Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

I am all for saving the whales and hugging penguins, especially if it gives me an excuse to buy more LED stuff. This apartment is only a few months old but the construction company chose to put three MR16 halogen spotlights in the bathroom, that is 3 x 35W for a total of 105W to light up a tiny room. What where they thinking? Halogen spotlights are a bit '80ish anyway.

In other rooms I can just screw in a low power fluorescent lamp as a replacement for an incandescent light bulb and feel good about my self and my progressive approach to energy consumption. But with tiny MR16 spotlights, there are no fluorescent alternatives available that I know of. Google led me to led1.de that offered a few LED alternatives though and that is even better than fluorescent alternatives.

They had two "high power" alternatives when it came to MR16, high power in this case meaning 3W which is about as much as you can get out of a LED today. One alternative uses a Cree XR-E LED and the other a Seoul P4. I chose the P4 because it is brighter but unfortunately it also has a colder white (6500K) compared to the warmer white of the Cree (3200K).

I was concerned the LED light would be a lot less bright than the 35W halogen I wanted to replace and I was also concerned about the beam being to focused and only illuminating a small spot on the floor instead of illuminating the entire room. To test the suitability of the LED spotlight, I begun by ordering only one. It turned out to work quite well. The 3W LED lamp is noticeable less bright than the 35W halogen lamp, but one LED and two halogen lamps certainly lit up the room well enough. The beam spread was also narrower than with the halogen lamp but not as narrow as I had worried it would be. The odd looking reflector and a diffusing lens seem to work well.

In fact, it all worked so well I went ahead and changed a second one of the halogen spotlights for a LED lamp. Now, with two out of three lamps being 3W LED lamps, the overall brightness is noticeably lower and I don't think switching all three lamps to LEDs would work, but two out of three is not bad - I brought down the power consumption from 105W to 41W.