lights

Brief reviews of some energy saving lamps we've used.

Our kitchen is currently lit with 10 × 50 watt tungsten lamps. Yes: that's a total of 500 watts. Which is utterly obscene and I feel distinctly uncomfortable just thinking about it. We want to replace these tungstens with LEDs, hence reducing the power required to light the kitchen by a factor of 10 or so. We have several requirements:

• Must be dimmable down to 5% or 1% (some LEDs only dim to 60%)
• Must produce enough light to fill the kitchen
• Must produce a warm, cosy light
• Must produce a light with a high enough colour rendering index to mean that skin looks like skin and not like pale plastic

This post is basically a collection of notes recording my research into dimmable LEDs.

PLL tubes, ballasts and holders