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All-Pro Recessed LED

13 years ago

We're the midst of converting most of our 6" recessed lights to Cree CR6's. However we've discovered that a few of the lights use a shallow can that the Cree CR6's won't fit into.

Looking around Home Depot, I found a LED that looks like it will fit, but haven't read anything about it. Any body have any opinions on it, or can recommend a LED retrofit kit that will fit a shallow can?

All-Pro 6in.

http://www.homedepot.com/Lighting-Fans-Indoor-Lighting-Indoor-Ceiling-Lighting-Recessed-Lighting/h_d1/N-5yc1vZbvlw/R-202651162/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053

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Comments (5)

David
13 years ago
You may find the following link useful.

Here is a link that might be useful: All Pro LED retrofit kit details
lee676
13 years ago
Sylvania just introduced a CR6-like LED integrated light/trim also (I think Lowes has it).

I did notice the All Pro is rated for wet locations (i.e. water may be splashed on it) rather than Cree's "damp" locations (over tub and some showers ok, but no direct spray from water). But it's 3000K rather than 2700K, so it won't quite have that warm incandescent look, and the CRI (color rendering) was lower IIRC.
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I'm not a lighting designer, and I don't mean to disparage anyone else here. But I do visit other people's homes. And I'm of an age (mid-50s) when good lighting is getting more and more important to me. So maybe I'm a bit biased. And maybe all my friends just didn't have good lighting designers. But I will flatly state that - regardless of the ages or styles of the homes I've been in - I've never seen an installation of recessed lights that produced as even a light as that from good old simple surface mount or pendant lights. This isn't hard to figure out. Bright sunshine streaming in a window feels good, but (especially if your floors are dark) it doesn't really light up the room very well. Your cat will love drowsing in that pool of warmth, but it's not the best light for reading, is it? On the other hand, outdoors under a tree is a great place to take your book. There you're getting some direct sunlight, and some light reflected from the atmosphere, clouds, earth, vegetation, and buildings. Lighting designers, being observant folk, figured that out in the early to mid 20th century. Vision and productivity are best when the room lighting is even - coming from many directions, like daylight. So they (re)designed lighing fixtures so they (the fixtures, not the designers) produced both direct (from the fixture right to the living area) and indirect (reflected from walls and ceilings) light. We seem to have more or less forgotten those designers' work. Cans - all direct light, shadow producers like direct sunlight - have been fashionable now for quite a few years. You see them in the glossy home improvement magazines. That's what almost all the builders automatically install in new construction. You can improve things a bit by having lots of different "suns." You can also add fixtures and systems specifically intended to add some indirect light. Of course, all that costs more to buy and costs more to install. If you have well designed (or even fairly simple) pendant and surface mount lights, they'll send light in all directions. That light will fall right on what you're doing, and also reflect off the walls and ceiling - just like good natural light. You'll see better and feel better. You'll spend less money on fixtures, have less complexity, have lower installation costs, and most likely use less energy. You'll also have better room insulation (instead of a swiss-cheese ceiling full of holes) to reduce your HVAC bills and improve comfort. If you're young and see just fine in poor to mediocre light, if you're going to sell your house in 5 years and are concerned about not following fashion, then maybe cans are for you. If you want good, practical lighting at reasonable cost and with moderate energy use, and you're remodeling or building for the future - then I suggest that you consider surface and pendant fixtures instead.
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Thanks for all the comments. They were very helpful, and I've since done some more researching and looking around. LED is very intriguing but so pricey right now. I do look forward to seeing how that technology develops, though, and expect to see more options and lower prices evolve over the next few years. If we were going to go with FL and stick with those forever, I would put in the 5" cans since I think they look better. However, right now it looks like LED fixtures can only be used with 6" cans, so to give us flexibility to convert to LED later, we'd need to put in 6" cans unless we wanted to take the gamble that they will come out with 5" LED fixtures at some point. I'm actually thinking now about going back just with a center 3-light flushmount fixture for my general room lighting and relying on UCL and task lighting over my peninsula to give me what I need functionally. I had thought perhaps pendants over the peninsula but now I'm wondering about just doing 3 LED cans in that location. I could swing the $$ for 3 LED cans right now, but 12 gives me heartburn! Plus, I could get the dimmer function with the LEDs over the peninsula which would be nice. My mom has this set-up (central light fixture, with 3 cans over her bar area on a dimmer) and it works great for her. She uses her dimmer all the time depending on what she is doing. I'm still looking at the options, though, and I appreciate everyone's input!
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I really struggled with this, too. I think it's best to consult a lighting specialist, but even then we weren't happy with the results, probably because we didn't know what to ask. I can only speak to the cans, but I think the type of bulb and trim you use has a big impact on the type of light you get. Our lighting specialist recommended short neck halogen PAR bulbs - the kind that have the reflector covers that look like outdoor bulbs - with black trims. We knew the black trims weren't for us, so we looked into the alzak trims, both clear and wheat haze. In the end, since we couldn't decide, we told the electrician to put in the basic white trims with the halogen PAR bulbs. We HATED it. The light was more spot-light than ambient (although not all that spot-light). We could clearly see the parabola shape of the light on the upper cabinets and walls. The shadows were bad, especially the handles on the upper cabinets, and the lights were very harsh when looking at the ceiling (although maybe the alzak trims would have fixed that). So then I started googling. Turns out, we wanted more ambient light, which is sounds to me like what you want, too. But our cans were in, and I wasn't about to consider changing those to surface mount. We ended up going with LEDs, as suggested by Nancy_in_Mich, and we LOVE them. After lots of internet research, we got the Cree LR6 2700k cans for $80 each at polar-ray.com and put them on a dimmer. Polar-ray is local to me so I did not order them over the internet, but they were great - very helpful and knowledgeable, and I saw good reviews of Polar-ray on the internet. The LEDs spread the light more. There are still shadows, but much reduced. The come on immediately (no warmup) and dim, although not as much as the halogens did. They are very bright, at least as bright as the 75 watt halogens. I recommend a dimmer! Here's a picture with both bulbs - look at the two lights near the wall. The one on the left is the LED, right is halogen 75 watt. You can see the defined edge of the light for the halogen, but not the LED. Also, the LED light is higher up on the wall - more spread out and diffuse. You can also see a color difference - we prefer the LED because the halogen was quite white. There are two other bulbs in the pic - the front one is LED and the right one is halogen (see the shadows created by the one on the right). Good luck with your decision!
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lee676
13 years ago
Two other new LED floodlights sold at Home Depot worth a look:

- Ecosmart 16w (90w equivalent) BR40 flood, 950 lumens, 2700K (incandscent color), 25,000 rated life, made by Lighting Science Group. Only $34.97 - not bad at all for a very bright LED lamp that looks like a standard R40 floodlamp in use, not like a showerhead as many LED reflector bulbs do. Only real downer is that the color rendering is middling - 80 CRI, slightly worse than a CFL, much less the 92 CRI of the Cree. But for many applications it looks fine - I've tried one. Home Depot's SKU is 425 859; these are just starting to show up in HD stores. It fits in any recessed can designed for a R40 or PAR38 reflector bulb.

- Philips R30 LED flood. Not the one that's been out for a year, but a new one that's just hitting HD stores now. Can't find it online anywhere yet. It's smaller and not quite as bright as the above bulb, costs $39, is 3000K (a bit whiter than incandescent bulbs, warm-white CFLs, or a CR6), but it too has a nice "real bulb" look with a diffused lens that again avoids the showerhead look with individual LEDs and glaring at you surrounded by heat sink fins. It fits in fixtures designed for R30 or PAR30 reflector bulbs, and thus is shorter than the Ecosmart. Don't know the brightness or CRI since I don't own one, but will look since I need to go to HD today.

Note that both of these do not include a trim kit like the Cree CR6, so you'll need a baffle (a white non-step baffle if you're trying to match the CR6 look) as well as the bulb; if you're replacing existing bulbs you may already have these.
DavidR
13 years ago
Ecosmart 16w (90w equivalent) BR40 flood, 950 lumens

Interesting. It appears that Ecosmart, like many LED manufacturers, is overstating the incandescent equivalence of their products. (CF manufacturers did the same thing in the early days.)

A typical 65 watt incandescent lamp will produce 1000 lumens. So this LED will produce a little less light than a 65 watt incandescent lamp, and nowhere near the light of a 90 watt.

Its efficacy is 59 lumens per watt. That's better than many other LEDs, but handily beaten by most compact fluorescents on the market. You can also expect that an LED's output will decline over time (as will a fluorescent's).

Caveat emptor.
lee676
13 years ago
Ecosmart is not a manufacturer; rather it is a Home Depot house brand (rather like Kenmore and Craftsman are for Sears), and Ecosmart-branded light bulbs are made by several different manufacturers. Some of the more prominent manufacturers include their brand name and logo on the box, others have no mention of the real manufacturer beyond something like "made in China for Home Depot".

The aforementioned Ecosmart 16w 950-lumen "90w equivalent" is made by Lighting Science Group, and their claims for incandescent-bulb substitution don't seem that out of line to me. Let's look at General Electric's 65 watt BR40 floodlamp bulb - a mere 730 initial lumens, and only 2000 hours rated bulb life.

I believe 90 watt BR40 incandescent bulbs were phased out several years ago to meet gov't regulations in favor of slightly more efficient halogen reflector bulbs, but I found a few web sites that still list discontinued products. Here's GE's old 90 watt BR40 incandescent floodlamp. 1000 initial lumens, 2000 hour rated bulb life. That's only slightly brighter than the 950 lumens claimed for the Ecosmart/Lighting Science BR40, and even if the LED's light output declines with use, so does an incandescent blown-glass floodlamp (which tend to darken over time), and keep in mind when the incandescent bulb is almost about to burn out, the LED bulb still has over 90% of its rated life remaining, and is probably still at near-initial brightness.

My own eyeballs tell me it's as about as bright as they claim. Remember that the "90w equivalent" is referring to a regular 90w incandescent, not a 90w halogen (and certainly not the newer breed of high-efficiency halogen bulbs like GE's Halogen-IR line - GE makes an excellent 60w PAR38 Halogen-IR wide-flood bulb with 1050 lumens, 3000 hour rated life, and a precise, even beam spread from its separate glass lens and aluminized reflector. 100 CRI of course, dims as well as any incandescent bulb, and stays at full brightness for the life of the bulb.)

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