Monthly Archives: May 2010

Gardener

Now is the time to think about the garden again. According to the plan, the municipality should finish the sidewalk in our street this year, but they have postponed it to next year. Originally we wanted to wait with finishing the garden until the sidewalk was in place, but we do not want to wait another year. That is why we called our gardener so that we could talk about what and how much work should be done this year.

After a long talk about grass concrete, driveway, pathway, beds, and so on, we agreed on what we wanted to be done. The most annoying part is that we cannot finish it until the municipality has finished the sidewalk, but it will be almost finished. So next year, it is only the last 5 meters of driveway and grass concrete that need to be done together with flagstones and a wooden fence around our garbage bins. We are looking forward to finishing the garden. You can live with something temporarily for some time, but 3½ years is a long time to finish a garden. 

Garden

LEDs

First, a little background information... 5 halogen light bulbs are usually what lights up one of our bathrooms, but 1½ weeks ago, one of the halogens broke. That started a discussion of whether or not to replace them with something more energy-efficient. For starters, we borrowed a suitcase filled with different kinds of energy-saving bulbs. We highly recommend doing this, since every manufacturer has many types of light bulbs, and the light from them is very different (even from bulbs from the same manufacturer). We liked one of the energy-saving bulbs, but the problem with that kind of bulbs is, that the time it takes for them to turn on is too long. It is very annoying, when you turn on the light, enter the room, and bumps into something before the bulbs turn on. So we started looking at the alternative - LEDs.

We began with buying two cheap LEDs. They were crap - the light was miserable, and we learned that warm white light was yellow! So they ended up along with the garbage. Instead, we bought 1 LED at another store, and it cost three times as much - but then it was also dimmable. That one was comparable to the halogens. Now that we finally had found a LED that we could use, we were tempted to try other types of LEDs (not dimmable). We ended up with two - one watertight and one with a wider beam angle. The watertight LED had a bluish light and a wider beam angle than the halogens, which made them perfect for the position above the mirror. The LED with the wide beam angle had a more yellowish light. We decided to combine the two LED types. Partly because we wanted the combined light in the bathroom to be somewhere in the middle of the two, partly because the watertight LEDs turn on a bit delayed compared to halogens (but not nearly as much as energy-saving bulbs), whereas the LEDs with wide beam angle turn on instantly and turn off a bit delayed. This way we can cut down on the electricity from 220 W to 22 W in our bathroom.

The dimmable LED we bought was not wasted. We use it in the outdoor lighting, which is controlled by a dimmer. A good piece of advice - do not buy the cheap LEDs, you will only be very disappointed. 

LED lighting