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NY[_2_] NY[_2_] is offline
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Default Halogen to be banned

"nightjar" wrote in message
...
On 09/06/2021 09:39, ss wrote:
..."Sales of halogen lightbulbs are to be banned in the UK from
September, with fluorescent lights to follow, under government climate
change plans"....


Apart from a few, rarely used, lamps that have yet to be changed, I have
long converted everything to LED.


Likewise. When we bought our house, the previous people had installed a grid
of GU10 fittings to light the kitchen and two of the bedrooms. The kitchen
had LED GU10s, although we replaced some of those with Philips Hue bulbs
that we already had, and moved the ordinary LED ones into one of the
bedrooms because both of those had tungsten GU10 - each bedroom used about
500 W (10x 50 W bulbs) so the saving by using LED instead was significant.

A few fittings were transformer-fed 12 V, so I converted those to normal
mains-fed because the mains LED GU10s are/were a lot cheaper than the 12 V
equivalents that fit in the same ceiling fitting.

The only rooms that aren't lit by LED now are an en-suite bathroom which
still has a grid of 12 V tungstens (I'd need to go into the loft and change
the fittings from there, because the lens on the front is glued to the ring
of the fitting and can only be changed from above) and the garage which is
lit by 5 ft fluorescent tubes. Oh, and a bedside light which is
touch-sensitive and can only be used with tungstens: my father-in-law, an
electrican, said that LEDs or CFLs would burn out the thyristor.

It seems a shame to throw away the perfectly serviceable tungsten bulbs, but
I can't see us ever using them, apart from the 60 W bayonet one for that
bedside lamp.


The real problem is light fittings which use various esoteric bulbs. Until
about 20 years ago, just about every light, whether pendant, batten, wall or
table lamp, used large bayonet. Then we started to get poncy light fittings
which used SES, SBC, LES - or LBC if you were lucky.

I know we are unusual in the UK in using LBC as the (former) standard, and
that even 220 V Europe uses LES (I'd thought that 240 V implied bayonet and
120 V implied Edison screw, but it's not as simple as that!). I still think
that bayonet is better than screw in terms of speed of changing (push, twist
slightly, remove) and in terms of not corroding into the fitting. It's a
shame that Philips Hue are not available in SBC - we've had to buy lots of
SES to SBC adaptors to rooms with SBC fittings where we want the
controllability of Hue. And the quality of the Edison screw part of those
converters is often very dodgy: we bought one batch where the act of
screwing in a bulb compressed the centre spring terminal in such as way that
it touched the screwed ring of the bulb as well as its centre contact -
bang! Those went straight back and I got Amazon to remove them from sale as
not fit for purpose.