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?