Help with Led or Halogen??

[seekingsally]

Daft question alert but we have moved into a house which has MR16 Halogen spotlights in the kitchen. One has just failed and in the middle of changing it I noticed the crazy amount of heat they are all giving out and would love to switch all of them to LEDs instead.

My question is can I simply replace them with LED bulbs or is there more to it that simply popping in a new bulb??

I have no insight, but hope this bump will help you get answers - I thought this was on the baby names board and thought you'd lost your mind. I think I'd slightly recommend Halogen above Led for your new DS, but would go for John over either of them.

No help on light bulbs, sorry.

Unfortunately, halogen lamps are no longer made, so it will be very difficult to replace them, so switching to LED seems like the perfect solution, however, it isn't as easy as that as MR16 halogen bulbs run off a transformer, and these transformers have a minimum load, usually 20w. If you switch out to a 6W LED bulb, chances are it will flash, strobe, or not even light at all.

I'd definitely recommend either having the existing lights rewired with a GU10 lampholder https://www.universal-lighting.co.uk/products/replacement-ceramic-gu10-lamp-holder-with-terminal-block/ if you want to keep them and bypass the existing transformer, or replace the complete light fitting with something more modern, making sure the ceiling hole size you have is the same as required for your new lights.

I think Hal could work actually. Led is definitely a non starter

I have GU10 in all my lights apart from 2x of the bathroom ones. These are the MR16s. I presume low voltage because of the shock hazard. Nowadays I think you can get sealed GU10 for bathrooms though.

The 2x MR16 bulbs I have each one runs off a single transformer and I switched to MR16 LED bulbs and they are fine. But it really depends on the transformer type so you might be lucky and you might not.

If you have a kitchen full of halogens though the main issue is the cost !

12x 40W halogen bulbs will cost about 12p an hour to run (assuming about 25p per kWh), whereas 12x 5W LEDs will be about 1.5p an hour.

My house has about 30 downlights in it, so the cost for lighting would be horrible if I hadn't converted to LEDs.