Useless Conversation

[Yegolev]

Haven't ran across that issue as I have only my friend in the Carolina's that has recessed lighting which I put in for her in 2010. But I'll make a note of this in case it comes up.

My recessed cans are from 2002.  The retention system is via a pair of spring rods hanging from the top.  Sides are smooth.  The LED light units are already ~$30 each (if I recall) and it is definitely a rip to pay $4 to convert one can.  I suppose I'll recoup the energy cost before I die.

[Merusk]

I finally figured out the incantation to find a conversion kit for old can lights to the new standard, and these fucking clips are Four American Dollars each.  God damn you, Sea Gull Lighting.

Converting to LED?

Yes.  My current cans do not have the side clips required to install the LED BR-30 replacements that I already have (and that match my newly-finished basement).  I guess I should be glad that I can actually find retrofit clips at all.

Can you toss a photo of what you're looking at and what you're retrofitting? The BR-30s I found are simple socket fixtures, not sure why you'd need a clip.

[Yegolev]

[Viin]

Yeah I did those, sucks you don't have the clips on the side to hold the spring-arms.

They also make ones with clips flat on the LED lights that spring out which sit flat against the inside of the cans, which don't require the holders for the spring-arms.
edit:
This is one style:
https://www.pegasuslighting.com/led-retrofit-modules/3000k-4-inch-76-watt-50-watt-replacement-dimmable-led-downlight-retrofit-module-e26-medium-base-damp-location-american-lighting.html

[Yegolev]

Ideally, all of the can lights will match through the house.  The light switches do not match and even though it bothers me, I haven't replaced them in the past 13 years.  Better to match the lights now.

[Merusk]

I see, so you're replacing the trim ring entirely with those then and the clips are just to attach the new housing/ LED fixture to the husk of the old one.

I assume you're doing it this way for the consistency of the trim ring, then, as you're still screwing it into the bulb socket. I just replaced my bulbs instead. The only hiccup there was the bulbs on electronic dimmers were below the wattage threshold to be considered "off" so they stayed lit until I replaced them with mechanical dimmer switches.

[Yegolev]

The old cans have black sheaths and the edison socket is of course at the narrow top end.  The attachment is also at the top end.  The new lights do not have black anything, and my wife prefers that look, so the idea is to pull the complete contents of the can and replace.  The catch is that the inside of the cans is smooth and the LED-housing spring arms do not have anything to connect to.

Being super dumb, I also clipped the wires from the edison socket very close to the socket itself and am faced with either locating my soldering gun or directly wiring the one lamp that I pulled.  I won't make that identical mistake again.

[Merusk]

Can you invert the spring arms to let them hold the trim up against your ceiling rather than buying the clips?

Something like this:

[IainC]

In my apartment, there are 126 recessed light fittings for E27 bulbs. The ones in there are all 40W filament bulbs and they blow all the time because, even with only some lights on, that's a crazy amount of load to be drawing. I was going to replace them with LEDs until I realised that the LED bulbs were about $10 a pop and electricity is so cheap here it would take me about 50 years to recoup the cost of replacements.

[Cyrrex]

To me, LED bulbs are not about saving money (they may or may not where I live, I have no idea).  I am just sick of these stupid little halogen bulbs that explode after 2 or 3 months of use need swapping out, especially when you have dozens of them in your house.  Sometimes I think I emit some kind of light-bulb-exploding field that shortens the lifespan of all things halogen.  I have yet to encounter either and LED bulb or even the older style flourescent bulbs that have needed to be replaced.  Never even once.  I will never again buy a non-LED bulb if I can avoid it, and it is now close to the point where I don't have to.

Also, these things actually give off decent light now.  It wasn't too long ago that it was all that uncomfortably sharp white light.  Now they're good enough I don't even really notice.

[Merusk]

Yeah, bulb-replacement is the biggest win. I have some PAR track-lights with the twist-lock in this house. They were going out at a rate of one a month, sometimes two, for the first 6 months, even after replacing them.  (Yes I know that's a bad sign. It's a terrible fixture but the wife and I can't agree on a replacement.)  The Halogen bulbs are ~$8 for a dual pack at Home Depot or $10 per light for LEDs, so it was a no-brainer swap.

The rest of the bulbs I just swapped-out over time as they burnt-out and there were sales on the standard bulb replacements. I was using CFLs at the old house and even that was nicer than having the incandescent burn out after a few months of use.

Also, these things actually give off decent light now.  It wasn't too long ago that it was all that uncomfortably sharp white light.  Now they're good enough I don't even really notice.

Light engineers hate you. The 'good light' is actually lower quality yellow that, I've been told, actually lowers the life expectancy of the bulb because you've got to generate more heat to produce it. It's in the The 'too bright' bulbs are higher-quality light more accurately depicting sunlight because of its higher Kelvin temp. The reason it feels so sharp is the light generated by LEDs is more coherent and also doesn't have the hot-spot-and-bleed falloff of old-school light sources. We had a LED engineer go off on a tangent about it at a lunch & learn 2 years ago.

Also, the CRI on soft and cool white bulbs is terrible, so if you're a designer you shouldn't ever compare things under them. UNLESS you know the materials you're comparing are only ever going to be rendered under the same shitty light source type. (i.e. always indoors, never near a window in a crappy little office with bad fluorescent lights.) Then you want to do so.

http://blog.batteriesplus.com/2013/seeing-things-in-a-different-light

[Cyrrex]

Whether it is or is not true for whatever particular bulbs I have experienced in the past, the point is that if the white light is so sharp that I cannot tell if the socks I am picking out are brown or black, then that is not good light.  Or "hey, this light totally fucking annoys my eyeballs regardless of the color I think I am perceiving."  I give no shits about whether it is the correct light, and whatever a light engineer is can go fuck himself 

I'm just being schmarmy.  I think you know what I mean when I say these super efficient bulbs have until recently put out some really shitty light. 

[Merusk]

Nope, you just had bubls with shitty CRI. Which is a different metric from white/ yellow as I alluded to.   The cheap bulbs, until recently, had problems, yes.

[Yegolev]

Regarding flipping the arms, I could probably invent something for that.  Flip the arms and maybe bend them a bit.  However, I'd have to remove the can and if I could do that, then I wouldn't even be having this issue.  Some of the cans are in gyp-board ceilings, but many of them are in a bead-board ceiling which is not going to be cut into.  I don't know how to get the cans out without cutting the ceiling.

As for the benefits, at $30-35 per LED unit, I'm almost certainly not going to come out ahead financially.  I will, however, cease replacing incandescent BR30 in an 11-foot ceiling.  I expect that it will also positively affect my cooling bill, so I might come out ahead financially if I were to take lots of measurements and do some light math.  The room might even be brighter, but with this particular model I think the lumens will be within engineering tolerances of the incandescents.

[Chimpy]

Meijer had a sale recently where their dimmable LED BR30s were 5.99 each. My house has about recessed 15 cans that had a mix of CFL and halogen lamps (bulb is not the proper term, yo) and ten of them are on dimmers. I was tired of the warmup time on the CFLs so I bought a bunch of those cans and I am much happier. Lights turning on instantly in the kitchen at full brightness is so nice.

[Paelos]

What do all these lightbulbs have to do with apples?

[Yegolev]

Apples.  So 2012.

Cyrax, do you fondle the halogen lamps?  That can cause them to die very quickly.  Do not touch them with your fingers.

[Merusk]

(bulb is not the proper term, yo)

Heh, I gave up that fight a while ago. People just look at you funny and say, "But this is a lamp.."  No, it's a fixture. "But everyone calls it a lamp."

Well they're wrong, but hey it's the vernacular now.

Yeg, at that price and inconvenience factor, $4 a pair seems like a bargain. Were you just bitching to bitch for empathy to the wrong audience of people? 

[Sky]

In my apartment, there are 126 recessed light fittings

What the fuck?

In my house, at night, I have one lamp on in the living room.

Who needs 126 lights? That seems like an unnecessary drain on the grid for no reason. Unless you're making porn videos in the living room or something.

Note: this will probably change when the old lady moves in, as I have excellent low-light vision and she has horrible low-light vision and turns on every light known to man to walk through the house. She also hates that I buy low wattage super warm bulbs, jokes that it's like living by candlelight. She's right! I love it.

[WayAbvPar]

This is what I assume conversations in retirement centers are like 

[Signe]

Lets chat about our medical conditions. 

[01101010]

Lets chat about our medical conditions. 

Funny you should say that. I am actually working on a project that is reconstructing their SAS programs to use ICD10 codes instead of the old ICD9 codes that they have used for centuries. God help me if I have to create a conversion program because that will in fact literally kill me. For now... it is just picking out ICD10 codes from a list. 

[Paelos]

Lets chat about our medical conditions. 

I get to wear a heart monitor this weekend because of weird rhythms.

[Sky]

I'm walking with a cane again because my toenail got too soft when I was wearing the cast and it cut back too far when removed, so now it's ingrown. Not a big deal, but it is a little painful, so the cane helps.

And canes are cool.

Also, one of my honeycrisp trees is blooming nicely this year after a couple lean years. Should be a good crop this year!

[Yegolev]

Yeg, at that price and inconvenience factor, $4 a pair seems like a bargain. Were you just bitching to bitch for empathy to the wrong audience of people? 

Slim chance that someone had already done this with more reasonably-priced fittings.  They are composed of bent metal and screws, after all.  Spending $400 on clips won't put me on the street, though.

I don't know how many cans are in my house.  There are a fucking lot.  I'll guess 17 in the living room, 12 in my bedroom, 10-15 in the kitchen, plus maybe 10 more in misc downstairs areas.  Upstairs?  I'm tired of counting.

Who needs 126 lights?

People with big-ass houses.

Note: this will probably change when the old lady moves in

Yes, it will.  No naked bulbs on strings in my house.

[Selby]

I expect that it will also positively affect my cooling bill, so I might come out ahead financially if I were to take lots of measurements and do some light math.  The room might even be brighter, but with this particular model I think the lumens will be within engineering tolerances of the incandescents.

I saved $45/mo in lighting and cooling bills when I changed every single bulb to LED 2 years ago. There were something like 20 60W flood lights in the kitchen and living room, and another 15 60-80W incandescents. Just the impact of not running the AC was tremendous. I have had to replace 2-3 bulbs due to failures since then despite the 10 year warranty, but considering how crappy the CFLs I've had were, it's not a big deal.

I'm also extremely light sensitive so I dislike the harsh bright whites that fluorescents provide. I prefer the softer yellows of the old bulbs or candles.  The LED ones are bright, but not so harsh that it bothers my eyes (sunglasses in the house isn't cool no matter who you are).

My first choice in LED conversion was solely in the rooms that the kids were in all the time since they don't believe the ONOFF switch has any other position but ON.

[Soln]

In local news, someone broke into our big metal mailbox yesterday.  A mailbox sitting between 6 other identical mailboxes. I tend to suspect former tenants, since we irregularly received mail from spammers and even the IRS looking for a business at our address.  

[Sky]

People with big-ass houses.

New or renovated spaces, more specifically. Most rooms in my place have 3 light sources, a couple lamps and an overhead fixture.

I would add some recessed fixtures in the kitchen, maybe; but I don't find necessary, I like lamps. I have a fixture I've been meaning to install in the kitchen for more light on the stovetop (the OTR microwave isn't as bright as the old hood), but there is a joist that runs directly over it that needs to be dealt with :(

[Selby]

New or renovated spaces, more specifically.

Very true. My old 40's house in San Francisco had 1 light fixture in the ceiling (with 1 bulb) per room - 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, living room and kitchen. I had a few standing or table fixtures and lamps for ambience but that was it. The house I grew up in built in 1978 was the same way. When did we start putting lights everywhere?

[MahrinSkel]

About the same time we cut down on the number of windows to make houses easier to heat/cool.

--Dave

[Polysorbate80]

A quick guesttimate gives me about 130 lights in our 5000 square foot house, with another dozen or so in the barn.  The garage/greenhouse/woodshop is a special case, it's got just three regular light fixtures and four large metal halide fixtures.

I think we're up to about 65% LED bulbs now.  I paid for someone to do the climbing to swap out the bulbs in the can lights and chandeliers; I'm not happy climbing 17' ladders.  The rest I've just been swapping as they burn out.

[Paelos]

About the same time we cut down on the number of windows to make houses easier to heat/cool.

--Dave

I'm moving out of my condo for that exact reason. It's got huge windows on every freaking wall, and while you get great views, they don't open and the place turns into an oven in the summer.

[Rasix]

I don't think I have near that many lighting fixtures and my house isn't exactly small (but neither is it 5000 sq ft  )

The old guy next door at work is being forced into retirement.  I sure will miss all of the whistling/humming/singing, nail clipping, phlegm coughing up, conference calls with the door open, and lunches consisting of reheated seafood. 

[Yegolev]

I have both windows and overhead lights, so go figure that shit out.  We like it bright.  My species evolved in the sun.

Related, light sources at eye level can go fuck themselves.

[Yegolev]

The old guy next door at work is being forced into retirement.

Does he know Docker?