welcome to a series of videos on dimming led lamps this series we like to call the Great British Dim
Off so what exactly we're gonna be looking at gordon okay so we're gonna be looking at
dimming lamps and specifically the gu10 lamp that you'll find installed in millions of homes across
britain usually in cans like this all right let's have a closer look just to familiarize ourselves
okay yep so yeah that halogen lamp there we're going to be replacing that yes place
that so let's just have a look at the lamp on your fingers yeah and what amazes me is the amazing job
the lighting industry's done over the last few years to ensure the led replacement for this lamp
is exactly the same size oh yeah physically characteristics or identical that wasn't
the case at the start that wasn't good so a few years ago you'd be looking at something like this
and what often happened was these wouldn't fit in the actual can you were trying to replace the lamp
in right so things have changed but the industry's done a fantastic job on the size of the lamp
but also that important thing dimming the lamp and being able to dim to low levels without
any infuriating things like flicker and noise and it's things like that that we're going to
be looking at in this series right so those cans are still around they're still being fitted and
it would be almost i don't know not wise to be taking a can out the ceiling just to replace it
with an led fitting when actually the lamp itself can give you better performance possibly than the
fitting you're going to put in its place yeah and let's forget a lot of these are still fitted today
you know there's a bit of a the contractors there's a there's people have a love-hate
relationship some people still like to fit traditional cans with lamps right
because one main reason that sort of decouples them from the process should something go wrong
right because most customers are happy to change possibly a lamp where they wouldn't want to change
an led fitting so you can see them going in new builds and put the cans in because the the
contractor the builders thinking they're probably going to pop a lamp out and put a new one in and
not call them back to replace a fan yeah that's one thing but you also do gain some flexibility
from lamps because obviously technology is still developing you get enormous choice in terms of our
color temperatures some even smart lamps coming up in the market some of the unique lamps we'll
look at in this series and things like beam angle there's a wider range of beam angles in lamps and
there are possibly in some of those downright fittings that are available on the market you've
gone to a lot of effort i can't take one ounce of credit for the rig you've built here or the
rig that's above our head so let's see some of the processes you went through so you were loving
yourself in joinery workshop i would suggest yeah nothing worse than the drilling yeah mass holes
all hopefully equally spaced to fit our dynalite cans that we got from knightsbridge and then
obviously wiring them up to create a giant connect four sets and and we're going to use this to
validate different uh lamps so went to market and and acquired lamps from some leading manufacturers
and then we're going to match them up with some dimmers again from from
different manufacturers and the interesting thing is some manufacturers make both lamp
and dimmers some people just concentrate on dimmers other people just concentrate on lamps
and you've got the ability with the rig to interchange the dimmer and the lamp so we
won't necessarily have the same manufacturer of both dimming each other at the same time which
is really clever so we see the performance ratings of those and then we've got the rig above us that
we'll be able to see different lamps dimming against different dimmers and the performances
because there's going to be some issues there isn't there gordon we've got some things that
we want to bring up in this series of videos don't we yeah so what we've found is we've got
our legacy dimmer and it's quite interesting that the dimmer that's installed in the installation
where you're going to fit the lamps may actually cause problems particularly noise that manifests
itself in the lamp so we're going to look at that okay we're going to look at low end dimming we're
going to look at how some of these dimmers have functions that you can set up on them
that means you get better performance out of the lamps themselves all right okay and we're also
going to look at lamps when we talk about dimming not just bringing the color down obviously the
brightness of that lamp but changing the color to obviously affect the mood of the room as well
yeah that's that's a lamp technology that some people just may not know even exists
and that's that's the benefit i would say to the electrical contractor if you've got canned
fittings and you want to change the style of that room it might just be a simple case of changing
the lamp to one that's dimmable but will also change its color therefore when it's dimmed down
it will actually change the atmosphere of the room and add real benefit to the customer at probably
little cost or little effort yeah and that's we're at the start of this series here so as this series
progresses we'll be adding more videos to it if you've got questions that pop up as you as you
watch the videos in the series fire them in and we'll try and address them in some of the later
videos in the series and as always the playlist is now live so it will appear at the end card it's
probably in the description below he's probably put it above our head as well so if you want to
go on from this point forward the videos will be there to watch not all of them and we'll produce
more as we go but we'd like your feedback in order to progress this series of videos and what you
want us to see so as always leave those comments below and we'll try and get to as many as we can
you