Special Rooms-Kitchen:
The biggest and most complex part of the lighting section of California’s Title 24 is with regard to kitchen lighting. You are allowed to use a combination of high and low efficacy fixtures in the kitchen because the state considers the visual requirements in the kitchen to be so much more complex than in the rest of the home.
You can use low efficacy fixtures (only in the kitchen) with a combined wattage not to exceed the combined wattage of high efficacy fixtures also in the kitchen. That means if you install 150 watts of high efficacy fluorescent lighting in the kitchen you are also allowed to install up to 150 watts of low efficacy incandescent, halogen, or low-voltage lighting.
Lighting built into cabinets is excluded because it has its own rules, but those built-ins must only light the inside of the cabinet. Lighting attached to the outside of the cabinets does not count as cabinet lighting, but must be included as part of the kitchen wattage calculation. The same goes if you have lighting inside your cabinet but it is designed to light surfaces outside of the cabinet. That is, you can’t install one of the low-voltage striplights that has little MR-16 attachments to point onto your counters to try to get around the kitchen wattage restrictions.
The high efficacy and low efficacy lighting in the kitchen must be controlled separately. (Actually, that is true everywhere, but since you can’t use low efficacy fixtures unless they are dimmed the distinction is a little pointless. You can’t combine different source types on a dimmer, so you couldn’t dim both incandescent and fluorescent fixtures on one control. I guess the only way to mix would be if all of them were on a vacancy sensor, but you shouldn’t be mixing fixture types in any room in which you want to use vacancy sensors anyway.)
To calculate the wattage of the low efficacy fixtures you must use the highest wattage allowed by the fixture. That means you can’t “save” by putting a smaller light bulb in the fixture, say a 60 watt bulb in a fixture that can take up to 100 watts. If you are using low-voltage fixtures you have to use the input wattage of the transformer, which is most likely going to be higher than the wattage of the lamp or lamps.
If you want to use track lighting in your kitchen there are a number of different ways to calculate the wattage against your allowance, but the easiest is just to use 45 watts per foot of track, unless the actual lamping is greater. Yep, a three foot section of track over your island counts as 135 watts, even if you just put two dinky 20 watt pendants on the track. If instead you put three 75 watt incandescent lamps you would have to use the higher combined wattage of 225.
The state has also figured you might try to get around the restriction by running your wiring to boxes and then not hooking up any fixture until after the inspection is complete. So each electrical box either covered by a blank plate or where there isn’t any electrical equipment hooked up counts as 180 watts of low efficacy power toward your allotment. Actually, this is often done innocently when you are going to install a ceiling fan but it hasn’t been picked out yet. The electrician runs the wires to a box that will someday support the fan for you, but he may be done and off the job before the final fan selection is made if you are going to install the fan yourself.
Finally, if you have a kitchen that seamlessly merges into your breakfast nook or any other room you have to be careful with the control wiring. If it looks like a single room the nook will be counted as part of the kitchen unless the lights are controlled by different switches/dimmers/whatever.
Other rooms:
The restrictions for bathrooms, attached and detached garages, laundry rooms,closets, and utility rooms are tighter than for the rest of the home. All the fixtures in all of these rooms must be high efficacy. There are only two exceptions: one, you can use permanently installed low efficacy fixtures if the control is a vacancy sensor; or two, if the closet is less than 70 square feet you can have permanently installed low efficacy fixtures without a vacancy sensor.
Notably missing from the exceptions for these rooms is the exception for using dimmers. As a personal point, I am sorry this is the case since I think that it is pretty important to dim the lights in the bathroom. See my post on dimmers in the bathroom for the reasons why. And if you have dimmed incandescent or halogen fixtures throughout your home I think it is poor design to use dimmed fluorescent in the bathroom.
