During the course of May, our team celebrated National Home Remodeling month by doing some simple lighting projects around the house and sharing them with our readers. We called it our “Weekend Warrior” series because all of the projects can be completed in a weekend (or less!).
Project Two – The 1-Hour Project
In my last post I shared how we installed recessed lighting in our bonus room. Once I installed the LED retrofits there, I was hooked on the quality and energy-efficiency of the lighting. I decided to change out our seven 75-watt PAR30 halogen recessed lights in our kitchen with seven LED retrofit modules. The 7 halogen recessed lights used 525 total watts of electricity. By switching to LED retrofit modules I would reduce that wattage use to 87.5 watts! HUGE energy savings! In addition to the LED retrofit modules, I also changed out my dimmer switch to a Lutron Maestro C-L dimmer.
This was one project I was able to very easily do myself. In fact, I finished this one in less than an hour.
Step 1 – Remove the existing 75-watt PAR30 halogen lamp.
Step 2 – Remove the existing recessed baffle trim from the housing.
Step 3 – Screw in the new LED retrofit module.
Step 4 – Rinse and repeat until all 7 lights are completed.
Step 5 – Turn on the lights to make sure they all worked.
Step 6 – Turn off the power to the kitchen, replace the existing dimmer with a new C-L dimmer, turn the power back on. Turn on the lights. Done.
All in all, both of these projects were complete successes. Much better lighting in our bonus room and huge energy savings in our kitchen.
Read all of the posts in our Weekend Warrior series:
- Installing wireless security lighting
- Installing custom battery operated strip lights in a pantry
- Installing a reading light in a book nook
- Installing recessed lights in a bonus room
