Sunday 11 October 2015

Lifestyle home improvements post



I have been waiting for about 10 years for them to make a replacement LED unit for our tungsten spots (IKEA) in the kitchen and bathroom, and I finally found some (LIDL) which seemed to fit the requirements nicely, so I bought a whole batch and rigged them up yesterday.

Our 2 systems are 12 volt and 20 watts each, and things go badly wrong with the transformer if you put anymore than three per line on it. I melted one by replacing a 20 watt tungsten with a 35 watt one, putting a total load of 75 watts on the feeble thing which is - I found out - only rated up to 60 watts max.

The LED replacements are 3 watts each - that is a huge power saving: 9 as opposed to 60 (I'm tempted to say 'do the maths', but they tell me it represents a 85% saving on the box).

These lights are designated as 'warm white', but there is no standard about warmth as yet, so all you can do is fit them and find out. Last night, ours proved too white, so today I am taking them all down and tinting the fronts with acrylic ink. This is a real bind, but since each unit is supposed to last for 25,000 hours, I will hopefully be dead before I have to repeat the procedure.

The other complication is that the frequency of LED light is totally different to tungsten, and this has nothing to do with brightness. The light from an LED is very sharp and clear - it makes glasses glister and sparkle, but if it is in the blue side of the spectrum, it appears very harsh and unforgiving. You know how candlelight is so conducive to a romantic dinner for two, whereas the lights in a mortuary are not? That's the difference in an extreme example.

Lighting is incredibly difficult to get right, especially if you live with H.I. The biggest compromise she has had to make in order to accept my change to LEDs is the fact that we will no longer have the little pink lines over the ceiling where some light escapes from above and gets filtered through the silvered backing of the glass units. That is what she likes more than almost anything else, and she is - I know - deeply gutted that it will no longer be like that.

When I told her that these pink lines will be a thing of the past, and that she must just get used to the idea for the sake of the 85% power saving, she said, "Typical man's way of looking at it". I suppose she is right - I love the idea of dramatic savings, but I also actually like LED frequency light.

I am not the type of person who switches their engines off at traffic lights though, and I have never been tempted to cruise downhill in neutral just to save about 3 pence worth of petrol. Did your father complain of finding the lights 'blazing away' in an unoccupied room of your family home?

I always buy cars with large engines (by British standards) and I tend to thrash them to the limit regardless of MPG. At the same time, I religiously put every scrap of waste paper in the recycling, even if it is only the little leaf which warns you that you only have six cigarette papers left.

I suppose that I could be described as enigmatically hypocritical.

19 comments:

  1. O good man we have several of the LED's around the home. Seems to be a variable life guarantee depending on the manufacturer. Three of ours are for 15 years and the others are 6 years.
    Our waste paper products go into the fire.

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    1. If I had a fire I would burn all that stuff too. It is illegal to have a bonfire anywhere near Bath these days. Tip - never buy Chinese made LEDs. They last for about 2 weeks, and nobody is going to return them. You get what you pay for, as always.

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  2. We've recently put a whole bunch of these into the barn; they seem to be the only ones now available. Quite nice light.

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    1. Soon, you won't be able to get tungsten. All the major fires in major country houses recently (Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, Prior Park, etc. etc.) have been caused by super-hot tungsten flood lights falling over. Now, there LED equivalents are blindingly bright and quite cool. Everywhere is trying to sell of the tungsten site lights before they are banned.

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  3. You sound to be a man after the farmer's heart. We have two distince parts to our kitchen - each part has a strip of small LED lights. When the farmer comes down in a morning and it is still dark this time of the year, he only switches on the lights in one of the two parts. Thus one half of the kitchen is in semi darkness until I get up. When I ask him why he says 'saving electricity. We do also have solar power - so we are talking pence - but when I point this out he just says - who pays the bill.

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    1. Just like a farmer, but I bet he doesn't like really strong light in the mornings. I know I don't, unless it is sunlight.

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  4. I don't care for LED lighting. It's cold and harsh. I particularly dislike them when used in Christmas lights and much prefer the warm glow of old fashioned, energy wasting lights.

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  5. Twenty-five thousand hours. Bwa-ha-ha! Can you hear me laughing over there? We've had so many blow-outs after less than a year of infrequent use. THEN, we read the fine-print. Well, they had to promise us something to shell out all that extra cash. I think the testers used that same software as Volkswagen. I find that reflected light is the best with these bulbs, not direct.

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    1. Speak to me in 25,000 hours from now, and then see who's laughing! Oh yes!

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  6. We have the same problem with tungsten spots here, you don't find them any more in shopes.

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    1. Well I have saved all our tungstens for H.I.'s bedroom. She now has 25,000 hours worth of them in spares, even if she refuses to convert.

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  7. Mff, we are pulling out the track lights in our pace and replacing with pendants. The strips were frying bulbs almost monthly, and as access requires a ladder far taller than any we own or could store if we did, they are for the chop. Now we are the go-to place for all things drum lampshade making, we are making replacements to hang majectically from our celings. The ones over the kitchen bench return look amazing. SO nice to have good light again. But the energy saving bulbs got binned in favour of new LED ones a couple months back and that light is even better. The hardest to access one is stil not done however as the whole project needs doing in one day, and that's a lot of ducks to get in a row

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    1. The longer you leave your project, the better the new LEDs will become. For someone like me - aged 64 - time is running out to wait for improvements as I deteriorate, so compromises have to be made. I intend to leave the last 10,000 hours of life to my grandchildren, but I don't think they will want them. Look at it this way - I am a pioneer who is acting as a hermit, shining my dim light ahead on the path of life, so others can go after me.

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    2. Surely not. 10,000 hours is just a bit over a year. You don't mean to leave us so soon, do you?

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  8. I can't be detailed because I have no idea what they are but my mister has had the most peculiar lights installed in the bathroom...they are blue tinged slow release things that make you feel you are walking into a nightclub in the middle of the night...but they get brighter and whiter as you sit on the loo trying not to open your eyes because you want to go back to sleep as quickly as possible.......

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    1. I know those lights. They are so crap that they put most people off the idea of economic lighting years ago.

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  9. I think we pick and choose those recycling or energy saving items that make us feel the best or are easiest to do. Like you, I dutifully collect every scrap of paper for recycling. Those that have personal info on them are shredded or, during winter, burned in the coal stove.

    Tungsten bulbs are known as incandescents over here, and 100 watt versions have been nearly impossible to find. I have some LED lights but do not like them, and they require greater care with disposal when they burn out.

    I put on as few lights as possible, which drives Himself mad. He prefers to leave lights on in every room, just in case. The old part of our house has light switches in queer places, so it can take some getting used to, which seems to support his idea of leaving a light on just in case.

    As a compromise, I leave one light on in every other room, so you can see where you're going or can mind the cats if one decides she needs to walk right in front of you just then.

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