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.
