Sunday, December 8, 2013

LED Lighting

If I haven't mentioned it before, the Breezy house is full of recessed lighting. We counted 27 BR-40 bulbs and some 10+ smaller bulbs. These 27 lights are loaded with an assortment of 65 and 100 watt flood lights so you can imagine my heart racing whenever someone turns lights on and leaves them on.

This afternoon, we went to the supply store and got dimmable LED lights and new switches to replace the ones in our house. Now, we've replaced 11 out of 27 and I'm feeling good. We have all the lights on in the kitchen / dining area and we barely use the power of one of the previous floodlights.

Some things I learned
- dimmer switches for incandescent bulbs will NOT work for dimmable CFL or LED lights
- some switches need some tweaking to make them gang-able. In our case, we got Lutron maestro switches so we have to remove the heat fins, depending on where it will be placed. Have to remember that removal of the heat fins will affect the rating of the switches, the more fins you remove, the less wattage the switch can handle. Documentation in http://www.environmentallights.com/files/documents/0301660.pdf
- If you want a light to be controlled from multiple locations, you need a master switch and companion switches.