Taobao product recommendation – LED lights

LED lights is the first thing i will recommend anyone to get from Taobao. In case you don’t know the merits of LED lights – it saves you more than 50% of electricity (as compared to fluorescent lighting aka CFL) and potentially lasts much longer. I did a rough calculation and my estimation is that i can break even on the change of CFL to LED lighting in less than 2 years. It may sound drastic, but i have changed almost all the lightings in my home to LED even though the CFL tubes have not yet broken down.

When i did my home renovation for my current home, more than 4 years ago, i installed LED downlights for the living room and also the doorway area. Each LED downlight cost me a blood sucking price of S$28! Barely 2 years later, 2 of those LED lights broke down. I was reluctant to pay the cost of getting an electrician to replace them. Finally, I decided to do it myself. I bought the LED lights from Taobao, at an unbelievable price of 9.8 Yuan each for the premium ones. This equates to S$2.3, which is less than 10 times my original buy price! The replacement work was actually very easy, although i accidentally chipped away a small bit of the false ceiling.

The 9.8 Yuan downlight

Buoyed by the success, I was determined to change the rest of the frequently used lighting in the home to LED ones – those in the living and dining room, kitchen as well as all the bedrooms. These consisted of two types of CFL light tubes – the PL-L 4P 36W and PL-C 13W. Here’s what they look like if you’re wondering:

PL-L

PL-C

It took a while to search on Taobao, because if you searched by those very search terms (PL-L and PL-C), it will be the CFL light tubes or other unrelated products showing up in the search result. The search terms to use are 2g11 led and g24 led. 2g11 and g24 refer to the base pin configuration of PL-L and PL-C respectively. To get comparable brightness, the wattage is the one that is slightly less than half that of CFL. For the 36W PL-L, the corresponding LED is 15W, and the LED is housed in a casing with the exact same length as the 36W CFL light, so you can’t get it wrong. If you do the sums, you save 58% electricity when you switch from CFL to LED. I found the brightness to be about equal or slightly dimmer, and it works fine for me. For a bedroom, you typically need 2 of these light tubes, so instead of 72W, you’re down to using just 30W.

For the PL-C light, you have many choices in terms of the wattage (and correspondingly the length), so you have to be careful to choose one that will fit into your downlight enclosure. For my 13W PL-C, i chose the 7W LED, for worry that if i chose the 5W one, it will turn out to be too dim. 7W is about 54% of the original 13W wattage, so the result was a very significant increase in brightness, and i can tell you it is “shiok” (exhilarating) as it makes your home feel like one of those brightly lit shopping malls! For L-Box downlight, as compared to a centrally fitted light, you need to have extra brightness to achieve sufficient lighting. To get that extra brightness at about half the electricity usage is extremely satisfying.

There are many sellers of LED light on Taobao, and as usual i chose the sellers with the highest sales volume, as the sales volume is a testament to these sellers being reliable. The 15W 2g11 LED cost me 48 Yuan (S$11) each while the 7W g24 LED cost me 23 Yuan (S$5). The pricing is not much more than their CFL counterpart actually, so i don’t see why anyone should be buying CFL anymore.

A note on the colour temperature of the light: you probably already know there are 3 types you can choose from – white, cool white, and warm white (basically yellow). In terms of Kelvin, these are 6000-6500K, 4000-4500K and 2700-3200K respectively. White is simply 白, cool white could be 暖白 or 自然白 or 中性光 while warm white is 暖黄 or 暖白. You have to read the specification of the seller very carefully to choose the colour that you want. If cool white is what you want and it is not among the options available, check with the seller if they offer it. If they do, you can ask for it by leaving a remark when placing your order.

G24 LED in the downlight housing

Now, for the installation of the lights, the PL-C or G24 type of light requires just plugging the CFL out and the LED in. That’s because, by design, the ballast and stater of the CFL is built into the PL-C lighting, and correspondingly, the driver circuitry of the LED is also built-in.

Swapping the PL-L for the LED is a little more involved, because you need to do some re-wiring to bypass the ballast and starter, which MUST NOT be used in conjunction with the LED. Fortunately, the design of modern lighting is such that you can do wiring quite easily, much like how you do it on a breadboard. I tripped the circuit breaker a few times while doing this, but nevertheless, i got the job done myself. Disclaimer: do this at your own risk, and if you are not confident, engage an electrician. See picture below to see the finished job.

2g11 LED – note the wires leading from the ballast and starter (which are already removed from the socket) are not connected to anything

Update 14 Jun 2016

One year on after switching to LED lights, they became noticeably dimmer, especially for the pair of cool white PL-L (probably because it was used more frequently). I will have to do a replacement purchase, but i don’t really mind that. Something for you to keep in mind.

Update 18 Feb 2017

Besides the LED downlight and the 2 types of LED light tubes i have mentioned above, there is also the integrated type that is becoming very popular now. The integrated type means that the LED light strips are built-in and inseparable from the housing. There are pros and cons to this of course – it comes ready for installation, and you need not worry about purchasing nor installing separate light tubes, but if it breaks down, or becomes too dim over time, you’ll have to replace the entire fixture.

Some of these look very nice, and my preference is for the minimalistic ones, but some of those made for and according to Chinese taste look “obiang”, or Singlish for out-of-place ugly. The search term to use if you want to look for the minimalistic LED are “LED办公室吸顶灯” and “LED办公室吊灯”, which really means lighting for office space.

Check these out:

I bought this one for a home office space, and it has a volumetric weight of 0.09 CBM

Extremely fanciful but with a nice effect

Create any combination you want

And the “obiang” ones:

Do you want this in your bedroom?

Or this for your living room? It looks out of place in the showcase photo

These light fixtures are huge in size when packed for shipping. They are just a tad smaller than typical furniture items. There is only one way to ship them – by sea freight. Here’s how you can ship them to Singapore – 86OF.

What to do with your disused fluorescent light

Don’t bin them! They can be recycled. Please walk the extra mile and bring them to one of the collection points for recycling! A little goes a long way.

Check out my newly published definitive guide.

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Travel Bucket List – Northern Lights Chasing the Northern Lights Taobao product recommendation – LED light, the definitive guide Taobao product recommendation – LED light strip replacement kit