I have 25 low voltage 50W downlighters in the upstairs of my house providing general lighting. I would like to go green and use low energy bulbs and if possible get rid of the downlighter concept. I discovered that if I let the bulb on a downstairs downlighter just hang through the ceiling aperture on its power wire the general light levels improved significantly. The cut out for the downlighters is
115mm.
So I'm looking for an inexpensive ( I've got to get 25) fitting that will fit the existing hole and allow a bulb/lamp to protrude through the ceiling and spread the light.
Not an especially cheap option, but you could replace the halogens with CFLs. I've tried various, and the best so far are the ones on this page.
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used the 11 watt non dimmable ones in our kitchen, and when fully up they are as bright as 30W halogens, and rather less beamed, which I think is an advantage for more even lighting.
Two caveats -
1) they take about three minutes to come up to full brightness, so are no good for on/off applications.
2) they are longer than halogens, and are fine in fittings with a loose bulb holder and circlip fixing, but don't look good in fixed base units.
You would not notice the difference between the 20W and 50W lamps.
Other options are to use low energy downlights (it would need a conversion from low voltage to 230V) or to fill the holes and use a better sort of lighting.
I recently swapped 7 12V 50W downlights in a bedroom to LED downlights and swapped the 8th downlight into a "normal" lightfitting. The LEDs give off no useful light but did save the customer having to skim his ceiling.
And a third caveat: they don't last anything like the 10,000 hours advertised IME. I fitted 12 of these 18 months ago, used 2 to 3 hours per day, so far I have had to replace 3.
I also have some of the Megaman CFL 11w GU10's, however, have not had an issue with life. I have 8 in my kitchen, on for at least 4 hours/day and not a single failure yet after 3 or 4 years.
Did you have the failures with the Megaman brand or another?
My commiserations. I helped a friend move into a flat with 50 of the damn things. It's rented, so we can't make any permanent changes. Firstly, I swapped them all for 20W lamps (got them for 18p each bulk buy special offer from CPC - well timed!). Contrary to what someone else said, you really will notice and it's unlikely to give enough light by themselves. However, it gets you some instant light at the door switch so you can walk across the room in bare feet without stepping on the lego bricks.
For better room lighting, I've taken a couple of 500W halogen uplighters they had and no longer use, and I'm going to convert them to take 28W 2D fluorescents. They've got some other table lamps around too.
The child had a childern's pendant lamp which they needed to keep which took a large diameter 60W ES mains globe bulb. I made up a halogen to ES converter (similar to
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which are BC versions), bought a small glass globe shade from Homebase, and fitted it all together with a 20W halogen capsule in it (a 10W one was too low power for the electronic transformer). To hang from the ceiling, I cut a 4" length of galvanised cable capping, drilled a hole in the middle and poked the wire through with a knot behind (yes, should have used a strain relief, but didn't have one), and made up a plug on the cable end to plug into the original dichroic lampholder. The short length of capping is pushed right through the downlighter hole and then sits horizontal on the downlighter mounting ring. (I was going to take the downlighter out, but it was well and truely jammed into the lath and plaster ceiling.)
The 12V lamps are reasonably efficient - it's their use as downlighters that's appalling for efficiency. You could look for some pendants you like, and do something similar to what I did with the childern's pendant. If you find a multi-drop pendant with 12V transformer in the base, you could discard the base and use the pendent parts with even less convertion than I had to do. Note that they might need to be rated 20W for the electronic transformer to see enough load to work.
The other thing I saw about 8 years ago was a set of lights which B&Q had which fixed into the ceiling in a downlighter sized hole, but used capsule halogen lamps with lots of different size and shape (and in some cases, colours) screw on glass covers. I bought one which is serving as an emergency light in the kitchen, but then they stopped doing them, sadly. You might be able to find something similar somewhere else.
This is all assuming you either can't or don't want to do significant changes to the room (which applied in the case of my friend's flat). Otherwise, you can change all the lighting to something more fit for purpose.
Genuine Megaman. I didn't get a chance to examine the first one, it failed within a week. The other 2 both failed with a clear black band around one of the tubes - you can see it at the 2 o'clock position in the first photo here:
And a fourth caveat: they don't give anything like a full spectrum light, anything in colour will look distinctly odd, unappetising even. Ok in the downstairs lav or the hall though, where they may be forgotten and left on overnight.
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