Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Let There Be Different Light

When I moved in, the hall leading to the bedrooms was lit by a pair of LED pot lights. The only upgrade I made to them was to install a motion-triggered light switch so that I would actually use the lights rather than just ignoring them and stumbling through the darkness.

There was nothing particularly wrong with these lights, at least from this side of the ceiling. But, since they were retrofit LED modules inside regular can-style pot lights, they stuck up above the tops of the ceiling joists in the attic.

This meant that they were in the way of placing down a piece of plywood to walk on, directly in the middle of what was essentially the main thoroughfare of the attic. Not really the end of the world, but not an ideal situation.

Thankfully, it's a situation with a solution: we just need to remove the cans and replace the lights with canless LED modules.

Step one: remove the cans.

This was a little bit tricky because the cans are basically made of tinfoil and not even slightly designed to be removed. Thankfully they're cheap and I didn't intend to reuse them, so there wasn't anything stopping me from applying a bit of violence. Being careful not to mangle the drywall, of course.

Step two: install the canless LEDs.

These are way, way lower profile than the cans, as you can see, and they're now much lower than the joists. As a bonus, the insulation can be scooped back in to cover them completely, giving me an absolutely unmeasurably small increase in insulation here.

As another bonus these modules are a full 6 inches wide, rather than being a 4-inch module with a 6-inch flange (designed to fit into either a 4 or 6 inch can), so they look slightly less dorky.

I mean, I guess. I don't spend a lot of time staring at my lights.

Anyway, the important part is that I was able to move the plywood walkway over top of these, so it's now much easier to get around up in the attic.

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