so i'm outside a customer's house the job i've come to do today is to replace halogen GU10 50
watt lamps they've got 10 of them in their kitchen they're the recessed down lights they want LEDs
version now the LED like this one here is a direct replacement GU10 the GU10 they're 230
volts they've got these two lugs they just push up and they twist so they're a direct replacement for
the old halogen GU10s some people get modeled up with the extra low volt 12 volt spotlights which
are just a a push-in version these will only work if they are mains voltage at 230 volts and they're
the GU10 connections connections so the LEDs i've chosen to replace today
are these five watt versions and it states on the on the box that they are 90 percent
energy saving so i'm just going to do a little bit of maths review this morning
on this so if what what the customer has at the moment they have 10 halogens at 50 watts each
so that's 10 times 50 watts gives you 500 watts so that's half a kilowatt 500 watts is half a
kilowatt in terms of paying for electricity we pay for electricity in what's called units so
if you look on the back of your electricity bill and you'll see on the back of the um on
the bill it tells you how much you pay per unit of electricity you use so remember a thousand
watts is one kilowatt hour which equals one unit of electricity so say for example you use
um you're paying 20 pence per unit and you've got at the moment the customer has 10
halogen 50 watt lamps so that means for every two hours them lamps are running that you're going to
be using one unit of electricity so for every two hours that's going to be 20 pence worth of
electricity now it doesn't sound like an awful lot but if you imagine they're just running constantly
then it is going to be using quite a lot of electricity a lot lots of them and ultimately it's
going to cost you more on your electricity bill so the LEDs are very popular now but i'm still coming
to lots of people's houses and they've got the halogens another benefit with putting the LEDs on
is that they don't produce the amount of heat that halogen does halogens are so inefficient because
of the amount of heat they produce once a halogen is on once it's been on for five or ten seconds
you can't touch it but it will literally just burn your skin off your hands a good quality led they
hardly get warmer you know they they sort of get lukewarm but they certainly won't burn your hands
so the the particular LEDs that we're using today as stated before it says on the back
that they're 90 90 efficiency or energy saving so again going back to do a little bit of maths
so we now use these so they are 5 watts each and we're going to use 10 of them so that's 10 times
5 that's 50 watts so that now means 20 hours that these are running you're only going to be using
one unit of electricity whereas previously for every two hours of the the halogens he was using
one unit so now you're getting 20 hours for the same price as you were getting the for two hours
so obviously that's saving you a lot more money and so it's actually saving you because they are
only five watts compared to 50 watts so that's only 10 of the halogen then you're saving 90
percent on your energy bill as well they do work i fitted no end of these um not particularly this
make or i've fitted a few of these ones before and they're good quality lights but everyone
should be going over to LEDs sometimes it's not just a direct replacement sometimes you can have
problems so for example these ones are non dimmable so it's no good putting these a direct
replacement for halogens if they're on a dimmer switch you'd need to buy a certain dimmer switch
that is compatible with this particular type of LEDs i've been caught up with that many times
i've even bought dimmable LEDs for replacement before but they're still not compatible with the
dimmer that the customer had so you do have to be very careful when you are using um dimmable LEDs
but these ones are non-dimmable they're just on a normal locker switch so there won't be a problem
so um see i'm going to go into the customer's house now and we're going to replace these