Room survey and testing notes
One row per room, one row per fixture and lamp, a dated row for every test, and a safety check for each room. Seeded from your setup; everything you type stays in this browser.
Essential on a first pass: the rooms sheet, the testing notes and the safety check, for the first room only. On the fixtures sheet, How light works in a room asks only for one row per light source in the first room; the bulb columns wait for Bulbs, labels and color, and the bulb trial and an electrician's brief use them later. Survey and test your rooms teaches the survey and every test.
Rooms
One row per room you want to work on: what happens there, when, the windows, the surfaces and what bothers you. The status is your own judgment of how settled the room's problems are.
Fixtures and lamps
One row per fixture or lamp, with what the bulb says. Turn the light off and let the bulb cool before you take it out to read it. Leave a column blank rather than guess.
Testing notes
A dated row for every reading or test. Keep the device and the spot the same between a before and an after; the comparison is the result, not the number on its own.
Safety check
Walk each room and look; do not open anything. Tick an item when it is true for the room, and note the room and what you saw. An item with a warning sign means stop using it and call a licensed electrician.
How to use these sheets
- One row per room, per fixture, per test. A room row says what happens there and what bothers you. A fixture row is one lamp or one fixture; a fixture with two bulbs that differ gets one row per bulb. A test row is one reading or one test, dated, at one spot.
- Record, do not conclude. Reading, glare, shadow, flicker and color hold what you observed. Status holds your judgment: confirmed when you have seen it the same way twice, provisional after one look, unresolved when you are not sure what you saw.
- Same device, same spot, same time of day. A before and an after are comparable only when all three match. Write the spot in words someone else could find ("sofa arm, left end").
- Read the bulb with the light off and the bulb cool. Leave a column blank rather than guess; "not printed" is a useful note.
- The safety check is looking, not fixing. Do not open a plate, a canopy or a panel. A hot or discolored plate, buzzing, a burning smell, sparks, lights that flicker or dim when appliances start, or breakers that trip repeatedly: stop using it and call a licensed electrician. NFPA's educational messages list the same signs.
The example rows come from Marisol, a renter working on her living room (all readings invented). The fixtures rows show why her ceiling light looks two colors: one bulb is 2700 K and the other 5000 K. The test rows are three phone readings taken after dark on the same evening, marked provisional because a phone reading is an indicator, not a measurement, and "before" because nothing has changed yet. Her desk row records heavy shadow: the ceiling light is behind her.
These sheets record what you saw with the instrument you had. A phone reading can be off by tens of percent, a single reading is not a verdict, and none of the published light levels was written for one person in one home: compare your own before and after. The safety check does not assess wiring; a licensed electrician does, and anything warm, buzzing, discolored or tripping goes to one.