LED room lighting (again)

[Jurek]

I've just bought 3 x 4w LED MR16s to replace the 50w halogen bulbs in the uplighters in my front room.
I can't say that I'm over-impressed, but then again, I wasn't with the amount of light the halogens were chucking out.

[arvid]

In November I bought a 4x50W halogen frame and immediately replaced the halogens with those really expensive Philips LEDs. The color is fine, but I will notice some flickering now and then. Probably just the 50Hz of the mains. This can be annoying while reading a book.

[Bledlow]

And there lies my gripe with so called "energy efficient" bulbs.    If I walk into a room, turn on light, find what I'm looking for and leave, then I'm using just a few seconds of energy.   If I want to protect my CFL and so leave it on all night so as to not "misuse them", I'm burning more energy then by having proper bulbs that are getting trickier to buy.

But how often do you walk into a room, look around for a few minutes, then leave? Are you really doing it often enough to break the lights in weeks? I find that hard to imagine. How many rooms do you have that you enter frequently but briefly? I can't see how anyone would do enough walking into & out of rooms for a minute or two to break CFLs quickly. Most of the rooms in my house are occupied in relatively solid blocks or time, so it makes sense to leave the light on, or it's off. I believe this is quite normal. Neither I nor Mrs B spends much time dashing from room to room. Yes, one of us sometimes wants to fetch something from a dark room. Fine - light on & off. But that doesn't add up to lots of cycles per light per day.

I don't leave my CFLs on all night. The bathroom light, especially, gets switched on & off fairly frequently.   It tends to get left on at times when the bathroom is experiencing heavy traffic, such as early morning & last thing before going to bed, but otherwise it's on & off when needed. It lasts for years, just like all the others.

[rogerzilla]

40% failure rate in 22 months now.  Chinese shite.  The last one failed and the replacement fell apart as soon as I took it out of the box.

As John Ruskin said:

There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money -- that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot -- it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.

Except that everything is Chinese shite now.

[David Martin]

The early cheap LED lights were crap. The ones in the kitchen are now pushing 12 months minimum with no failures (11 lamps from various manufacturers)
Just bought some for the new bathroom fittings.

[rogerzilla]

Average life of anything not made by Philips - no failures there -seems to be 12 months and can be as little as zero (i.e. the thing falls apart when you remove it from the box).  The old halogen MR16 lamps ran for TEN YEARS without a single lamp failure.

The LEDs have cost way in excess of the electricity savings.  The technology is fine but the hucksters and con artists in China have flooded the market with shite.

Now that Philips have started making MR16 LED lamps I will have to start replacing with those; I can buy 10 no-name LEDs for 1/5 of the price but they will only last a few weeks - they really are that bad.

[Polar Bear]

We're just about to replace an ageing Ikea 4x20w, 12v fitting with a track, 4 heads and 4 led gu10 bulbs.   Philips bulbs from the local high street specialist lighting purveyor with a receipt so that early failure can be addressed.

The existing Ikea fitting has literally started to crumble. 

[CAMRAMan]

I recently bought 4 gu10 lamps from LIDL. They are impressive with regard to the brightness and colour they put out. I'll report back on longevity later. Much later, hopefully. 4 for £18.

[Biggsy]

Update on the corncob LED bulb I mentioned before: only one of the several I bought and use failed.  The rest are still fine after a year or so.  These are not spot lights, they have multiple LEDs in a corncob style arrangement.  The "Day White" ones are pretty close in colour to real daylight.

[ian]

We've been replacing halogen spots with LEDs for the past couple years (mostly just waiting for the halogens to pop). I keep meaning to just replace the lot of them (but there are loads of them and it involves ladders and cranky fittings that make me swear, and – oh – I'm lazy). I think a mix of Philips and Ikea. Anyhow, they've been fine and not one of the LEDs has failed.

[Pickled Onion]

I was a fairly early adopter of LED GU10s starting with a batch of 10 about four years ago, we now have approx 40. The early ones were disappointing in output and colour, but the latest ones are excellent, better than halogens. Five of the earliest batch have been replaced, all the others are going fine.

We have them all on for 8+ hours six days a week so the saving in electricity is about 600 pounds a year, out of a total layout of around 450 pounds (they were all bought at around the 10 pound mark). So on electricity alone they are a substantial saving, that does not include replacement halogens which used to be a weekly job to replace one or two that had blown. That's probably 3 or 400 quid over the four years (assuming 1000-2000 hour bulbs) not to mention the time and hassle of replacing.

[fuaran]

Could do with a bit more light in the kitchen. Any recommendations for under-cabinet lighting?
Maybe some kind of LED strip light?

[jsabine]

Fluo strips are cheap and proven technology - the only thing to note is that there are umpteen different sizes of T5 tube (the skinny ones that the fittings will use) so make sure you know the exact replacements you will need in 3 or 6 or 10 years. Avoid incandescent tubes like the plague - high power consumption, short life.

Point light sources (halogens, LED spots, even the mini CFLs my parents have) can give pools of light with much darker patches between - I'd almost always go for strips to illuminate a work surface. You'd probably want cool white rather than warm white or daylight tubes.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Has anybody seen these LED imitations of filament bulbs from Panasonic?
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/spUH9FyCTh8&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/spUH9FyCTh8&rel=1</a>
Apart from the definitely GlobalEnglish in which it is written and spoken, I'm unsure if it's merely designed to appeal to the retro-grouch (fixie hipster?  ) brigade or if it is a good idea?

[Dibdib]

Thanks for the tips. Next time I'm in IKEA I'll be picking up a handful to replace the SIX 50w halogens in my kitchen.

Also going full-steam on getting rid of filament bulbs around the house. I've got the upstairs done, with just 32w of bulbs up there, but downstairs has a ton of old 60w/100w filaments and so a long shopping list

[Canardly]

What are people using in bathroom zones 1 and 2?

[jsabine]

Fittings with an appropriate IP rating.

Either that or a good dose of hope.

[CAMRAMan]

LIDL are flogging Philips LED bulbs at 2 for £14 next Monday in my local store (Warwick). Otherwise £8 each.

[rogerzilla]

LIDL are flogging Philips LED bulbs at 2 for £14 next Monday in my local store (Warwick). Otherwise £8 each.

The 9 or 9.5W GLS-style ones are extremely good - claimed 40W equivalent but more like 60W in a pendent fitting because most of the light goes downwards.

[fossil]

I was a fairly early adopter of LED GU10s starting with a batch of 10 about four years ago, we now have approx 40. The early ones were disappointing in output and colour, but the latest ones are excellent, better than halogens. Five of the earliest batch have been replaced, all the others are going fine.

We have them all on for 8+ hours six days a week so the saving in electricity is about 600 pounds a year, out of a total layout of around 450 pounds (they were all bought at around the 10 pound mark). So on electricity alone they are a substantial saving, that does not include replacement halogens which used to be a weekly job to replace one or two that had blown. That's probably 3 or 400 quid over the four years (assuming 1000-2000 hour bulbs) not to mention the time and hassle of replacing.

 What make / model GU10's are you using Mr onion ?

[Pickled Onion]

I've tended to buy from ultraleds as they always seem to have the best quality/price point at any time. The latest ones I bought were
these U10WWCOB

[LEE]

The rooms we use most are now entirely LED or Compact Flourescent.  The CFLs are "mood lighting" really as they still take too long to come on and don't give out much light.

I get my LEDs from LED Hut.

I have 6 downlighter LEDs in our most commonly used room plus a couple of LED "globe" bulbs in table lamps.  If I switch them all on I'd be using 32 Watts but usually it's either the downlighters (utility lighting) at 18 Watts or the two table lamps (mood) at 14 Watts.

I replaced 10 x 50W spot lights (GU10) in my kitchen with 3W LEDs.  I never turned them on before, I couldn't bear to think of 500 Watts burning away.  Now it's 30 Watts and the lighting is nicer if anything.  I have a few "tubes" under cupboards and 2 pendant lamps running 7 Watt LED "globe" bulbs.

I'm really happy with the lighting and now I can max out my two most used rooms for under 100 Watts.

Oh yes, my Home office I'm in right now has a ceiling spotlight running 3 x 3W GU LEDs and a desk light running a 7W LED globe.  So there's another 16W running all day.  I think it's perfectly possible to stay below 100 watts for you entire lighting needs at any one time (assuming you switch lights on/off as you need them).  That's 5 rooms with 20Watts burning.  That's 6 x 3W LED bulbs in each room...that's a lot of light and equivalent to just one old 100W filament..

Yes they are expensive but to me it's worth it for two reasons:

1) We both work from home and lights stay on a lot of the day (all day in Winter) so it probably makes economic sense (never checked)

2) I don't need to run around the house, like Hodges from Dad's Army, any more, shouting "turn that light out", because the light in question is probably 7 Watts.

[Feline]

I'm very happy with my LED kitchen spotlight replacements for the 50w GU10's x8. They've now been in about a year with no failures. I used to replace a halogen bulb at least once a month between the 8 fittings. The light is less yellow/mellow than it was but we soon got used to it. A previous LED I had tried was very blue so had to be relocated.

I think they are a bargain for £5.59
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006UR5IUY/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[JJ]

We have a mix of CFL and LEDs around the place.  The LEDS seem to be a better replacement for halogen spots simply because of shape and size, but they also have the advantage over ageing CFLs of coming up to full brightness instantly, rather than needing a few minutes to warm up.  Compared with halogen, I love that I can reach up and direct the spot where I want it without using oven-gloves!

In another house that we use, which is off the grid, I put in a tiny solar setup.  It uses an inverter and 220V so that we can still switch back to the generator.  The LEDs are noticeably more efficient than CFL at eking out the battery, and respond better to switching on and off as we move round the house, which adds to the gain.

[Ian H]

By chance we discovered an advantage of LEDs. Our kitchen is LED. During the last power cut there must have been some residual current flow. All lights and power went off, except the LEDs which were a little dimmer, but not much.