Real job
North Brisbane & Moreton Bay
100 inch HVLS fan in a warehouse
A big low-speed fan hung from the portal frame of a warehouse, moving the hot air off the roof sheets instead of trying to refrigerate a shed.
What was there
Cream-trimmed halogen cans with compact fluorescents screwed into them — the fix everybody reached for when halogen lamps got expensive to run. It works, sort of. The lamp takes a minute to come up to brightness, the colour never matches the rest of the house, and the can is still a big hole in your ceiling with an air gap around it.
What we did
Old cans out, sealed LED downlights in, same diameter, so every fitting went back into the opening that was already there. That is the difference between a morning’s work and a job that ends with a plasterer and a painter: no patching, no repaint, no ceiling dust through the house.
Worth knowing before you book one
Two things decide whether an LED swap is a clean job or a fiddly one. The first is the cutout — if the new fitting is a different diameter to the old can, the ceiling has to be made good, and that should be on the quote rather than a surprise. The second is dimmers. Most flicker people blame on “cheap LEDs” is a dimmer built for a 50 watt halogen trying to run a 9 watt light, so if a circuit is dimmed, the dimmer usually gets changed with it.
Then there’s the running cost, which is the reason most people call. A 50 watt halogen swapped for a 9 watt LED runs the same room on about a fifth of the power, comes on instantly, and stops pushing heat up into your roof space in the middle of a Queensland summer.
