LED downlights

[Yorkie]

... I've been considering for some time that it might be a good idea to replace them, but I was put off by a neighbour's experience - he fitted what I assume are CFLs, and when he turns them on they take several minutes to come up to full brightness ...

That was quite a problem with the early CFLs and possibly still is with some types but all the CFLs we've got in use here, from a variety of sources, are fine.

If in doubt, I'd canvas other peoples' experiences with different makes and types - assuming you still want to go down the CFL route, that is.

Thanks for reading my post Terry. No - I've no intention of using CFLs in any situation - I just thought that the LEDs to which Jeffrey gave the link looked a promising replacement worth considering for R80 reflector bulbs. Seems to me that CFLs are a nonsense in places such as toilets, landings, bathrooms, box rooms, lofts, bedside lights and so forth. The light is often only on for a few minutes and often hasn't come up to full brightness by the time to switch off. Furthermore, because such lights are only on for a few minutes at a time, any savings are marginal.

My neighbour - he of the CFLs - has a meter gadget which shows how much energy he's using. He seems to have made it his hobby to go round the house switching things off to see how the consumption drops. (TVs left on standby for example). Huh - what's that all about?  I know that if I turn my room thermostat down I'll save energy, but I also know I'll feel cold, so I keep it at 22C - winters are miserable enough as it is!

[Keithstv]

We have four R80 spotlights in our kitchen. When we moved in they were 100W each. I changed them for 60W versions with hardly any difference in the perceived light output. Three years ago I found R80 LED bulbs on Amazon and bought one to try it out. I compared halogen and LED side by side and noticed very little difference so bought 3 more and fitted them. There's a slight delay of a few hundred mS before the lights come on but with the power consumption down from 240W to 24W I can accept the delay. Although the bulbs were not cheap they  paid for themselves after about 15 months. Virtually all the lights in our house are now LED although the one in the cupboard under the stairs is still CFL (free one from an electricity supplier) as it only gets about 2 hours use per year so not worth changing!

In our living room we have two light fittings with three bulbs in each. I fitted two CFLs in each with an incandescent bulb to provide some light while the CFLs were warming up. They are now all LED.

If you do replace any of the spotlight bulbs with LED make sure the ones you get have a domed diffuser as these give a better distribution of the light. I fitted some R50 bulbs with no diffuser in the kids bedrooms and as they appear to give a cone of light the corners of the room were permanently in the shadows. I replaced them with domed diffused ones and now the rooms are evenly illuminated.

Keith

[jimmc101]

ALDI have on offer today a 5pk GU10 LED for £9.99
5W
360lumen (vs 300 for 50W halogen)
Warm white
100deg beamwidth
NON dimmable (the advert is incorrect)

I've just replace 4 x 50w  halogens in a light bar in the kitchen and I'm most impressed, and more importantly so is my wife, much brighter and more even light overall.

Jim

[pamphonica]

However...
I have a large ceiling lighting fitting that uses 10x pigmy 25W bulbs.
These lasted about a year each so it was a real "Forth Bridge" type of replacement project. Always up and down the ladder.
So I bought a full set of 3W LED pigmy bulbs a year ago ("MiniSun 3W Warm White), at about £5 each so not cheap.
Five of the original 10 failed between November 2015 and January 2016, after little more than a year, and have had to be replaced.
And another has just gone this week.

Not a great advert for long-life! Especially as they are on about 3 hours a day. (= about 1000 hours life).

Jeremy

[ppppenguin]

A lot of poor quality LED lights around. Unfortuantely hard to tell which are the good ones. Even the expensive downlighters that I fitted had to be replaced under warranty.

Where do the problems lie? Probably poor thermal design. LEDs still put out a lot of heat, some need efficient heatsinking to stay healthy. All this heat is bad for the electronics, espeically any electrolytics. My downlights have the electronics physically separate from the LEDs. The LEDs have impressive heatsinking, the electronics is in a small plastic box spaced away from the LEDs. Reading between the lines the failures were inadeuqately spec'ed caps in the electronics module.

[jimmc101]

I've just measured the temperature of the shell of the Aldi LEDs with a cheap IR thermometer at 90'C ! (Room temperature  22'C)
And this is in a fitting with all but the base exposed.

Jim

[Pop Alexandra]

I've been using the downlights from NDR Lighting and they're really good.

[ppppenguin]

Hi Pop Alexandra and welcome to the Golborne forum. This is an old thread (that I started about 10 years ago) and LEDs have come a long way since then. CFLs are now, fortunately, extinct and their passing won't be mourned. I buy these "100 watt" lamps from Screwfix and they've been fine: https://www.screwfix.com/p/sylvania-tole...pack/888pp The expensive downlights that I bought years ago are now easily bettered by low cost products. I still like the 12V LED MR16 lamps that I retrofitted in my bathroom downlights. They have a diffusing face that gives a very even light distribution, unlike just about any other downlights I've seen.

Conventional fluorescents are now also more or less obsolete too. At the Broadcast Engineering Museum we buy various batten fittings from Lampshoponline https://www.lampshoponline.com/ who offer good products at low prices. We've also bought 600mm x 600mm and 1200mm x 600mm panels from them. We've had a couple of early driver failures which have been replaced without hassle under warranty.

I still have a stock of GLS lamps for use in lamp limiters and suchlike.

[Mike Watterson]

I'm wondering how many of my lamps have failed due to excess voltage. Always been above the Irish 230V at over 235V, but recently it's mostly 245 to 250V with excursions seen as low as 241 and as high as 262. I've no 24x7 logging so don't know if it's been higher, but we have had a lot of failures of LED lamps. It's sometime since we had halogen or CFL. The few tube lamps still in use use choke ballasts, so are not likely to fail so easily as CFLs with an electronic "ballast". Might have had CFL failures due to overvoltage?

I only started regularly checking a week ago because the solar & mains charged UPS was intermittently cutting out due to "Grid overvoltage". That's more of an issue than brownouts and cuts. So I've put a big transformer with its 12V (@ 240V in) secondary in anti-phase to the UPS grid input. Since then it's been fine. We don't feed any power to the grid. Also two of the overvoltage episodes were after dark, so that rules out theory of neighbourhood solar to grid putting up the voltage.

One of the LED "GLS" spots that failed a few days before the alarms was relatively new. The electronics in it seems small, with a capacitor as the only larger part. I mean to see what failed.

[Mike Watterson]

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The 3.3 μF 400V cap is in a socket. The - of the cap is on the + label, the socket is labelled +PIXS-
The 4 pin SOIC is obviously a bridge on the line/mains
The 8 pin has very faint print.

It was intermittent and variable brightness before totally extinguished.