Three costly lighting fails I wish I hadn’t committed

Nobody loves RGB lighting more than me. Watching that sea of changing colours just makes me happy. The thing is, my appetite for colourful lighting sometimes overrides my common sense, leading me to buy lights I don’t actually need. This article will be painful to write, because I’ll be fessing up about the lighting I regret splashing out on.

Just so we’re clear, this isn’t a product review (the lamps listed below are all good!) They simply don’t suit my particular room setup. For you, it might be a completely different story.

No room for a slim floor lamp

I’d wanted a tall, slim floor lamp capable of bathing a wall in different colours for ages. They always look gorgeous in photos. However, when I finally got my hands on the Smart Corner from Govee, I regretted buying it as soon as I took it out of the box. «Hmm, where am I actually gonna put this?» To really come into its own, the lamp needs to be positioned by a large, light-coloured wall.

Let’s face it, you want to see its pretty lighting effects as often as possible. The lamp’s got to be positioned somewhere you spend a lot of time, where it’s in your line of sight. It wouldn’t be worth putting it in a bedroom, for example. In my case, that leaves my home office, living room (complete with an armchair for reading and playing the Steam Deck) and conservatory (where I watch TV in the evenings) as options.

When I’m in my office, I spend most of my time staring at the screens in front of me. To the left of the desk, there’s a door. To the right, there’s a sloped ceiling. So a 140-centimetre-tall lamp wouldn’t fit. In my living room, every single wall’s already covered in shelves. None of the wall surfaces in that room are big enough. That leaves the conservatory, which is surrounded by windows on three sides. But it’s not the garden I want to light up, it’s a wall.

Basically, I didn’t need the lamp, but I thought it was too fabulous to return. It’s now positioned next to the TV, which has already claimed the wall as its own territory with its Ambilight technology. Yep, that was a bad buy.

No room for light bars

It’s a similar story with the two Govee Flow Plus light bars I bought for my workstation. They’re designed to beam colourful light onto the wall to the left and right of a screen. That being said, you can obviously position them elsewhere too – for example, on either side of a sofa. The nice thing about the two lights is that they work well together. For instance, they can create a colour gradient moving from one strip to the other.

However, that doesn’t work for my desk setup. There’s no space to the left and right of my monitors. Still, at least I can see the light above the screens. With my desk squeezed between the door and sloped ceiling, however, the whole setup comes off as jarring. The lighting simply emphasises how sad it looks.

I’m now so fed up with my workstation that I’m going to move it and paint the sloped ceiling a lighter colour. Hopefully that’ll help my light bars stand out more. I wrote about my current desk setup in more detail here:

No point in having three coloured spotlights

My home office has a ceiling spotlight with three spots pointing in different directions – a leftover from the people who used to own the house. Years ago, I fitted it with three White & Color Ambiance GU10 bulbs from Philips Hue.

The problem with the lamp’s three spotlights is that they don’t give off diffuse light like the lamps in mood photos do. Instead, the bulbs illuminate specific parts of the room – sometimes even to a dazzling degree. But even putting that to one side, buying the bulbs still wasn’t worth my while.

When I first got them, I was streaming on Twitch almost daily. The bulbs were supposed to create some atmospheric lighting for my camera background. However, a single bulb would’ve been enough to give me a colourful highlight from above. After all, I’d already decorated the walls visible in my stream camera with LED strips and other light-up objects.

If I’m not streaming, the three bulbs have even less use. When I’m working, I barely notice the space behind me, no matter how brightly coloured it is. And I don’t use the room for anything other than sitting at the computer. If colour’s a must (it is!), then a regular ceiling lamp with a single bulb is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other use for the GU10 bulbs, so I’m sticking with my unnecessary three-bulb setup.

When it comes to future lighting projects, I’ll consider more carefully whether the lamps are actually worthwhile. At least, that’s the plan…