We chose to use all LED lighting in our house for obvious reasons – the energy efficiency.  But there are some other benefits as well.

Size

Because we are using LED fixtures (not just bulbs) the bulbs are much smaller, and the fixtures, with trim, are 4″in diameter (see the 3″ image above – the size doesn’t include the trim), to the outside of the ring, compared with 8″ (see the 6″ image above) for traditional fixtures.  That will make our ceilings look a lot less busy and the lights will disappear more, rather than being a feature of the ceilings.

Load

We decided to wire for a backup generator (even though we aren’t putting one in initially).  That means that, everything that will be on backup power needs to be wired to a special breaker panel.

Part way through the exercise, trying to decide what part of the house absolutely needed lighting, it occurred to us  that LED lighting might allow us to put much more on backup than we thought.  It turns out the lighting for the entire house will only draw something like 23 amps when it is all on.  To put this into perspective, a typical set of outlets will be a 15 or 20 amp breaker.   In short, all the lights won’t use that much power.

Because of this, we can simply put ALL the lights on the backup generator panel, which is much simpler, and, if we do have a power outage and we have a backup generator, will be much more more practical.