Lighting Upgrade in the Kitchen
One of the things that we did really early on was dealing with the lighting. We had about 40 of these halogens downlights fitted in a gimbaled fitting (that is they had the ability to tilt). But they were all 100% flat on the ceiling, and there was an enormous gap around each. So there was lots of draught into the roof, lots of electrical energy used in the halogen lamps, and lots of ceiling insulation missing as well because you’ve got to leave a big spice around the hot lamps. We knew we need a lighting upgrade!
What did we do? We took the lamps out and took the centre out of each fitting. That just left the space that actually fits the hole in the ceiling, and then we installed 11-watt compact fluorescent lamps into that existing ring.
So that effectively sealed the draught, greatly reduced the electrical energy for lighting. And of course, we can fix up the ceiling installation pretty closely to these. The downside of that was compact fluorescents take about 30 seconds to come up to reasonable light and about a minute to come up to full light. That’s pretty irritating. We put up with that for a very long time because that’s all there was. But now there are these amazing LED downlights, and so we have replaced the compact fluorescents with those. The LEDs are completely sealed units with an amazing light output.
These particular ones have got a switch that enables you to change the colour of the light. We like the warm light, so
that’s what we use. They’ve got a regular plug on the end so that they can plug easily into what’s called plugged bases
in the ceiling. So if you’ve got plug bases, then it’s a DIY installation. You can just take out the existing inefficient
lights and plug that into the plug base, then pop that into the ceiling and the job’s done. The result is just amazingly
different – it’s a really amazing light and surprisingly cheap.
The DIY Guide to Energy Efficient Home Project
Downlights LED are the saving grace in the halogen vs LED battle
LED downlight installation is a simple plug-in process with the Osram Tri Colour Downlight. It is a dimmable LED light fitting and globe in one complete unit that has a long-lasting 90mm sealed LED downlight. With no bulb to replace, they are effectively maintenance free!
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