Here is a brief explanation on how downlights make your ceiling into Swiss CHEESE, while also exposing your insulation to risk of fire.

CHEESE

Convection Currents

When your lights are turned on, heat from your halogen lamp encourages air from your living area to shoot up into your roof area.

Heated Air pressure

During cold days, opening around your downlights and gaps in your insulation enable hot air to freely pass into your roof space from your living area.  Hot air wants to go up.

Expansion of Heated Air

During hot days, the sun creates extremely hot air in your roof area(70˚+ C), this air expands and pushes down into your living area through ventilated downlight fittings.  This effect is especially undesirable when you have LED recessed light fittings installed.  LED lamps can be damaged by operating in temperatures of 70˚ Celcius.

Excessive Air Drop

During cold nights, downlight fittings enable cold air to freely drop into your house avoiding the R-value from insulation completely.  Our house gets cooler quicker, with ventilated downlight fittings.

Spread of Draughts

During windy days, your roof can become quite windy, these draughts freely move into your living area with ventilated downlight fittings.

Exposure to Fire damage

Anything can get stuck in recessed lighting, to ignite into a flame, should insulation or debris get too close to a standard halogen dichroic Lamp(300˚ + Celcius).

The root cause of these inefficiencies is the way standard dichroic lamps operate.

• They produce light downwards and
• they try to force the majority of their heat and a good portion of the light backwards up into the roof.

“So effectively they create connectivity of your living area to your roof area.”

• The new Basic Mitt, is a Ventilated diy downlight cover, which can be used primarily for fixed head fittings, and will be very affordable for the do it yourself installation, and can be used with standard dichroic halogen lamps.
• The new Loft Mitt, is a large insulation downlight cover, primarily designed for insulation installers to be installed from above and Large CFL/Incandescent downlights.

These are both quality downlight covers that help protect against downlight fire and provide insulation above recessed lighting!

Keep watching this space for further developments.