features:
I would recommend going with what your budget allows. To install these, you would just need to stick them onto the back edge of your table top. Prior to sticking it on, make sure that the back edge is clean to ensure good adhesion from the LED light strips.
I hope these tips have give you some insight into setting up lighting for your home office. Home office lighting is very important and I would urge you to invest in some good lights as it will improve your productivity but also your health, especially during these times of pandemic.
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