Effective Lumen
The specification in lumens describes the luminous flux of a light. With LED lights, a distinction is often made between theoretical and effective luminous flux.
The theoretical luminous flux is derived from the specifications of the installed LEDs under defined operating conditions. It therefore does not directly describe the luminous flux that actually emanates from the fully assembled light.
What are effective lumens?
Effective lumens refer to the luminous flux actually emitted by the complete light. This takes into account the losses that occur within the light. Such losses can, for example, be caused by reflectors, lenses or diffusers, as well as by the actual operating conditions of the LEDs.
The effective luminous flux is therefore generally lower than the theoretical luminous flux of the installed light sources.
Theoretical and effective lumens
A theoretical lumen value is of limited use when assessing the actual light output of a complete light. For a more practical comparison, the effective luminous flux is more meaningful. However, even the effective lumen value on its own does not indicate how well a specific area is illuminated. What is crucial here is how the light distributes its luminous flux spatially.
Two work lights with the same effective luminous flux can therefore produce significantly different illumination results due to different beam patterns.
The illuminance actually falling on a surface is expressed in lux and can, for example, be illustrated in an lighting diagram.
Specification by J.Führ
For our lights, we specify the effective luminous flux – where relevant measurement data is available. This allows for a better assessment of the actual amount of light emitted by the complete light than is possible based solely on the theoretical lumen values of the installed LEDs.