Choosing the Right Color TemperatureUpdated 5 days ago

Color temperature is measured in Kelvin. Lower numbers are warmer and more golden. Higher numbers are cooler and more blue-white.

For most rooms in a home

2700K–3000K, warm white. It's the comfortable, inviting range, and it suits living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, entryways, and decorative lighting.

What MOD LIGHTING ships

It depends on the fixture, so please check the product page before you order.

Indoor fixtures — chandeliers, pendants, and flush mounts — ship in warm white 3000K.

Many of our outdoor wall lights are adjustable. Haylen and Cadel, for example, offer three color temperatures —warm white 3000K, neutral white 4500K, and cool white 6000K — switchable from the remote that ships with the fixture.

Some fixtures let you choose the color temperature when you order. Harper, for example, comes in either warm white 3000K or cool white 6000K.

The color temperature, and whether it can be adjusted, is on every product page under Dimensions & Specs.

Keep a room consistent

Mixing 2700K and 4000K in one room is more noticeable than either one on its own. If you're adding a fixture to a room that already has lighting, match what's there.

Dimming

How a fixture dims depends on the fixture, and the two systems don’t mix. 

Remote dimming

Most of our adjustable outdoor wall lights, Haylen included, dim through the remote that comes in the box. They aren’t designed to run on a wall dimmer, so don’t buy one for these. If you need one wired to a wall dimmer, that’s a customization, and it’s a single color temperature only — contact us before you order.

Wall dimmers

Where a fixture is listed as dimmable on a wall dimmer, two things have to be right:

• The fixture has to be dimmable. It’s on the product page under Dimensions & Specs
• The dimmer has to match. Trailing-edge, sometimes labelled ELV, is the usual choice for LED fixtures. Leading-edge dimmers, sometimes labelled TRIAC, were designed for incandescent bulbs and often have a minimum load higher than an LED fixture draws, which is the most common cause of flickering or buzzing

If a fixture flickers on a wall dimmer, check the dimmer first — but check that the fixture was meant for a wall dimmer at all.