The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 15 – Everything Electrical (III)

We were again out of home for a good part of the weekend scouting around various places for furniture and fixtures for our Minton home. As our renovation has just started too – will blog about it next – we’ve also been given a rough timeline in which electrical fixtures need to be ready for installation. We’d already picked up a good number of lighting fixtures – e.g. for the balcony, the various LED downlights throughout the house, and for the home shelter – but still have a lot left to decide and buy. Of concern for us especially were the LED downlights, since we bought these direct from a warehouse who didn’t (wouldn’t?) test every unit before packing them. Thankfully, we were lucky to have a neighbor-friend who’s an Electrician by training, and he was able to test all 30 LED downlights for us – and they all worked, though we’ll have to return to the warehouse nonetheless to exchange one of the round LED downlights for a square one (what we’d initially asked for).

Even if not, we bought these LED downlights for cheap – just $28 for the single color ones and $38 for the 3-in-1’s. In comparison, branded LED downlights can easily cost 3 or 4 times as much. Even if a couple of these go down in a few years, I figured we’ll still be coming out ahead in terms of money spent on them.

After taking a week to look at the different fan models, we decided on five – one for each of our rooms and another for the living/dining hall – and ordered the bunch from Tai Yong Electric for just a mite over $1.4K.

The table of fans might look a little odd – four Crestars and 1 Fanco – but it’s on account that there weren’t any suitably small Crestars that could be installed into our Study (the ‘+1’ room), what with the full-height shelving we already have on one side of the room. We’re also constructing false ceilings and L-boxes for the Living/Dining Hall and Master Bedroom, and our designer advised that the fans should be lowered by about an additional foot from the ceiling for better air circulation. The two letter codes in parentheses specify the colors for each unit. Where possible and available, we’ve all gone for (matt) black or darkish colored blades and motor casings for each fan. The two fans with light kits in the Study and Children’s Room will also require additional power cables to be drawn across the ceiling, but since this will be part of the renovation project, these cables will get buried in the ceiling itself.

Finding appropriate lighting was not easy though after we’d chosen the LED downlights. The functional light fixtures for the balcony and homeshelter was easy enough, but the dining room and bedroom lights were a lot harder, since they have to go well with the overall aesthetic in each area. Our projected outlay of such lighting includes:

• Hanging dining room lights
• Wall lights for the children’s room
• Wall lights for the Master bedroom
• Track lights for the Master bedroom

One thing’s for sure. Lighting fixtures as sold in many shops in Singapore are all dreadfully expensive, no doubt from seriously marked-up prices. We saw a couple of pretty nice dining room lights at the Jalan Besar shops, but they cost several hundred a piece. Ouch. Many new homeowners here are finding ordering from the Taobao – the Chinese equivalent of eBay – viable since you can easily find similar and possibly even identical lights for typically a quarter of what you’d pay here in brick/mortar shops. But we decided not to go for this option, only on account that we prefer to get lights that we can see for ourselves in persons – online pictures convey too little information – and in the event that the lights fail, getting them exchanged with shops here will be a lot easier than trying to talk in Chinese to online retailers LOL.

And funnily, after a weekend of searching, we finally settled on lights from Ikea – from all places. Yeah, we’ve had terrifically bad experiences with Ikea shelving, but fortunately better luck with their lighting systems. Here’s what we’ve picked up:

We picked up the highest lumens LED lights for each of these too – 600lm E27s for the Ranarp’s, and 400lm E14s for the Astrids. Not exactly as cheap as the normal light bulbs, but hopefully these longer-lasting and brighter lights will be worth the additional expense.

Edit 4 May 2015: Over the last 3 months, several of the LED lights have failed; roughly about a quarter of them. Oddly, not in the single-light temperature types which are all still working great but the 3-in-1’s. The warehouse we purchased the lights from so far have been amendable to exchanges, though it sure is a hassle.

Edit 26 Oct 2015: We’ve replaced several of the spoiled LED lights with new ones from a different supplier. Post here.