kitchen lighting

[Aragorn84]

Our kitchen currently has two bar style fittings with 4x50w halogen GU10s in each. They're useless and i want to fit some linear fluros instead.

I've found a fluro fitting which looks half decent and takes a pair of T5HO 39w lamps, but i'm trying to figure out if one of these will be better at lighting the room than the current set of 8 halogens, or if i'm going to need to get a pair of the fluro fittings?

General googling suggests the T5's will put out ~3000 lumens each, whereas the halogens are ~800lm, so it would seem that overall output is similar, however i'm not sure if one fluro in the centre of the ceiling will be enough to evenly light the whole kitchen?

The kitchen is 4.7m x 3m.

Any thoughts?

 

[pjcomp]

Your kitchen dimensions are similar to mine and a single 5ft fluorescent tube does fine at providing general ambient light. We also have lights under the wall units to provide a more direct working light on the worktops, plus a cooker hood with lights.

Whether you need anything more than the fluorescent will depend on how your kitchen is put together, windows and so forth - almost certainly at some point you'll be standing between the light source and the work area, but generally I would say a fluorescent's ambient light spread takes care of this where halogen spotlights (note the "spot" component) do not.

PJ