New regulations were promulgated last year that require all lamps to have a minimum efficency of 90 lumens per W. No technology is banned by these regulations, but incandescent lights can’t meet this figure, nor can CFLs.
Manufacturers and retailers were given a year to run down old stock, and the minimum efficiency comes into effect for all lights sold from 24 May.
Trouble is, this is going to push prices up. SAns, it seems, still prefer incandescents because even with the sin tax attached to them, they are cheaper.
These halogen lights apparently produce the closest light spectrum as a black body when it is heated up (which is the ideal light source) see: Black body - Wikipedia
I don’t know about the common or garden globe that we all used to use for home lighting. I don’t see those when I go to Builders or to my first stop lighting store.
However I do see incandescents when some other shape or size is required. My wife has a halogen desk top lamp that brings me out in a rash.
But survey data shows that incandescents are still the number one choice of South African consumers (which may be to do with price). So maybe I go to the wrong stores or something.
Same here. Had 6 of those 60W Halogen downlights in the kitchen, which at 360W-ish doesn’t sound like much until you realise those lights are essentially the first one turned on at dusk, remains on the entire evening, and probably again early tomorrow before sunrise. They add up to quite a bit of energy use.
What I had done early on in the current porsie was to have a skylight installed in the darkest room in the house (that’s not a euphemism) and in the kitchen. These are the type that have a lens at the top and a mirrored tube that works as a collector. They don’t provide nice views of the night sky, but they do bring a lot of light into a room.
Before our current place we rented a place that was relatively new. Only GU10 ‘downlights’ for the whole house.
Shortly after moving in I installed a ET112 meter with a VenusPi to take a look at energy consumption as we were spending quite a bit more than before on electricity even though we had those on the roof solar geysers. I remember walking around the house with the VRM app open and switching on all the lights and just stood there with my mouth open when I saw the figure.
I think it was a week later that I bought boxes of the 5W LED GU10’s. If I remember correctly we replaced about 30x of the 70W with 5W. Luckily caught a big sale at Lighting Warehouse at the time.
If my calculation was correct that was made up after a couple of months.
That’s exactly the point. In our case we had living area, kitchen, passageway and main bedroom lights pretty much on from sunset until bed time. Was over 1kWh just for lights…
It’s actually crazy the difference a couple of things made back then (remember this was PV-less):
Replaced all bulbs with low wattage LEDs.
Changed the geyser temperature from 70 to 55.
Added a geyser timer to not heat up during the day to give the solar geyser time to do it’s thing (had a late afternoon boost for bad weather days).
I’ve got an old garage that was converted into a room that is now the guest bedroom, but pretty much wasted space, so I’m contemplating making it my home office (swapping it with my current ‘lots of natural light’ room) and a friend actually mentioned getting a skylight in. Good to hear it is actually worth it.
How much did that cost if you don’t mind me asking? Feel free to DM if you don’t want to share publicly.
They can be quite bright during the day, and they can still provide some light at night. I wouldn’t recommend them for an area in which somebody might sleep.
But they are good for gloomy rooms, which will receive lots of light without troubling Eskom.
I honestly can’t speak about prices. We got ours about 12 years ago. I will say that if they’re installed properly they give no trouble. We’ve never had them letting rain water in. I have taken the lens off the bottom to clean out bugs and dust. Once.
