At In360light, one of the primary selling points is the output of our LED work lights. Our largest work light is listed at 20,000 lumens. That's a lot of lumens, a light bulb might be 100 lumens. Well, just what does that mean? We used to measure light bulbs by how many watts they were. LED's have changed all that. They are so efficient they don't have any where close to the wattage the traditional bulbs had Many manufacturers post on their packaging a comparison such as "This bulb is equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb".
Now the big term is "lumen". Every bulb you buy always has the lumen output on the carton along with the color, which is a topic for another time. What's the actual definition of lumen? A lumen is a unit of luminous flux. It is a unit of a solid angle by a point source of one candle intensity. Oh, OK got it? Now what's that mean? Basically it's just a measure of how bright the light is. When you look on the side of the light bulb box it will list the brightness in lumens. It could be just 25 lumens or it could be 10,000 lumens.
How many lumens you require should be based on just what you need the light for. Do you need directed light for doing fine detail work like soldering a connection, or do you need it for painting a garage?
You can find all kinds of nifty charts for calculating what you need online, There are no hard and fast formulas that fit all lights. Kitchens require a different amount of light than a living room might need. The charts you can find will specify just what the lighting application would be appropriate for. All area work lighting it's a bit more difficult to calculate. Do you want enough light to read by or just enough light so you don't trip over things? Most of the bigger all area lights can mostly be found based on 1,000 lumen increments. For instance you may find lights of 1,000, 5,000 or even 100,000 lumens.
A simple rule of thumb that a least gets you in the ball park for all area 360 degree lighting would be take the square footage of what you want to light up and multiply that by a factor of 20-30. That would give you a rough idea of how many lumens you may need, That two car garage you want to paint this weekend is about 400-500 square feet. Based on that our 20,000 lumen Impact LED work light would easily light up the area. After you're done painting you can take that same light outside, set it up in the driveway, and let junior shoot hoops at night. Or better yet, set the light up on your deck, and grill some steaks to reward yourself for a job well done.