Halogen light bulbs
February 13, 2009
When we got a new kitchen last year our builder put in halogen lights – 12 of them, each at 50W. Making a grand total of 600W of power every time we turn on the lights. Which is a lot of the time at this time of year. They are often on from 5pm until 11pm. From using our electricity monitor we can see that this is the biggest drain on our electricity use.
This in itself is surprising – its not the cooker or the TV or all those devices we leave on standby its just the lights!
So what to do? Simplest first, turn the lights off. And we are trying, sometimes only having half of them on. Trying to turn them off when we leave the room etc.
What I’d really like to do is replace them with LEDs. But the technology isn’t there yet. It turns out that a 50W LED costs £20+ each. Thats an unacceptably large amount of money to replace them all. See here for details:
http://www.yourwelcome.co.uk/acatalog/GU10_LED_Lamps.html
My only hope is that technology has improved vastly over the last couple of years (50W halogens were not available at all until very recently). So if I wait a year or two more (hopefully when my existing halogens start to go!) they’ll be down to an acceptable price and available in my local B&Q.
I’m really surprised that halogens haven’t really been addressed by shops. Our local B&Q is full of energy saving light bulbs for standard lights. But how much of a normal house uses these now. Not that much I’d say. I think its just the bedrooms in our house – maybe 30% of our total lighting. And I don’t think other people are that different. So energy saving bulbs are a help and I definitely use them where I can. But realistically they don’t address that much of the issue at all. And until there is a solution for all forms of lighting (small odd sized side lights are another problem as the slightly bigger energy saving candles just don’t fit) we’re not going to make much progress.
Entry Filed under: electricity reading. .
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1.
Francois | March 16, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Same with us. When we renovated our place, the hallway got a track light with 4 halogens, and the kitchen has 6. Me, I’d have been happy with a single fluorescent tube (like my childhood kitchen), but my wife says indignantly that we do not live in a factory. (I guess it would not exactly boost the resale value.)
Nevertheless, she’s come to dislike the halogens as much as I do. Besides the ridiculous energy consumption, their durability is simply appalling. It seems as if we’re replacing bulbs (not cheap) every other month or so. We strongly suspect bad installation, but we are not experts and the electrician who installed them, predictably, says that there’s no way his installation could cause the bulbs to blow more often. He says we can make them last longer by installing a special transformer — about £15 — for each bulb. Ha ha!
We partially decided on halogens in order for it to be dimmable, but every time a bulb blows it fuses the dimmer reostat, so we don’t even have that anymore.
2.
tryingtobegreen | March 23, 2009 at 1:04 pm
The ones in the kitchen don’t go that often – we’ve only had to replace one in 18 months. So that suggests it is your installation. We have a fancy light in the hall too which takes those tiny halogen bulbs and that goes all the time – we have to replace a bulb about once a fortnight. We think its a dodgy fitting so the only thing we can do is replace the whole thing.