The reduction in cost of LED lighting is surprising. An item of anecdata from my experience.

My house is somebody else's self-build - a nearly finished "reduce a bungalow to trhee walls and a hole in the ground, and rebuild as a house with 150% extra space" done in 2008-2012 to rather better than building regs, but not near-passive, standard. It was 2013 and they ran out of getting their money back so left some things undone.

He had a bit of an obsession with ceiling spots, and when we moved in there were 19 in the kitchen, and a total of 63 50W halogen GU10s in the house. I replaced them all with the new £4 Ikea ones as the first thing I did - ie the cost was about £250. It paid for itself in about 2 years.

Now 12 years later, most of my Ikea LED GU10 lights have yellowed, and maybe a dozen have gone pop, so I am replacing all the rest.

The "Trade Rated" pack of 50 in the LAP brand I picked up from Screwfix (949YY) yesterday came in at £32.

How things change. Time will tell if I bought a pup.

Very cheap. Well spotted.

Though 345 lumen is a bit tight on light output.

For all the progress, I have yet to find the perfect GU10 - 800 lumen+, dimmable, 60deg, CCT remotely controllable, CRI>90.

I wonder where we would be had they not banned people from using the old ones.

On 24/10/2026 at 11:06, Ferdinand said:

Now 12 years later, most of my Ikea LED GU10 lights have yellowed, and maybe a dozen have gone pop, so I am replacing all the rest.

We massively overpaid for downlights when we built 11 years ago. I got a bit obsessed with light quality, so we paid a lot more than we really should have, especially given that many cheap LED downlights today probably measure as well as what we paid through the nose for back then. We should have bought decent fixtures with replaceable bulbs, then replaced the bulbs with better versions over time as they deteriorated or failed.

The only upside is that we've had only one failure in that whole time. It's somewhere where it isn't particularly visible, so I haven't bothered checking what's actually failed - it could be the driver, which I can replace easily enough.