An electrician visited the other day and explained to us about our lights. The lights in the kitchen (I see they are called folding spotlights) were causing a problem because they were coming away from the wall, kept burning out and used too many lights - in a long kitchen there were two sets of folding spotlights making eight spotlights in all). We replaced them after only five years with two sets of three spotlights. These spotlights were not on a branch so there was less leverage involved. The electrician, who is a family friend and did not charge us, explained that the lights that came with both the old and the new were G10 Halogen lights but he suggested that we replaced them with GU10 dichronic LED's which, he assured us, would save us a lot of energy. He explained that these days LED's could be very bright. The important factor was the colour temperature: very bright ones at 6,000 Kelvin would be almost daylight strength and very white, dimmer ones, at 4,000 Kelvin or so, would glow with a more yellow effect: it was up to us which we preferred, he said. They used between 5 or 7 Watts.
He suggested we buy the LED's from Amazon at about £12 for 8. If you bought them locally they were about £7 each, he said. I showed him the concealed lighting in the other room, and he said they were the same lights. Lights could theoretically last for about 25 years these days, he said, but they did not because people had to switch them off and on all the time. Halogen lights were incredibly sensitive to vibration or movement in the ceiling, from the room above, which broke the delicate filaments. GU10 LED's come in two types SMD's or Cree. Cree were more expensive and purportedly lasted longer but he thought that the SMD's seemed to be fine. Also we had to check that the shafts were short and not extended, because we wanted them to be surface mounted so the long ones would stick out. You could dim them too if you wanted, he said, but if you wanted to be able to dim them you had to buy dimmable ones in the first place. And it used more energy to dim them anyway, so we decided that we weren't particularly interested in that. All this was most enlightening so I thought I'd better write it all down in case I needed to know in future.
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