Upgrading office lighting to LED
In August 2014 I replaced the builder grade “boob light” for something I thought had more lighting capability. The track lighting was a special order from the local store.
Pictured above is how it was suppose to look once installed. And had the end strips worked properly it might still be up there. But, the connecting tabs failed and the two end pieces were returned. Leaving us with just the centre strip and 5 lights to cast light around the room. It never did that well because the orientation of our desks meant our backs were to the light. Therefore there was always a shadow cast over our desk work area. Plus the fact the bulbs emitted quite a bit of heat which was ok in the winter but not so much in the summer.
Efficiency Nova Scotia has been running a special the month of October with a pretty good rebate on LED lighting products. So good in fact that the LED products cannot be kept in stock at the local stores. Earlier we upgraded the kitchen lights and were quite happy with the result. Now I wanted to upgrade the lighting in the office.
We had a local electrician come in to do some other work and while here we had him installed these two (you only see one in the picture below) 6 inch flush mount LED lights. All he needed was a drywall knife to cut the hole. A 6 inch hole saw certainly would of sped things up and I’m sure if this sort of installation was his bread and butter, he would have one. Other than getting up into the attic to run some wire from the centre light to the two round lights, it didn’t take long at all.
These fixtures are pretty slick, they are only 1/2 inch thick. That’s the thickness of the drywall! That design feature comes in handy because when you cut out the drywall in the ceiling you have the very real possibility of running to the wood joist above or the strapping itself. That’s what happened here. But it didn’t matter, we did not have to cut the strapping. Which meant less work and less possibility of damage to the drywall. And from a design perspective, it means you can literally put them anywhere. Even on the wall if you wanted to.
The centre square fixture I installed myself. We also had him install a dimmer switch for the lighting. Pictures below show lowest, medium and highest settings.