LED kitchen lighting

In the kitchen I have three ceiling-mounted light fittings each with three 12V 20W halogen lamps (from Ikea IIRC).

I'm experimenting with using LEDs instead. So I bought some LED units from China on eBay, each allegedly 4W from four LEDs.

They were billed as the same size as the standard halogen lamps. In fact they're about 8 mm longer, but I can live with that.

They seem easily bright enough, but the beams are quite a lot narrower. I don't understand why, given that there are multiple light-emitting elements that don't actually need to be arranged in parallel, LED lamps always seem to have such narrow beams.

So far not too bad, but there are two more problems. The first is that if I replace all three lamps with LEDs they start flickering after a while. I assume that this is down to insufficient load being placed on the power supply. However there's no minimum load marking on the power supply, or on any of the spare power supplies that I have to hand. So if I wanted to replace the power supply, what do I look for to ensure that it can cope with a roughly 12W load? Or should I perhaps be looking at

240V lamps instead?

In the meantime I've got one halogen lamp and two LED lamps installed in one fitting and the flicker problem has gone away.

However I'm not at all happy with the lighting. Shadows (of my head, particularly) are very deep and sharp-edged. The point sources of light give rise to very bright reflections from hard surfaces, and the overall effect is one of glare rather than illumination. Most unpleasant and ineffective. It occurs to me that a diffuser might help but a quick search with Google didn't turn anything up. Any suggestions?

Reply to
Mike Barnes
Loading thread data ...

From my own experience with LED lighting in our kitchen; I found I needed a transformer rated at 20w as the LEDs were 4.3w each. After I installed the said transformer, the flickering stopped, and they come on instantly. As far as narrow beam goes, the ones I have have a beam angle of 120 degrees, but I didn't buy mine from China, via ebay.

Reply to
Bob H

I bought 240v from

formatting link

They have plenty of choice in terms of beam angles, wattages and colours. Just don't pay the advertised price: there are plenty of codes around for significant discounts, including direct from their site.

Reply to
F

They send out an annoying number of offers ... enter FART20 for special

20% discount because our MD just let one rip.
Reply to
Andy Burns

Yes, I bought mine from the same site, and also yes they do send too many annoying offers which I don't think that they are. That's just my own opinion.

Reply to
Bob H

I bought 'warm-white' COB LED lamps from China - they weren't warm white an d Ebay's Resolution Centre got me my money back - +1 for Ebay today!

But these are 3W COB MR16 type lamps and have an excellent spread. I had t o go back to 20W halogens to get a photo showing the before and after and w as impressed by how much more light there was from the LEDS, albeit unpleas antly white. I'll get warm whites from another source and they may be not quite so bright, but it does look as if COB gives a much better spread.

I also found a double MR16 adjustable ceiling holder on EBay that at ~£12 is excellent.

For those not up to all the TLA's today (!), COB is 'chips on board' and is a ~15mm dia. yellow area in the middle of the lamp carrying something like 6 LED chips.

Personally I avoid 240v LED lamps as the electronics to drop the voltage is far more likely to fail than the LED's themselves. Perhaps a bit more of a faff to arrange low voltage running, but a 12v electronic transformer is not going to suffer the packaging problems of being forced into a lamp hold er, and should have pretty good life span.

Rob

Reply to
robgraham

I have a total of 18 mains voltage LEDs round my house. None has failed so far, though I admit it's early days yet. What precisely is the electronics that does the voltage dropping, and why is it 'far more likely to fail' ?

Reply to
Jim Hawkins

formatting link

and why he thinks the first one is dangerous

formatting link

The failure mechanism is usually heat.

Reply to
alan

Three special offer emails from them today, making it eighteen in the past month ... unsubscribed!

Reply to
Andy Burns

There are lies, damned lies, and Chinese ebay LED sellers' lies. Anyway, you'll find the survival rate at the end of a year is 25% if you're lucky, making the bargain pointless. Been there, never again; I now buy LED bulbs from ledhut, lightrabbit, or locally when they appear in Lidl / Aldi and not had a failure from any of those sources.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

Thanks for the advice. Actually they were *so* cheap it's easy to chalk them up to experience - and they did give me a better idea of what to order. I've ordered more from Ledhut. One the Ledhut units has just failed after a week or so but it will be easier to get my money back there I'm sure.

Anyway the cheap Chinese ones have failed sooner than you predicted: after much swapping around experimenting in different fittings with different transformers, the pins have come loose and sunk into the plastic. :-)

Reply to
Mike Barnes

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.