And today's rant... Low energy GU10s

[Adrian]

A little row of five recessed spots in the kitchen ceiling, above the work surface.

Two of the halogens have failed. First time I've had to replace any of 'em since we moved in.

There's a cupboard full of various CFL and LED GU10-equivs. Do any of 'em bloody fit? No, of course they don't. The CFLs are laughably huge, total non-starter. But the LEDs look like they should... Oh, wait a second... They curve slightly out from the edge, so the sodding retaining clip won't _quite_ fit.

Why is this not easy? The GU10 halogen package is not exactly news to bulb makers. It's been around for years. It's _prime_ for replacement with lower power equivalents. So why...?

[Martin Brown]

Look on the bright side - even if you had managed to fit them into recessed ceiling fittings designed for hot halogen lamps they would have cooked their control electronics in no time flat.

[Colin Stamp]

None of mine have, unlike the Chinese, Ebay, SES, LED, candle bulbs I got a while ago. Five out of six failed after eight months, all within a fortnight of each-other. I reckon they had timers in.

They weren't as bad as the GU10 halogens that came with some fittings I bought at the same time though. I only put them in to try out the fittings after wiring them up. Three had popped after ten minutes!

You get what you pay for...

Cheers,

Colin.

[ARW]

Similar problem at the weekend - not recessed lights but the GU10 LEDs would not fit a bar light that came with halogens. A test of a different brand LED did fit but was the wrong colour LED.

It's a joke that they are playing on us.

[Tim Streater]

Hmmm. We replaced our halogen GU10s firstly with CFL, which are OK but take a while to warm up and produce much light. Rather light the early CFLs. So SWMBO dint like that.

Then I swapped them all out for LED ones, which so far (one year) have all survived. I put some of the now-redundant CFLs in the other half of the kitchen which we don't use much.

I agree the CFL are Huge, but there seems to be room and the retaining clips, while not perfect, are good enough.

[Brian Gaff]

maybe the designer in China used one of those undersized rules to measure them. I read this somewhere that a shop here had sold cheap tape measures and steel rules all with undersized divisions. Brian

[Martin Brown]

I have got one somewhere on the side of a useful double sized useful scientific info reference credit card thing. It was ages before I finally spotted that its mm divisions were 95% of real metric ones.

It was a free give away at some trade show or other.

[Terry Fields]

The kitchen here has a four x GU10 spotlight fitting. When I came to replace the 50W halogens with LEDs, I quickly found that only Philips lamps would fit, and even then one was fairly tight.

[Scion]

Martin Brown put finger to keyboard:

Reminds me of the Viz Top Tip to make your own metric/imperial ruler.

Get a rubber band and make markings at 1cm intervals. That's your metric ruler. To use as an imperial ruler, stretch it by 2.4x.

[Matty F]

I hate decimal inches. I want it to expand millimetres to sixteenths.

[Andrew Gabriel]

My dad had a ruler that worked like that, except it was a spring in a transparent case, and you could slide the end of it up and down to change the scale. There were numbers attached to every 10th or 20th coil, and the coils where colour coded inbetween. The spring itself was not circular, but triangular, so it formed lines more like the markings on a bevelled ruler, and couldn't twist inside the plastic.

[Windmill]

It would be so easy to do that nowadays. Though of course you could use thermal noise in the electronics to provide a degree of randomisation.

[Windmill]

Well, 0.1 mm is very nearly 1/256" so not hard to convert half/quarter/eighth/sixteenth inch fractions etc. with fair accuracy.

(Was it once intended to be *exactly* correct, but they got it wrong?)

[Bob Eager]

1 inch/sec is pretty well 1 attoparsec per microfortnight.

And my lectures last a microcentury.

[Huge]

And light travels ~ 1ft per nanosecond

And the barnmegaparsec is ~ 3ml

[Martin Brown]

More likely the same batch of capacitors. They are the weakest link in the current generation of control electronics for low energy lights.

Not always. Sometimes you do get a genuine bargain!

[Jim K]

Nov 12Scion

Or even 2.54x...

Jim K

[alan]

I've just lost the second low energy bulb in a couple of weeks. These are from the batch supplied free/cheaply* by the utility companies. They were both approx 2 years old and not in heavy use.

• supplied at a cost to me of a few hundred quid in green taxes on my utility bills.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes its swings and roundabouts, someone always pays. The capacitor quality in all things these days seems to be at an all time low. Gone are the days when you could rely on a capacitor to outlast the rest of the equipment it was fitted into.

Brian

[Martin Brown]

After valves and semiconductors capacitors were always the least reliable components in complex kit. The evil smell of the magic smoke escaping from an electrolytic is unmistakable.

At least modern capacitors are not coated in nice falmmable wax like the ones of valve radio days which were inclined to drip hot and possibly burning wax all over the place when things went badly wrong.