Adding recessed lighting is a great way to make a major improvement to your home, but with any change new problems are going to arise.  Fortunately, many of the problems that people have with recessed lights are fairly easy to remedy.  In this post I want to describe some of the issues that people run into, and some ideas to get them fixed.

The biggest issue that you’ll run into is a major jump in your energy usage.  Rather than having one or two light fixtures in your room, you now have eight or ten recessed ones.  With that many fixtures, you also have more bulbs, and more bulbs leads to using more electricity.  Remedying this is easy.  You can either install energy efficient bulbs, like CFL or LED, or put the lights on a dimmer switch and only turn them up when you really need to.

Another energy increase comes when the light fixtures are not properly sealed.  Air leaks between your living space and the attic, which leads to a temperature change that forces the AC or heater to run more often.  If your lights leak air, there are sealing kits available that make it very easy to stop the air flow.  Avoid adding insulation around the light, unless you really know what you’re doing because some lights are not designed to have anything near them.  Light fixtures like these can lead to attic fires, which are extremely damaging and dangerous.

When recessed lights are installed on high ceilings it’s a major pain to change the bulbs out.  To resolve this, you can either invest in a very large ladder or just use the energy efficient bulbs that we talked about in the second paragraph.  Not only do these bulbs use less energy, they last an incredibly amount of time longer than standard bulbs do.

As you can see, the problems that come from using recessed lights are minor and easy to fix.  Use the things discussed in this post to get the most from your new light fixtures and fix the problems before they start!  To learn more about how these lights work, visit Recessed Can Light Guide.