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Review on πŸ”† TORCHSTAR Adjustable Recessed Downlight: The Ultimate Retrofit Solution for Industrial Electrical Systems by Timothy Barnes

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Great product, just didn't fit in our home.

This is a very good product, well built and neat. My only issue is that I have halogens throughout the house and we love the warm tones of the halogens and the ability to dim them heavily to create decorative lighting that is very attractive. Unfortunately, all of the LED replacement bulbs we've tried (and we've tried many) don't come anywhere near the light quality of our halogen bulbs. The extremely low wattage of the new LEDs compared to halogen lamps is certainly attractive. But the warmest available LED (2700K) is still too blue for us. It clashes with our beige tones on the floor. I didn't want to be picky, so I took my wife to an endurance test and simply popped one of the new LED lenses next to one of our existing halogen bulb lenses. The difference was immediately noticeable. The woman said no, absolutely not. Oh, I tried. But she's right, the color of the LEDs offered so far is still "off". We think the new LEDs would look amazing if you didn't have any other lighting to compare. Or, if your home has more shades of gray or blue, then the blue-green hue of the LEDs will accentuate this even better. But besides better halogen lighting, there is a distinct difference and we prefer halogens. Halogens may also seem like a waste of energy to some, but we always dim the lights so each lamp has a lifespan of many years and energy consumption is very low. We have solar installed anyway so the net energy cost to ourselves with our halogens is zero. There's one more thing people need to know about LEDs. They don't tarnish nearly as little as halogens. There is a minimum dimming threshold, which means that if you have multiple backboxes installed you will have plenty of light even if the dimming is as low as the LEDs will allow. Too bright for mood or cinema for us. Maybe they fix that in the future. In the end I hope that this will not be taken negatively. The Torchstar product is really very well made. I was quite frustrated that this didn't fit our needs well. This is just one household's view of the lighting comparison. To each his own. I hope someone finds value in this information. The best advice is to try a few different LEDs and pay close attention to the Kelvin color and hue.

Pros
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Cons
  • I don't remember but there was something