Led lights without bulbs.

[Fridayschild]

The down lights in my ceilings are all starting to fallout due to age and having been a bit cheap when bought. My trusty builder says I should look at Aurora M10 fire rated down lighters . These have no bulbs, use very little power, guaranteed for 10 years. Over 10 years they will be cheaper than conventional down lighters.

On the down side they are quite expensive now - £40 - and I think if anything goes wrong I need the electrician back to fix them. Also when they come to the end of their life in 10 years time I am looking at a big sum of money to replace them, rather than a series of swapping bulbs. The person who had this house before me put down lighters in the whole house so we are talking about 30 of them...

Anyone got any experience of these?

I would put in standard down lighters with led bulbs personally. You will still make savings (and boy will you if you had halogen bulbs!) but you'll be able to just replace the bulbs when they go.

The cost of running CFLs (energy saving lamps) is the same as the cost of running LEDs but they are much cheaper to buy and available with greater output.

In ten, five or two years lighting technology will have moved on so spending lots on lighting now will not be an investment.

Downlighters are a fashion statement, they are a functionally very poor way to light a room. Holes in ceilings allow smoke, fire and noise to pass through.

Thank you both. I agree down lighters are not great. They were in the house when I bought it. Sadly it remains cheaper to replace the down lighters than to put in some other lighting so I am stuck with them for now.

We had exactly your situation: bought a 15 year old house with about the same number of halogens in. After a few of them fried their wiring (!) we decided to replace the lot... The holes were there already and the downlighters fitted into the pre-existing hole sizes.
We got the fixed downlighter units in the bathroom/loo and spare room as they are simple and get less use than some of the kitchen (it's also less of an issue if one bulb goes). . In the kitchen itself and the porch we got the electrician to fit GU10 sockets for LED bulbs that we can change as the need arises, as those are our high-traffic areas where a blown bulb would be annoying. We are so far very pleased with both the downlighter units (go for extra warm white if you want it to feel like energy-saving-fluoro bulbs) and the GU10 LED bulbs (we got the bulbs from LED Hut). They also do plug-and-play stickytape LED strips for underlighting cupboards that are great!