If you’ve never heard of low voltage lighting before, you must have been living under a rock or something. First of all because it is not really a new thing. Halogen lighting systems for home lighting have been around for decades, and in fact, you may have one at home. Of course, there are varieties that work with mains voltages, but most don’t. Instead, it runs on 12v or so from a low-voltage lighting transformer installed somewhere in your home. Secondly, there is so much talk all the time about LED technology taking over more and more of our lighting needs, it would be hard not to notice. But if all this is new to you, don’t worry. I will update you with this article.
First a few words about what low voltage lighting can do for you. There are two big advantages that most people will be interested in, and these are the often much lower power consumption possible with halogen and LEDs. The other big thing is that often these light sources are physically much more compact than most people are used to. This means that a whole new horizon in lighting design opens up, allowing useful lighting solutions to take entirely new and compact forms. A desk lamp no longer has to be a big, clunky thing to properly contain a light bulb and provide enough shade to keep the light out of your eyes and onto your desk. A light source like an LED weighs much less than a traditional bulb and is much smaller, which means it can work with a smaller assembly to give you the light you need. This is also true of halogen lights, but again, these have been around for years, so you may have already discovered their advantages.
One problem with the new technology is the fact that it still has to live with traditional mains voltage lighting. I hope not many people have low voltages like 12v coming out of their wall sockets at home, and this means that anytime you want to use something like an LED, you have to have a transformer between the mains and the LED. The problem with that, besides the fact that transformers cost money, are heavy, and take up little space, is the fact that a certain percentage of electrical power is always lost in the transformer. This power never reaches the LED or halogen bulb, but is dissipated as heat. So you get no light from that power. If you have a lot of low-voltage LED or other lighting in your home, you’ll also have a lot of transformers, all of which waste some energy as heat. This is even less compared to the old incandescent bulbs, but I envision a future where it will be common to have a single central low-voltage transformer in your home, along with special outlets that carry both traditional mains voltage and, say, 12v. This will make lighting fixtures and also consumer electronics much cheaper as they can then be sold without their own mains voltage adapters. But that’s all in the future. Right now, you can upgrade your home lighting to something much more sophisticated and elegant, while also making a difference to your electric bill and the environment, too. Not bad, huh?