AliExpress (Chinese) LED Solar Street Lamp Style Motion Lights

36 LED solar motion lights!

These solar lights are marketed as "street lights". They can be ordered with or without a post, and I've been looking at them for a while. I paid about $13 a piece without the extension rod, and tonight we put them up on the dark side of the garage that has NO light whatsoever.

Replace Energy Sucking Landscape Floodlights with LED for $1

Have low-voltage flood lights around your house? I do... 13 of them.

At 20 watts a bulb, that's a lot of energy consumption for all intents and purposes, decorative lighting.

You can easily retrofit these kits and fixtures with LED light bulbs from big box stores, but you will be paying for them, to the tune of about $7 per bulb.

Standard, incandescent 20 watt bulb vs energy efficient LED

I'm happy to share that I've found an alternative to the expensive bulbs from Home Depot and Lowe's! These cost from 90 cents to about a dollar a piece. That's a savings of hard, cold cash and a whopping 17 WATTS per light!

G4 LED COB 3W warm or cool white bulb.

Did I mention they are available in cool or warm white? Here's pictures after installation:

Back garage line, 3 lights

Side of house, 3 lights

Buy them here: G4 LED COB 3W warm or cool white bulb.

The planet, and your wallet, will thank you.

Lazy Days: A New Half-Story Ceiling

We have a half story upstairs. We are fortunate because someone already made 2 spacious closets up there, there's electrical run, HVAC is there, and there are walls and a ceiling.

The paneling walls don't bother me too much, but there was an awful acoustic ceiling and one (1!!) light upstairs.

Guy and I decided to rip down the acoustic tile, and add a cubby (see the wall on the right? There's nothing back there but paneled-over empty space, so we cut in a door, and we can squeeze about 6 large totes in there.) Also we added dimmable LED recessed light, which I love.

We started this at the beginning of February, and since it's hot in the summer, we went to Cedar Point instead.

We are back at it and we have 100% of the drywall hung (never again), and we are in between finishing mudding and starting sanding.

Then it's paint, trim, and rip up the carpet.

In the meantime, here are some photos of our progress.

LED Bathroom Waterfall Faucet UPDATE

So it's been about 36 months that we have been using the waterfall LED light up glass and chrome faucet bought from ebay. It's held up well enough to this point, but about a month or two back, the LED's suddenly began remaining on at all times. We thought swapping out the batteries would help, but it doesn't.

As a faucet, it still works fine. I plan to take it apart and see if it's a fixable issue. It was neat enough, but I can't say I'm crazy about the waterfall aspect of it. For $48 though, I'm still not complaining.

LED Color-Changing Under Cabinet Lighting for $35!!

This is such a cool project. We ended up putting a new outlet in the back of one of the cabinets to hide wires, but on the other bank of cabinets, we plugged the LED's in behind the fridge.

There isn't much technical explaining here, and as we seem to run new Romex for every project we get into, so I guarantee that's covered elsewhere in this blog. For this one, just enjoy the photos and a video, too.