Kitchen lighting question

[Syke]

Having some time ago fitted (5) 12v halogen downlights, I am now thinking it may have been a mistake. Even after swapping the MR16 50W bulbs for 20W, I feel they are a bit wasteful. I note that there are fluorescent replacement bulbs available but are about £10 each, and I'm not sure how these would compare in terms of light output. Bearing in mind I don't want to replace the wooden ceiling,(which I would probably need to do in order to mask the resultant holes if I removed the halogens) I wondered if there were any other options I could pursue, not being totally up to speed with all the modern developments.

Regards and thanks in advance

Pat Macguire

[Chris J Dixon]

The consensus, at the moment, seems to be that CFL don't give good, or enough, light output, and LED technology hasn't quite got there yet.

So, whilst available solutions continue to evolve, feed them via a movement detector like

you don't waste energy when there is nobody present.

It works very well for me. Chris

[Andrew Gabriel]

Downlighters will never provide good general lighting, which is what you really need in a kitchen. We cover kitchen lighting very frequently here, and I suggest you look back over the old threads.

What you could do with the existing holes is to fit some low power decorative lighting, quite separately from the main functional lighting.

[Invisible Man]

There were various halogen spots etc around our kitchen. Very pretty but not suitable for using the kitchen. Fluorescent tubes are much more effective for general lighting in our opinion.

[David Hansen]

On Sun, 8 Feb 2009 12:21:13 -0000 someone who may be "Syke" wrote this:-

I haven't noticed any for 12V fittings, but I may not have seen them. I have seen LED lamps for 12V fittings though .

Assuming 12V CFLs are available then I imagine that, like the equivalent 230V ones, they will be fairly slow starting. Having reached normal brightness some people will say they are fine, others will not. Why not buy one or two and decide for yourself. There is still the problem that it is entirely the wrong sort of lighting for a kitchen.

Either leave them where they are, with or without CFL/LED lamps, or make a feature of them in some other way. Use other lighting for normal lighting.

[Malcolm]

.

Look at the earlier thread on CFL vs Led - There is a link to a CFL downlighter which I am contemplating - I have an example at home. The lam (Megaman) is a GU10 base and mains powered

Malcolm