Lux Meter App Review, & The Danger Of Using An App For Lighting Audits

13 years Scott Cooney 5 Comments
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.

On an energy efficiency kick and want to do a lighting audit? Think you’re set because you just found an awesome new app on your smartphone to help you do it? Maybe not….

I’m in the midst of gathering together some top products for helping to improve the energy efficiency of your home. I found the Android app “Lux Meter” and thought it would make the whole lighting audit process even simpler and easier. But, you know, you have to check these things.

I went ahead and compared the app to a professional light meter. The downloaded app is absolutely terrible, and anyone using it to adjust the lighting in their work/life environment will end up using about 6x too much light.

Image Credit: Scott Cooney / Important Media
Image Credit: Scott Cooney / Important Media (click to enlarge it)

The pic above isn’t excellent, but you can see that the app is showing almost no light (0 foot candles), compared to 97 lux (or about 8-9 foot candles) on the professional meter.

In other words, stick with the professional light meter!

I haven’t run across other such apps, but if you know of any that you think are more accurate, I’d be happy to check it (or them) out. Drop us a note!

Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Advertisement
 
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 10–15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

CleanTechnica's Comment Policy

Scott Cooney

Scott Cooney (LinkedIn) is a serial eco-entrepreneur focused on making the world a better place for all its residents. Scott is the founder of CleanTechnica and was just smart enough to hire someone smarter than him to run it. He then started Pono Home, a service that greens homes, which has performed efficiency retrofits on more than 20,000 homes and small businesses, reducing carbon pollution by more than 27 million pounds a year and saving customers more than $6.3 million a year on their utilities. Scott wanted to contribute to native ownership of the clean energy revolution, so he gifted Pono Home to a long tenured employee with native Hawaiian roots for just the liquidation value, turning down a mainland company interested in purchasing the company. In a previous life, Scott was an adjunct professor of Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, a consultant at Saatchi & Saatchi S, where he worked with a team to educate and empower millions of employees to live healthier and more sustainably. He is the author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill) , and Green Living Ideas. Scott is an occasional investor, currently he has investments in Rivian (RIVN).

Scott Cooney has 191 posts and counting. See all posts by Scott Cooney