LED Spotlight bulbs.

[paulca]

I replaced all my GU10 240V spotlight bulbs... all 18 of them with LED variants.  In the man cave and kitchen I put 5W cold daylight and in the bathrooms and living room, 3W warm white.

They are great.  The 5W are brighter overall than the 20W halogen's that I had.  The 3Ws light the bathrooms perfectly.

The downside is they are diffused with a clouded screen which kinda negates the "spot light" effect and spreads the light out.  I have two pointing down at my work bench and the effect is not as good as the halogen spots.

Question:  If I persuade the diffuser cover off the bulbs it's unlike to damage them right?  It should restore the harsh spotlight effect for a workbench light?  The risk would then just be blinding myself, as looking directly at them for even half a second  with the diffuse cover on leaves me with a ring of square LED retina burns!

[Zero999]

Removing the diffuser could pose a shock hazard, if it exposes live parts.

Not all LED spot lights have diffusers. Why not replace the ones over your workbench with the type which don't?

[Kjelt]

I am facing a similar issue.
I have the ambience white GU10 hue spots that shine their light in at around 160 degrees.
Just removing the "diffuser" will not help you since the light from individual leds will give a lightpattern, not nice.
What I need since I can not remove the current 160 lens is some lens to,put in front to focus the light to the 25 and 15 degrees angle I want. Sounds silly but I am going to my glasses shop for help, probably costing twenty euro per lens or so

What you can do is replace the current lens with the one you want but therefore you need to know how the spotlight is constructed. Are there three  1W powerleds in the Mercedes star construction then you can find a lot of options on Ebay, many lenses are sold seperately. If there are ten or so medium powerleds it will become very hard to focus that light since it is intended to be a diffuse light source.

[james_s]

There are (or were) some cheap lenses available from China for LED lighting. I think I got the ones I have from DealExtreme back when it still made sense to build my own LED lights.