A Brief Guide To Domestic LED Lighting
Over the past few years the development of LED technology has advanced at an extraordinary rate. This has resulted in both an exponential increase in the power of LED bulbs (the amount of light produced per watt of electricity consumed) and a steady fall in the costs of production.
Combine these factors with others such as the high lifespan of LEDs (they can last twenty times or more longer than equivalent incandescent light bulbs) and it’s obvious why interest is developing in using LED lamps for both public and domestic general purpose lighting applications.
Also, not only can the superior energy efficiency of LED lighting yield jaw-dropping savings in electricity (we’re talking 10x cheaper here), but in contrast to existing energy saving technologies such as the CFL (Compact Fluorescent Tube), LED lights do not contain dangerous mercury vapour or suffer from a slow start-up and inferior light quality.
But there are issues too, for example, although LED light is unquestionably extremely bright it is for the most part highly directional. A regular incandescent light bulb will emit light (plus a considerable quantity of heat) uniformly in all directions, but an LED will deliver a tight, focussed beam that generates a compact light pool.
This is of course exactly what designers of spotlights usually try to achieve anyway by using reflective surfaces to direct the light to a single spot. But LED spotlights are so extreme in this respect that they have to be constructed so as to actually widen the beam angle and thus approximate what most people have become accustomed to. For this reason, it is quite common to see that a single LED spotlight contains a cluster of individual LED modules all set at different angles.
These days it is becoming ever more common to find domestic LED lighting deployed in the form of replacements for halogen spot lamps. When you consider that an LED spot light rated at 4 watts is as bright as a 35 watt halogen lamp and thus costs about 10x less to run you can see why.
There are however a few considerations worth noting before diving into replacing your existing mains powered halogen lamps with GU10 LED bulbs…
- In order to dim LED lights you generally also have to fit specialist dimmers and transformers.
- The subject of “color temperature” is important with LEDs. Variation in color temperature is less of an issue with incandescent lights since they mostly what is termed “warm white”, but LEDs vary considerably between “warm white” (a yellowish glow) and “cool white” (a bluish tinge).
- LED manufacturers invariably seem to exaggerate the power and light spread of their products. Allow for this by simply increasing the number of LED light bulbs used – this will help both spread the light more evenly and increase the overall brightness level.
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Tags | domestic LED lighting, G10 LED bulbs, LED, Lighting, replacing halogen lamps
