Thinking of upgrading my home to LED lighting

FW and I just bought a house end of April, awesome home but the lighting needs some attention. Right now it has the small halogen bulbs that I hear are a fire hazard because they get so hot. Another downside to the halogens is that they take a converter and several of those are burned out. We would really like to convert the whole place to LED’s. Can you do that since the converters are behind the drywall? These are 3 or 4″ cans so there isn’t much room and I am no electrician. I have calls in to a few electricians in the area but I would like to be “up to speed” when they start talking install and pricing. Thanks

I fully converted my entire house in June, purchased in May. I got a deal I couldn’t refuse on Phillips LED bulbs and I couldn’t be happier. I noticed a moderate decrease in power, but I didn’t have incandescent bulbs in long enough for a good comparison. If I tell someone that visits that the whole house is LED, they are shocked, you can’t tell at all.

I’m assuming your talking about low voltage halogens? Phillips makes bulbs that can work with transformers. But if it isn’t an absolute nightmare, you can replace the transformers with LED drivers and use just about any LED bulb that fits. I am unsure of the cost savings over using the old transformers over converting to LED drivers, but I would imagine the drivers would save some money in the long run.

Come to the ‘bright’ side and make the switch, you wont regret it! (that was full of puns)

I tried to put some cheap LED replacement bulbs in my garage and it interfered with my garage door opener. I guess there are some of the cheaper brands that have a frequency interference issue. I was using the Feit(sp) brand bulbs….

I was a painful experience to sort out and deal with…

I have no idea about the halogen converter situation. But if you have recessed cans of any kind you should be able to put LEDs in them on your own. Personally, I’d take one apart and see what’s inside the can. I’d bet there is a product or bulb out there that would allow you to go LED.

The LED can conversion products are really nice because the bulb and the trim are one piece. There’s no worry about getting the bulb centered in the housing and there’s no air gap into the ceiling.

I did not have halogen bulbs, and I installed these throughout my house: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00T5HOKZ0/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

In my opinion the LED lights I linked to above a superior product to any traditional recessed light setup I’ve seen. I installed them about 6 months ago and have been very impressed.

If you buy LEDs, pay attention to the color of the light … I like the 3000K bulbs, which are a soft white vs. a harsh white light (5000K). Also, some are dimmable and some are not.

I hope this helps!

Don’t forget to look at the electric company to see if they offer a rebate on the cost. I changed mine over and got 75% rebate on the cost of the bulbs.

I just installed can lighting in a basement remodel and went to all LED bulbs. Fantastic. Tremendously wasteful to use anything else now IMO, my basement would have used 600 watts with old 75 watt incan bulbs, but with LED it’s about 90 watts for the same light output. Wow.

When shopping for canister lights, I noticed a large numbers of converters, adapters, retrofitters, etc on the shelves. It looks to me like there is are many solutions for retrofitting existing variations of canister lights to make them into LED-compatible fixtures. A lot of these looked to be brand specific so situation may require some figuring.

Bottom line is there may be something close to a plug and play solution out there, so do your research to avoid having someone do excessive amounts of unnecessary work and parts replacing.

Grouse

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I’m assuming your talking about low voltage halogens? Phillips makes bulbs that can work with transformers. But if it isn’t an absolute nightmare, you can replace the transformers with LED drivers and use just about any LED bulb that fits. I am unsure of the cost savings over using the old transformers over converting to LED drivers, but I would imagine the drivers would save some money in the long run.

I would really like to get rid of the transformers also as there are several throughout the house that are burned out and I feel this will be a continued problem down the road. I attached a pic of the halogen bulbs that we have.

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   halogen-bulb.jpg
   

Dave Ansell wrote:

I tried to put some cheap LED replacement bulbs in my garage and it interfered with my garage door opener. I guess there are some of the cheaper brands that have a frequency interference issue. I was using the Feit(sp) brand bulbs….

I was a painful experience to sort out and deal with…

Oh Dave I owe you for that comment. I have doors with openers for my main garage. For the life of me I cannot not figure out why the one worked fine but the other one would not work very well no matter which remote I used. Then all of sudden it would work after pushing the button a few times but it seemed to work after the light went out. Now after reading your comment and thinking about it I had replaced the bulb with Feit LED’s. So I bet if I replace my bulb with a normal it will work fine.

To the original poster we had a lot of can lighting in our house. We replaced all of them with LED bulbs. Just the cost savings of not having to replace bulbs all of the time has been awesome but the electrical savings is a great also.

Thanks,

RVRDUX

I changed mine over and got 75% rebate on the cost of the bulbs

With a 75% rebate I might see a break even point before my 100th birthday.

Either way I’m slowly working though the house and camper with the led change over.

These folks are giving me great service and answer questions fast. Prices are about the same as other companies.

https://www.superbrightleds.com/?gclid=CPXR7JqI8c0CFQyNaQodTNgMKA