No, I’m not after a new light for Priti Patel!

The lighting in my home office is pretty dim (single pendant) I think its giving me eye strain as more and more of the working day is in darkness (NE Scotland) so no ambient light coming in.

Does anyone have any suggestions on…
– what I should do (wrt to lighting) to minimise eye stain? (obv take more screen breaks)
– A wired solution into the ceiling, I was thinking I could get a spur put in from the pendant rose/do away with the pendant and route cables to multiple panels that gave a more diffuse light. would be happy doing this on the room side of the ceiling, it’s a functional room!
– a lamp solution

Any other thoughts/comments on this welcomed. I’ve heard lots of others at work complaining of similar eyestrain problems, maybe just too much ‘working from home’ (in before someone shares that sketch).

I struggled with this and switched over to a higher wattage and 4000k day light bulb. Replaces the ‘warm white’ yellowish with white. Big difference, can’t believe I didn’t know about this before.

https://www.screwfix.com/p/lap-bc-gls-led-light-bulb-806lm-9-5w-5-pack/5894t

I fitted one of these LED light panels in place of a pretty crap standard light fitting in my ‘home office’ (AKA the spare bedroom) and it’s made a real difference.

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/floalt-led-light-panel-dimmable-white-spectrum-90436314/

You can adjust the lighting temperature (so white during the day, warmer in the evening) and sync it up with other wirelessly-controlled lights or just use it as a standard light via the wall switch.

Can get a multi ceiling rose thing and have a few lights from it. Nice coloured cable and make a feature of it eg https://www.notonthehighstreet.com/quirk/product/plain-bright-coloured-lampshades-25-colours

Else add some table or floor lamps. If you use hue bulbs and a remote it’s easy to turn them all on and off at once.

Hue colour bulb for me! Allows me to vary the colour from reading, relax to concentrate.

What has also really helped me is having glasses which slightly filter out the blue light. They seem to have a slight pink tint to them and really helped with eye strain. (might not help if you don’t wear glasses!)

I’m embracing the ‘cave’ option and have a light that sits on top of the monitor. It casts a light downwards towards the keyboard, so no reflections on the screen either. It even is dimmable and has a choice of warm/neutral/cool colour balance too. Combined with the screen changing colour temperature as the sun sets it’s actually really nice.

It’s not actually a BenQ one but it’s very similar to this: https://www.reviewgeek.com/4820/benq-screenbar-review-the-perfect-computer-desk-lamp/