Room Planner

It is a colour map of how much light lands on each part of the floor. Blue areas are dim, green is comfortable for most living spaces, and yellow to orange is bright working light. It lets you see the dark corners before you buy anything, which is the part a shopping list of fittings can never show you.

Start with the shape. Draw walls lets you click corners out freehand on a metre grid, hold shift for straight runs, and click back on the first corner to close. Or take the rectangle or L shape preset and drag the corners, click a wall midpoint to add a corner, double click one to remove it. Then pick a fitting from the panel, it follows your pointer and drops where you click, or press auto to lay a grid that hits your target lux. Add furniture from the other tab so the layout reads in real proportions.

Yes, for anything tall enough to matter. A wardrobe, fridge, shower or storage rack stands above the 0.8m working plane, so it casts a shadow and the map dims behind it. Its own footprint is greyed out, because the top of a wardrobe is not floor you walk on and counting it would flatter the average. Low items like beds, sofas and coffee tables sit below the plane, so they are drawn for layout but do not block light.

It works out the direct light from each fitting using the inverse square and cosine laws, with a beam angle per fitting type, then allows for what the walls absorb and for dust and ageing over time. That puts it in line with the lumen method used in our Room Lux Calculator, so the two tools should broadly agree. Treat it as a good working estimate rather than a certified figure. Pale walls read brighter than this, dark walls dimmer.

It compares the darkest spot to the average. A room can hit its average lux target and still feel badly lit if the light sits in pools with gaps between them. Anything below about 0.4 usually looks patchy. The fix is normally more fittings of a smaller size rather than fewer bright ones.

It works out how many fittings the room needs for your target, lays them in an even grid, and then checks each position against your furniture. Anything that would land on top of a wardrobe, a rack or a fridge gets nudged to the nearest clear spot, because a downlight over a wardrobe lights the top of the wardrobe and nothing else. If there is no clear spot nearby it drops that fitting rather than waste it.

Use it to plan and to sanity check a quotation before you commit. It will tell you quickly if a proposed layout is going to leave you short. For the final layout, especially anything commercial or industrial, send it to us and we will go through it with you. We do this every day and there are things a sketch does not catch.