Make my chandelier work: lights and electrics, LED edition

November 2, 2015 2:35 PM

So I have this chandelier. It's a lovely mid-century piece but it chews through bulbs like you wouldn't believe. It was installed by a professional electrician and is wired into a regular on/off light switch on a standard UK lighting circuit. However, as you can see, bulbs blow on a disturbingly regular basis. My question: can I switch the regular bulbs over to LED equivalents and do these even exist?

Here is the light. Here is the bulb - a typical (in the UK at least) fridge/freezer bulb, in this case made by GE, rated 15 watts and labelled SES E14. The chandelier takes a whopping 28 bulbs (I think - it's strangely hard to count them) which are getting harder to find and are expensive. Is there an LED equivalent? Can I even put LED bulbs in this kind of lamp? Assume total electrical ignorance beyond being able to change a bulb.

posted by srednivashtar to Home & Garden (10 answers total)

If you search for E14 LED bulbs you'll find plenty that will fit in the socket, you just need to find one that's about the right overall size. The key is that they're E14 base bulbs which seems to be a pretty standard european size. I found plenty that might work online.

Also yes, LED bulbs should work.
posted by GuyZero at 2:46 PM on November 2, 2015

These low wattage filament mimics are are pretty cool. My sister has a set in NA standard E17 and they mimic those old style low efficiency long filament bulbs fairly well. Might work well considering the number of bulbs in your fixture. Downside: even more expensive than a regular LED bulb.
posted by Mitheral at 2:58 PM on November 2, 2015

Here are some E14 LED bulbs I found. I would buy one pack of 5 and make sure that they fit your in the glass globes on your light fixture. Also, you'll want to check the color temperature and light output are to your liking.

The cheap LED lights I've bought generally work great, but sometimes 1 of 10 will die in the first year (the rest seem to last forever), so you might buy a couple extra. It can be really hard to match the color temperature on new LED lights vs older LED lights.
posted by gregr at 5:44 PM on November 2, 2015

I wonder if there's actually enough power or a fault in the electrical lines themselves. Just because it's hooked up properly doesn't mean that there isn't some issue in terms of electrical. Do they burn out anywhere else in your house?
posted by Crystalinne at 6:38 PM on November 2, 2015

With 28 bulbs, an average life of 1000 hrs and 4 hours use per day; on average one bulb will burn out every ~9 days.
posted by Mitheral at 7:13 PM on November 2, 2015

I switched my chandelier over to dimmable LED bulbs. Works great.
posted by w0mbat at 8:07 PM on November 2, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks everyone so far. I hadn't considered the statistical side of things, Mitheral. Final question - can one mix regular and LED in the same installation? Or is best to just go all LED? And in case I don't 'want' to invest in 28 x LED bulbs at once, can I just put in, say, 10, and leave the other sockets empty?
posted by srednivashtar at 12:08 AM on November 3, 2015

You can mix LED and regular bulbs, and you can leave some of the sockets empty.

LEDs don't work with regular dimmers, if you want to make this dimmable you'll need to get dimmable LEDs and an LED-compatible dimmers.
posted by mr vino at 5:33 AM on November 3, 2015

The chandelier takes a whopping 28 bulbs (I think - it's strangely hard to count them) which are getting harder to find and are expensive.

Part of this is simple statistics. There are 28 bulbs. If there's a 1% chance that a bulb will die that week, then you have a 28% chance that you're going to lose a bulb every week!

E14 and other small form factor bulbs also tend to have small filaments, which don't last as long. The big difference between "industrial" bulbs and regular ones is industrial bulbs have much thicker filaments, so they last much longer.

All bulbs hate being turned on -- you go from cold to full heat fast, and the inrush current is hard to take. If you have a dimmer with a short rise time for the voltage reaching 0 to the top of the waveform, you are in effect switching the bulb on and off all the time. This doesn't help at all. If you frequently turn the lamp on and off, that isn't helping either.

So, I don't think you have a problem with that lamp or circuit. I think it's just low endurance bulbs, lots of inrush current, and the fact that you roll the "am I going to blow" die 28 times every time you turn the thing on.

So, LEDS: They are much longer lived, so you're cutting that chance down a whole bunch. You'll still roll the die 28 times. If you are on a dimmer, you almost certainly will need to replace the dimmer with one that is compatible, and you'll need dimmable LED bulbs -- basically, they sense the lower voltage and change the amount of time the LED is lit, from 100% at full brightness to a fraction for dim. Since LEDs are solid state, they have no problem with being switched like this -- almost all LED installations these days aren't running the LEDs 100%.

If there isn't a dimmer, then you can use regular LEDs bulbs. Be careful about physical fit -- if there's a larger globe on the LED lamp, it may not fit.

Obviously, they'll fail much less, but you're still looking at 28 lamps. Basically, on a given day, that chandelier has a 28x chance of losing a lamp than a single bulb desk light.
posted by eriko at 8:31 AM on November 3, 2015

srednivashtar: "leave the other sockets empty?"

Don't leave the sockets empty as there is a shock hazard if someone manages to get a finger in the empty socket and in theory a fire hazard if something combustible falls in it. However there isn't anything wrong with just leaving a burned out bulb in the socket besides esthetics.
posted by Mitheral at 11:40 AM on November 3, 2015