Submitted 1 month ago by Seigest@lemmy.ca to [deleted]
Renting a room in an old house. The landlady is one of the rare good ones and cooks for me somtimes so I’m trying to be handy where I can.
This light in my office died, and a few others in the house are in dire need of replacing. Rusted and covered in decades of caked on dust, probably hazardous.
I keep seeing units like this. a.co/d/iU3hAd3
But I’m wondering if I should get a few of those or get another bulb style ceiling lamps and just use LED bulbs?
I would go with the bulbs
The fixtures are nice but they can have high failure rates and are more difficult to replace, as you have to replace the whole unit.
Bulbs on the other hand are easy to replace if they fail, they’re standardized so anyone can walk to the store and pick up an A19 60W equivalent.
If it’s an old house going to led fixtures can have issues.
Back in the day it was fine to let a little juice trickle past a closed switch (light switch off)
Because what little went thru, wasn’t enough to turn on an incandescent bulb.
But it’s enough to turn on a led dimmly.
So there’s a decent chance if you install a light like in your link, it will always produce light. Then you have to change out the switches and all types of other stuff.
Especially in a rental, you don’t want to open that can of worms. Just use a conventional fixture.
I had intended to change the switches to dimmers as well. Good to keep them low on migraine days.
Make sure the new switches are rated for “led dimmers” too and you should be fine then.
Don’t just buy the cheapest dimmers or you’ll be buying them and installing them a second time.
I put that fixture in my kitchen before I sold my old house. I really liked it. But if you want the best bang for your money, just go with light bulb replacement. LEDs won’t last forever and in 10-15 years someone will have to replace that fixture unless they are willing to manually replace the LED strip inside it.
I’ve been using those integrated flat LED fixtures in my place lately. I don’t find them too difficult to install, and at least one of my rooms has a rather low ceiling so I’d rather not have stuff dangling down where I can bonk myself on the head with it.
I haven’t had a single problem but if they die they’re trivially easy – for me – to replace. They’re just held onto the ceiling electrical box with two screws, and the electrical connection is two wire nuts. It’ll take me longer to find and lug my stepladder into position than it will for me to replace one. Light fixtures are dead easy, you don’t even have to find and turn off the breaker. Just turn it off at the switch before you mess with it.
The example you linked is suspiciously expensive. I’m getting these for around $15 each.
If you are going to go the socket-and-bulbs route for any of the reasons raised by the other comments here, make absolutely certain that you don’t get a fixture that is enclosed in any way. Enclosed fixtures will kill LED bulbs quickly, and in extreme cases you’ll go through them faster than filament bulbs.
you don’t even have to find and turn off the breaker. Just turn it off at the switch before you mess with it.
One word of caution here. If the light fixture is hooked up to a three-way switch, it is possible for the light to be off and BOTH sides of the wire to be hot. This isn’t a common way to wire three-way switches and it isn’t to code anymore, but there are many homes out there with legacy switches wired as such. See: Carter 3-way switch.
henchman2019@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The next tenant after you might not be so handy. It would be easier for the average person just to change a bulb if they needed to. I’d go with the fixture that uses replaceable LED bulbs.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Agreed. The fixtures with non-replaceable lights are a giant headache waiting to happen down the road. Always go with the replaceable bulb fixtures.
Seigest@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Good point I assumed these lasted forever, but I guess that’d be wishful thinking.