Spots not bright enough

[soul2soul]

Hi All,

I have spot lights installed throughout my house & they now seem to be giving off a yellow rather than bright white light. I have 50w bulbs in them & I am sure that they were a lot brighter when they were first installed.

Any ideas as to what could cause this or common things for me to check?

Thanks in Advance

 

[mikhailfaradayski]

try swapping one lamp for a new one. Preferably where you can compare it directly with an adjacent one.
This will tell you whether its the lamps at fault or whether to nip to the opticians

BTW, Do you like the general effect that the downlighters give you?

 

[soul2soul]

Thanks will get a new bulb tonight to compare & report back. Love the effect of them apart from them not being bright enough when the dimmer is turned up on full.

 

[Steve]

Love the effect of them apart from them not being bright enough when the dimmer is turned up on full.

<shudders>


So now you have at least 4x50w in each room, thats 200 watts minimum per room. And its still not bright enough for you. May I be so bold as to suggest scrapping the dimmers and buying some CFLs (compact fluorescents AKA energy savers) I light my staircase with a 20w CFL. Its plenty bright enough.

 

[fattony]

depends, I have 6 in 1 room, but 20w lamps in them and a dimmer. Really does depend what light level you need / want

 

[Steve]

I suppose it doesn't help that many DIYers believe that 12 volts means its energy saving. And that most mains fittings wont accept the larger CFLs (without looking stupid), and that GU10 CFLs aren't well advertised to DIYers.

LED is the way forward.

 

[RF Lighting]

But not for retro fitting into 50mm downlighters, where halogen is still the best lamp type.

 

[GaryMo]

LED is the way forward.

I second fixed a job today which included 6 downligheters on a front veranda.
The fittings were IP65 GU10 and lamps were 240v 5watt Osram LED's, warm white in colour.
I was quite surprised with the light output but would be slightly put off with the £20ish price tag per lamp.

 

[ericmark]

the dimmer

There's the problem. The whole idea of using quartz is it gets that hot it reflects the active material which leaves the tungsten element back onto the element so allowing it to last a lot longer. Temperature is critical too hot and it burns out too cool and the tungsten is deposited on the quartz which then goes black and whole lamp fails. And with extra low voltage models the inverter is specially designed to maintain the voltage to critical level even when the supply voltage goes down.

Although one can dim the units it's asking for problems. It seems you got what you asked for. If you want to dim the lights don't use quartz if you want quartz don't dim them. Simple.

 

[soul2soul]

try swapping one lamp for a new one. Preferably where you can compare it directly with an adjacent one.
This will tell you whether its the lamps at fault or whether to nip to the opticians

BTW, Do you like the general effect that the downlighters give you?

Got some new bulbs over the weekend & put them in next to old ones & cannot tell the difference. Also found one of the boxes for the lights & they are 240v GU10's.

 

[Chri5]

Re read Eric informative post. It's the dimmers causing the problem.

Merry Chri5 mas

 

[soul2soul]

ok thanks - will get rid of the dimmers.
I assume that this is a common problem with dimmers then?