Missives from the 6th Floor

Despite claiming "instant on", they in fact take a moment to turn on (just long enough for you to start wondering if the bulbs are burned out) and a good 30 seconds to get to full brightness, but once they're running at full they seem to be a bit brighter than the 65W incandescents they replace.

Our kitchen, with 8 recessed lights on a single switch went from consuming 520W down to 144W.

So at this point, the only incandescents left are in the fixtures on dimmers and half of the globe bulbs in the two bathrooms with showers (practically speaking, they're doubling as space heaters).

On the less-good side, I'm going to have to replace one of the sinks in our master bathroom, which promises to be an adventure. It's drain was running slow a few weeks back, so I boiled some water and managed to thermal shock the porcelain. I discovered that the sink is no longer water tight, and after reading up a bit on doing porcelain repairs, it seems this isn't a good candidate, as the crack has spread in more than one direction.

Of course I can't find any identifying marks on the sink - so I'm not holding out much hope for finding an identical replacement. I've dropped a note to the builder to see if he can clue me in, but failing that, either the master bath sinks will be mismatched (fortunately they're on different walls, so that might be livable) or I'll have to do the job twice - taking the sink from the spare bathroom upstairs and making it the odd-man out.