LED lights for the Living Room?

Posted by jplesset on February 3, 2014 under LED Lighting | Be the First to Comment

Sure, why not?  If you have general lighting in your living room, it’s most likely incandescent, or possibly fluorescent.  Incandescent (regular old light bulbs) is very wasteful of energy and your money.  Fluorescent is much more economical, but they don’t dim, often have poor color, and look kind of “industrial” to many.

LED lighting is even more efficient than fluorescent, comes in either “cool” or “warm” white, both with very good color, and can be hidden easily.  In my case, our living room has sconce fixtures on columns and indirect “trays” overhead.  When we built the house, the sconces could have had incandescent lamps in them, though I put in low power LEDs instead.  The overhead trays had 4′ fluorescent, dimmable tubes across the whole ceiling.

As you can see, it looked pretty good. Five years later, one bay of the fluorescent tubes wouldn’t light.  I bought replacement tubes, but that didn’t help.  Bad ballasts.  Called the manufacturer who said, “buy new ballasts, send us the old ones.  If we determine they’re bad, we’ll replace them for you.”  No thank you.

Instead of replacing the ballasts ($125 EACH), I replaced all of the tubes with LED strip-lights.  “Double-brightness” strips in warm white were $39 for a reel 16 feet long. Add $49 for a power supply for each one, and about 2 hours to install it all.  Now, it’s more dimmable, uses 1/3 the electricity, and should last 20 years with no maintenance.  It doesn’t really look very different. The LEDs come on quicker, and are “warm” instead of “cool”, like the old tubes were.  I also replaced the 6 watt reflector lamps in the sconces with 11 watt LED “A” lamps, so the room is actually brighter than before.  These are dimmable, too…

Here’s a link to the strips I used.

and the power supplies

and the sconce lights. These simply screw into standard sockets.

Stay tuned for more LED projects.  I’ve also replaced all the under-cabinet lights in the kitchen, and all the ceiling recesses in the hallways.  Dining room is next for more light…  Oh, yeah.  The reflector lamps in the bedroom are still the original incandescent 50 watt bulbs.  Those will be replaced as soon as the budget allows with these.

Questions?  Comments welcome.