The basic types of lighting for your home include general lighting, task lighting, and accent lighting. You want to utilize these types of lights in different areas of your home in order to effectively perform the different tasks you need to around the house.

Putting the correct lighting in the right place will make your home more efficient and brighter. Here are the three basic types of lighting you need for your home, as well as their purposes:

General lighting

Otherwise known as ambient lighting, general lighting includes lights that generally illuminate an entire room and replace light from the sun. These lights are generally diffused, offering you with a comfortable degree of brightness such that you can move in and about the room easily. Below are some types of common lighting fixtures.

Sconces

These wall-mounted fixtures are great for illuminating areas like bathrooms and bedrooms.

Uplight installations. This type of light projects upward to the ceiling, where it spreads light to make the room more illuminated. Designs like 'Upward facing chandeliers' are examples for such models.

Architectural lights These are architectural lighting fixtures with several functions, such as diffusing light in the room with valance lights placed behind a valance.

Task lighting

Task lighting is best to provide lighting for specific household activities, like eating, cooking, reading, sewing, and other tasks. Here are some of the most prevalent kinds of task lighting fixture:

Pendants. These light fixtures are most often seen in people's dining rooms hanging from the ceiling, providing additional lighting for eating and preparing food.

Lamps. Lights are usually used for studying. Either tables or floor lamps are available for you to use.

Sconces. If you need a light to help you perform a specific task (e.g. applying make-up at your bathroom mirror) a sconce light is a good type of fixture to use.

Accent lighting

Accent lighting is a special type of lighting arrangement that makes drama by focusing on a particular object in a room, like framed artwork, sculpture, and other decorations. To give them a more dramatic look it can be focussed on certain parts of the room like on walls or windows. You garden and its elements can look more impressive with accent lighting, especially around a grotto or pond. To make your accent lights more effective, they should be much brighter than the general lighting in the room. These are used for accent lighting as common fixtures:

Provide an area where lighting fixtures can be displayed. To accentuate any painting, sculpture and other decor usually small spotlights are mounted on walls or on tables.

An attractive addition to any home would be recessed lighting fixtures. These ceiling mounted fixtures illuminate a particular object in the room. Should you decide to rearrange, recessed lighting fixtures are equipped with adjustable eyeballs to move their focus.

Fixtures for track lighting. You may use this type of lighting instead of standard display or recessed lighting. They use halogen or fluorescent lamps to spotlight art, decorative wall frames or sculpture.

You might want to consider LED step lights. These lights, also known as aisle or pathway lights, are particularly useful to dramatically light pathways in your garden. These lights also look great on hallways or in stairwells as night lights.

Also there are beautiful types of lighting fixtures available in most home furnishing stores that can functions as lights one or more ways. Architectural lighting fixtures, for instance, can also serve as decorative lights in addition to providing your room with ambient lighting.