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Missing daylight?
This time of year in our Northern climes, we all seem to feel the absence of light. Especially if we can’t spend much time outside during the daylight hours. In Jackson Hole, the sun rises just before 8 a.m., and sunset is just after 5. So if we’re working, we’re missing some valuable light. For those with Seasonal Affective Disorder, the lack of light can be especially hard.
According to the EPA, Americans spend 90% of their time indoors. Whether it’s due to work or climate or simply lifestyle, for many of us, the way we live works against our natural need for natural light. Sunlight boosts vitamin D, which builds immunity and helps absorb calcium. Sunlight also lifts our moods and increases energy levels. Getting enough daylight can also improve the quality of our sleep.
Fortunately, smart home lighting solutions offer lighting and shading innovations to support and even create natural lighting to help us in these long winter months. The ground-breaking “human centric lighting” philosophy offers design concepts to enhance our health, well-being, comfort, and productivity. Human centric lighting – also called circadian lighting – uses tunable light-emitting diode (LED) fixtures which mimic sunlight. Tunable LEDs also employ correlated color temperatures.
Savant, a whole home automation platform we often recommend for our clients, employs a variety of human centric lighting options, with pre-set scenes that can be programmed specifically to meet the homeowners' needs throughout the year.
As one of our favorite and most trusted lighting platforms, Lutron provides our clients with HXL – a broad approach to human centric lighting that uses four elements of lighting design to support the mental, emotional, and physical health and well-being.
Lutron’s quality light offers consistent color and high fidelity with high performance dimming, tunable white, dynamic color and compatibility with many fixtures. Ketra natural light mimics daylight indoors, shifting color temperature and intensity throughout the day, using a full-color spectrum to support vibrancy and mood. This system gives perfectly-calibrated light focused precisely where our clients want it, when they need it most. Lutron’s tunable white lighting control solutions allow our clients to use lighting to designate and create dynamic spaces throughout their home, which can change and evolve as needed. The high-performance white light gives a smooth, continuous dimming capability down to 0.1%.
Lutron also makes the most of natural daylight with automated, motorized, and manually controlled shades of high-quality fabric. Working together with Ketra light, this system of lighting and shading creates the natural feel of daylight inside, all winter long.
To learn more about how your health and well-being can benefit from a smart home human centric lighting system, call us at Jackson Hole AV. We’d love to discuss the possibilities.
