God is in the Details

We need more example of good lighting, as being a bloke I struggle with lighting design!

After struggling with kitchen lighting and spending a fortune replacing bulbs very very regularly, I vowed to go back to a simple fluorescent tube in my next kitchen.  It’s what we have in this temporary house and it lights the kitchen perfectly.  It’s not pretty, but it is definitely functional.

I prefer table lamps in living room areas but I like them controlled by light switches.  A bit more effort at design stage but the plugs are cheap and readily available.

It seems to me that flat panels are the “natural” form factor for LEDs as they can emit both their light and heat in all directions easily. Also, they avoid big holes in the ceiling. They seem to still be a bit of a niche product, I'm not sure why.

We have flat panel LEDs in the kitchen/dining room and in the hall.  They seem to have a very even spread of light, with none of the glare often associated with downlights.  We originally fitted MR16 downlights in the kitchen/dining room, with 12V LED lamps, and still have a fair few of these around the house, in the bathrooms, WC utility room and my study. 

 

Replacing the downlights with panel lights was pretty easy, and didn't require any redecoration.  I'll probably replace more of the downlights with panels at some future point, just to get better light quality.

That sounds like a good solution.  We’re going to the NEC show in a couple of weeks so will look out for them 

I’ve just replaced some downlighting with the LAP fixed ones from Screwfix and pleasantly surprised. Like @JSHarris though I’ve used the flat panel ones and very happy with them and the light you get - if they were to do them so you could have multiple units from a single transformer then I would be even happier ..!

13 minutes ago, PeterW said:

I’ve just replaced some downlighting with the LAP fixed ones from Screwfix and pleasantly surprised. Like @JSHarris though I’ve used the flat panel ones and very happy with them and the light you get - if they were to do them so you could have multiple units from a single transformer then I would be even happier ..!

 

 

Easy to sort out, as I run ours of a single power supply.  I did this for two reasons, the first was that I'd already got 12V running to the downlighter positions, the second was that I found there was a fair bit of radio interference from the small constant current power supply units; enough to make a portable radio unusable, but then we do live in an area where radio reception is pretty poor to start with.

 

I ended up adding another 24 V power supply anyway, as we decided to increase the size of some of the units and they needed a higher voltage.  The mod I did sounds crude and inefficient, but when I worked out the additional losses I found they were small enough to live with, in return for the simplicity of the approach.  I made up connecting leads for each panel light that had a 2.1mm free socket on the end (so that the lights would plug straight in to the new wiring loom), and added a 68 Ohm, 1 Watt resistor, in series with the positive supply to each lamp.

 

These resistors limited the current to each lamp to the rated 300mA, and only introduced a small efficiency loss, barely any greater than than of the rather crude constant current driver units that they are supplied with.  By a happy coincidence, the same resistor value works for the 3 W, 0.3 A lamps and the 6 W 0.3 A lamps, although the latter need a 24 VDC supply and the former a 12 VDC supply.

Anybody got a pic of these flat panel lights your all talking about. 

I've used a mix of of different shapes and sizes of them, but they all seem to be very similar in design, like these: https://ledlam.co.uk/product-category/led-panel-light (random site chosen from the web, don't think I bought from here).

Ok cool, I was envisaging a more office type thing, 600 x600 fitted into a false ceiling affair. 

13 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

Ok cool, I was envisaging a more office type thing, 600 x600 fitted into a false ceiling affair. 

 

 

There are plenty of those about too, but the smaller round panels are pretty similar to flush-faced downlighters, but without the projection behind.  The 3 W ones are pretty much the same, in terms of light output, as a downlighter fitted with an LED, but with a wider and more even light distribution.  The ones we have fitted into a 65mm diameter hole, so were a straight replacement for the downlights we used to have in the kitchen and dining room.  I opted to replace four of them (two over the island, two over the sink) with the larger 6 W panels, which meant opening the holes out a bit, but this wasn't that hard, and the mix of 3 W and 6 W units in the same ceiling seems to work well.

 

We have cool white ones in the kitchen area and warm white ones in the dining area, and TBH I prefer the look of the warm white ones, and may change the cool white ones over one day, as the warm white ones seem just as bright.

Thanks for all the comments.

I have temporary bulbs in our kitchen but fancy using led flat panels like @JSHarris, my only worry is the radio interference some have.