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Apps for the lighting enthusiast
If you are interested in lighting, and love doing all household light jobs yourself, you are in for a treat. There are mobile apps for this very purpose, and these apps come with some great features that you just cannot afford to miss. With the ever increasing consciousness on saving energy and creating lighting solutions that are energy efficient and that use up little space, making sure that your lighting job is energy efficient can be quite a trouble, if you don’t know where to begin. A energy efficient lighting job will consist of three basic steps – planning your room, selecting the right light bulbs, and keeping track of how it performs. We bring to you 4 pro lighting apps that will help you do just this, and in the process, will save a lot of your money.
Planning – The first step
We begin with planning out your energy efficient space. There are two main things to consider while doing this – the look of your lighting, and the energy that it is going to use. The looks matter especially since the lighting needs to be pleasant to look at, and with just the right amount of brightness. Too much or too little brightness will render the fixture useless both in functionality and aesthetics. One app that will help you out here is i3dOPlus, which lets you see how the output of the proposed lighting fixture will look like in the room. It visualizes your room just the way it is and displays the lighting output in graph form, thus giving you a very quick analysis and design of the lighting that you are thinking of installing. This is a very comprehensive app that is worth every cent of the $29.99 that it costs.
Customize every bit of your plan with this app!
While you are at it, if you have customized plans that you would like to see your lighting fixture in, you can use a pretty neat app called AutoCAD WS that lets you view, edit and share AutoCAD drawings with anyone, through the internet! The best part is that you don’t actually need an internet connection to work on the drawings. You can annotate, revise, edit, and do much more with the drawings, from anywhere in the world. Work offline and share when you are back online. A very handy app that is free and a must have on every lighting enthusiast’s collection.
Choosing the right bulbs
Well, moving on with the topic, once you’re done planning the output of the lighting, the next step is to choose the right bulbs to fix. Light Bulb Finder is one such app that gives you details of all the available light types, their energy usage, their impact on the environment and much more. You can specify the kinds of lights you want down to the tiniest detail, and the app lets you even purchase the lights through it once you have finalized the lights you need. You can select from the most efficient lights using this app, and also see how much you save when you use a particular type of light. This app is free and a must have.
Keep track of your handiwork!
Moving on to the final step, that is keeping track or monitoring your lighting installation, which is a very important step because it lets you know if the lights are working to your expectations or not. A very useful app here is the Venergy Advanced Metering System, which is also free. It monitors your energy efficient space’s lighting outputs, and also measures the energy being used by the installation. This app can track many installations, and is not just limited to a room. You can track your entire building or campus using this app, and it displays the energy consumption in real time on any display you run it on. This is a very useful app that helps save a lot of your money by being able to monitor exactly how much energy is being used and what can be done to make the lighting even more efficient.
Josie is a passionate blogger and works for a supplier of lighting tower technologies.
