It's happened to all budding interior decorators: you paint a room a blooming shade of orange or a just-so tone of blue, stand back and admire your handiwork… then flick the lights on. In the cold, hard light of chandeliers, lamps and spotlights, the colour and mood of a room can change abruptly as the sun goes down.

And for many years consumers have underestimated how sympathetic LED lighting can be to the colours in your room. As interior design guru Jo Hamilton decries, LED lighting has long been thought of as cold or surgically precise - or worse, too weak to make an impact - but in light of a number of leaps and bounds in the technology, LED lighting can actually be the perfect accompaniment in your newly decorated home.

"I often talk about the impact lighting has on colour," says Jo. "There are blue-based lights and yellow-based lights. LEDS, for the most part, give us a blue-based light. Natural light is blue-based, and halogen lighting, as with the spotlights you can get, is actually blue-based as well.

"It's much more akin to natural daylight, meaning the colour rendering is much better," Jo continues.

And what's more, the running costs of LED light bulbs are a lot cheaper than traditional incandescents, using an average of 2 to 3kW per hour. It's something that could be especially useful for homeowners after research from Go Compare found that the latest Energy Bill introduced by the government runs the risk of leaving a number of homes unable to afford light.

"The government is banking on alternative energy sources, such as solar, becoming more attractive in years to come," said Go Compare's Jeremy Cryer. "But in the meantime there are warnings of higher fuel bills to fund the investment in clean energy required for future generations."