My adventures in LED home lighting

I finally got around to replacing the under-counter G4 halogen lights in the kitchen with LEDs… all the gruesome details here: Hera halogen counter light Nichia 219 retrofit

I am taking a rather cautious, slow approach to replacing and upgrading my lighting. I did the same thing with CFL bulbs, and as a result found out for myself how quickly they fail when installed “upside down” in recessed cans and track lights, and how frequent on/off cycles kills them. This is now well documented, of course, but several years ago, when we were all being told to scrap our incandescent bulbs, most people seemed oblivious to these problems.

My first step was to attack my kitchen track lighting which probably accounts for almost half the lighting usage in my house. I have fourteen PAR20 halogens in track fixtures, plus three traditional 75W BR30 bulbs in cans. Close to 1,000 watts, and these are on at least three hours a day. Most lighting in my house is controlled with a central computer, triggered by motion sensors, so the lights are turned on and off as people enter and leave the room. Thus, the lights cycle on & off a LOT, and instant on is mandatory.

My search for the “perfect” 50W halogen PAR20 replacement led me to the Sylvania 78748 bulb. You can read about it here, and also read my review (it is under the same user name as my name in this forum):

Sylvania PAR20 LED

As I note in my review at that site, this bulb is actually brighter than the halogen bulbs, but it is quite a bit cooler in color temperature than its 3000K rating would suggest. I actually did a color measurement (you can measure color temperature by taking a photo of a white card in RAW mode, and then correcting the color in the Photoshop RAW import dialog: Photoshop reads out the color temperature in that dialog) and found these results: the Halogens measure at 2900K; the Sylvania measures at 3150K and the TCP bulb that I purchased later measures 2850K.

The TCP bulb:

TCP LED9E2692027KFL LED 9 Watt PAR20 40 Degree Flood Light

has more even illumination, and is almost the exact brightness as the halogens, but the CRI is lower. This gives the light a slightly “less pleasing” quality. Incandescent bulbs have a CRI of 100, meaning they put out equal amounts of every color in the visible spectrum. By contrast, LED bulbs only emit discrete color bands within the visible spectrum. Those bands still combine together to produce white light, but the missing colors make you interpret what you see in slightly different ways.

The best way to describe CRI is that the average of the numbers 1, 5, & 9 is 5; the average of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & 9 is also 5. If the two sets of numbers each represented the discrete colors in the spectrum of a light source, the second set would have a higher CRI. The “missing” colors in any LED bulb’s “white” light is why you may have had the feeling that you are not quite perceiving or seeing things as clearly when something is lit by an LED bulb.

So, for me, I have not quite made up my mind between these two bulbs. The Sylvania is more expensive ($38) compared to the TCP ($26); the Sylvania is brighter than the halogen; the TCP is the same brightness; the Sylvania hass more pleasing color than the TCP, but is bluer than the halogen; the TCP has more even illumination, and the beam spread is much closer to the narrow flood spread in my halogen bulbs.

I am not quite yet ready to replace all my halogen bulbs, but these two bulbs are very close to being the right choice.

I used the same Sylvania bulbs in my kitchen and office (20 total). I have the ability to measure color temperature and light output. These measure right at 3000K-3050K and 550 lumens… dead on to what Sylvania says. I have not seen any shift in output or color temp over time.

With halogens I was replacing at least one bulb a week and when a bulb blew in the kitchen it would often take out a couple of others and the $35 dimmer. None of the LED bulbs has failed. Highly recommended.

I just had one of the Sylvania 10W PAR20 bulbs die. I was browsing BLF in my home office and the LED suddenly turned into a DED (dark emitting diode). That bulb was installed the week of 24 Feb 2012… pretty much exactly one year ago. It will be interesting to see how Sylvania handles warranty claims.

Some states allow 120v /- 5% at your house, others allow/- 10%.
If your house voltage is above the high side for your state its public utility commission might be interested in hearing about it.

I have high voltage… even 130V bulbs didn’t last. And obscenely high water pressure.

I’m assuming that LED bulb failure was just a random thing. We’ll see. In the year it was working, at least 4 or 5 halogen bulbs would have died in the office.

If they don’t make you return it open it up and post it’s guts on here, interested to see who’s LED it is using etc.

Well, since it’s from Sylvania/Osram, I’d assume it’s Osrams.

But then their PAR16 bulbs have four XML’s. I did take apart one of their 15 watt PAR38 bulbs. It had a array chip on it… looked like it may have been from Citizen. That bulb died because it blew an internal picofuse.

You may be able to use a buck-boost transformer in the buck mode to reduce your house voltage and a pressure regulator to put your water PSI at between 20 and 80, commonly 40 to 60.

I took my DED light bulb back to whence it came. They plucked a new one off the shelf and gave it to me (they kept the old one). I asked the guy how many LED bulbs (out of the thousands that they have sold) have they had to replace… a grand total of 4 bulbs (2 Philips PAR38 bulbs, my Sylvania PAR20, and a Sylvania MR16)

I knew some of their stuff did use Cree LEDs, that’s why I was curious, always cool to see where our stuff is being used.

What type of wood cabinets are best suited for LED lighting?

lesliebone,

I strongly suggest you edit your profile and remove your home address from “Location”. Everyone can see your full address.

Cute house. Looks like you just recently bought it.

PPtk

Hello, I just find your site about wooden cabinet LED lighting. It's a subject I have been interested in much time and others will surely find this wooden cabinet LED lighting very good.

hello, eveyone, here is the link i share with you guys,
music control the bulbs, very nice ;

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/lifx-the-light-bulb-reinvented

One of the candelabra bulbs at my front porch gates finally died after 4 years of 10-12 hour/day use (say 15,000 hours). Something on the driver board died. Had to break the bulb to get to it (base was glued, some of the bulbs the base just unscrews). Nothing obvious was cooked. The filter cap was good. So were the LEDs (3 Chinese “egg-drop” emitters). The bulb was surprisingly well built.

3000k-35500k belong the color of warm white,sure,you can use them in dining room,also you can consider use the neutral white,tie color temperature about 4000k-4500k……

hi,lesliebone,may be you need conside what type LED lighting suit for wood cabinet……

I’ve got to say, this thread has been a gold mine, I moved into my new house last month, first thing I noticed, for an English house, there was a LOT of halogen bulbs, mostly 50w 12v mr16’s, so, I started looking around for what was available this side of the pond. Mrs gords loves to have the lights on, I mean literally ten in the morning, all the kitchen lights are on, plus all the lights between upstairs and the kitchen, that’s 22 50w halogen bulbs on must of the day and some cfl’s to boot. I could HEAR the damned electric meter whizzing round and I’m not flush either.

I ended up ordering a couple of philips master 2700k dimmable gu10’s and ceramic holders. After some questions, I’d found out that early generation transformers wouldn’t run one led replacement, one solution I found was to run three or four mr16 led bulbs off one transformer to fool it into seeing a decent load, good plan but it’d mean fishing two core cables all over the shop, remembering which light gave access to the transformer and generally just didn’t appeal to me. Then someone suggested swapping the mr16 12v holders for gu10 240v holders (England remember) The first two were an experiment, would the output be enough? would the tint be acceptable?

Well, these Panasonics seem pretty good, after failing to find a cri rating, I asked the dealer, he said he’d never been asked that before but looked it up, 81cri, acceptable enough for me and the output is indistinguishable from the halogens they replaced, I’ve now got seven out of nine replaced in the kitchen, one in the entrance hall and would have replaced the ones on the landing.

They presented a problem, the old guy had found a big industrial 240v - 12v transformer and used that, all the fixtures were in parallel off that, not the biggest problem but less simple to solve than I wanted, I picked up some osram nw (3000k) multi emitter mr16 (5 or 6w I’ll have to check) I put those in, mainly as a test bed as I’ve found another of those transformers elsewhere, they work ok, bit of a thunk on switch on and a bit cooler than I’d have preferred, but I used my litmus test, I didn’t tell mrs gords, just put them in without saying anything and waited for the complaints about me buggering about………I had to point them out, she didn’t notice at all! that to me, is the best thing, if people dont notice, you’ve found a good replacement, and these were 20w mr16’s I can even run down to one of these on that big ole dumb transformer, so they are fine elsewhere in my case.

So far I’m happy, I’ll order the rest of the bulbs next month, I have had to return six earlier phillips masters, they were a very deep (80mm) assembly and wont fit in the recesed down lights, they’d be fine in a fixture, they’d even look nice but were no good, fortunately, the ebay seller agreed on a refund, no quibbles so I didn’t get stuck with them (thank *k since I ordered drunk and well over paid).

What’s the point? mainly to say thanks to texaspyrp for the helpful info and in the hope I added a little more.

Now, I just need to find two gang dimmers that’ll work with these drop ins and dont cost the earth.

Did she not notice any difference? Where did you get them from? I think I need to try some.