I had recently switched rooms in the basement for my office. It is important to have a place where I can spend an inhumane amount of time on Zoom calls as I work from home. Since the basement has no natural light, it means I must get the lighting just right to light up my face, not cast too many shadows, not reflect in my glasses, and not make me look any worse than I already do. Previously I had used some sconces I had made, but since my desk was now perpendicular to the wall, I did not have a wall to mount the sconces on.
I first experimented with replacing the four overhead can lights with smart bulbs to adjust the color temperature, brightness, and overall lighting pattern for the four lights. The lights directly over my head can create unflattering shadows on my face, so those are turned off during meetings. The lights in front of me overhead would then be turned on with warm light at full brightness. This setup proved to be insufficient and hit at the wrong angle.
I next ordered some key lights from Amazon. These mount directly to the desk and have multiple color temperatures. It even came with a remote. The problem is that every time you turn them on, you have to reset the color temperature and I found them to be entirely too bright. The remote also was finicky. I returned them.
The sconces I had used before were perfect, so I tried rigging them up on my monitor stand with a 1x2 and some zip ties. Trying this out for a day proved to be exactly what I needed.
I put some plans together for how I should construct this to be mounted directly to the desk and headed to the hardware store with measurements to explore my options.
The final result isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve built, but it does the job perfectly. The lights are mounted to a board that is in turn mounted to a galvanized pipe that seats over the top of the monitor stand. I did have to use a shin to help level it as the mounting point is off-center.
All of the lights in my office are controlled so I can have two modes.
Meeting mode:
- Turns off the corner lamp
- Turns off the two overhead pot lights closest to me
- Turns on the two overhead pot lights on the far side of the room
- Sets the pot lights to warm white and dims them to 1% brightness
- Turns on the mounted desk sconces
Focus mode:
- Turns off the mounted desk sconces
- Turns on the corner lamp
- Turns on all overhead pot lights
- Sets the pot lights to a green and dims them to 1% brightness
Total cost of the project was $80
- Two 18" x 1.5" black pipes = 2 x $15 = $30
- Four-pack Sylvania WiFi Smart lights (BR30) = $50