From our previous article we outlined the biggest chunk of your power bill over the year is from heating. And that chunk is much larger than any other types of use coming to around 30% of your bills.
But how is heat lost in a home once it’s paid for and pumped into a home? Air gaps are the largest method of loss, so that includes those open windows and doors as well as, you guessed it, old downlight fittings. Just get up on a chair on a cold evening and hold your hand close to the downlight fitting, you will feel quite a strong draft! That is because that gap in all those downlight fittings is acting as a chimney for all the warm air in the room to fly away into your roof where for the most part it is lost forever. You may get some of it back by pumping it back down into the house with an HRV type system but even then as the air gets moved around it loses most of that heat.
Hot air rises, pools around the roof then zips right out your old crappy downlight fittings. Sealed efficient downlights, like the ones we install will stop this chimney effect dead in its tracks. No more quick loss of heat and you can stop using your heaters for up to 2/3 of the time you used to!!
Decades ago when most of these lights were put in the main concern of the developer/builder/electrician was not efficiency but the wholesale cost of the light fittings and the margin they could get from the client out of them. So they were installed all over the country in the majority of new homes. To this day you can go into a new build home and see the same terrible downlight fittings being installed, which is really a huge disservice to the client. It’s verging on a big con actually.
Lately we have seen a huge move towards LED lights in the home. Awareness of these core issues is coming the surface and installers are having to change their ways. We here at Home LED are at the forefront of this change and building an awareness in home owners of how they are spending too much year in year out. We educate then provide an affordable solution that makes sense.