Retrofitting recessed GU10 eyeball downlights in a bathroom.

The new retrofitted GU10 recessed eyeball downlights in my bathroom :

17 years ago I spent a lot of time on decorating my bathroom ceiling with pine-cladding along with four white eyeball recessed spotlights. It even has some quality Pioneer loudspeakers (but that's another story).

I have been meaning to replace the ES Spotlights for a few years with more modern LED lights as these are cheaper to run but this would have meant getting some Edison screw to GU10 adaptors to fit inside the white fittings. Recently one of the bulbs blew and it was impossible to unscew the dead bulb, even after removing the entire light fitting and smashing the bulb so I could use pliers.

So the time came to swap out all the old light fittings for new GU10 models.
Having found a suitable set of Brass eyeball downlighters on Amazon I had the problem of the size difference between the old and new fittings.

The new lights are made by Firstlight Products. Model HS202BR "HiSpot 50 Eyeball Downlighter Brass". Looking on Amazon now, I had the last ones! A set of 6 for just £24.96 including GU10 bulbs.


The old fittings used a cut out of about 120mm where as the new ones only need 80mm so how was I going to address the problem of different hole size? I thought about using a tank cutter to make some wooden discs with an outer diameter of 140mm and a cut out of 80mm which I would varnish and stick to the existing hole.
But the final solution to this problem was quite simple really.
What I did was remove the eyeball part of the original light fitting and then retrofit the new smaller fitting into this original fitting.

This made the job look quite neat and took minimal effort to fit the new ones inside the old.
Here are some photographs showing the DIY job progress.


1) Power off of course, Here we can see I have popped out the eyeball from the ceiling mount, ready to disconnect from the original wiring block.

The original eyeball spotlight popped out of the housing ready to unwire.

 2) Here the orignial eyeball has been removed and the ceiling mount cleaned up ready for reuse.

The shell of the original spotlight fitting ready to retrofit the new one inside it.

3) I have assembled the new GU10 eyeball fitting, connected the wiring and pushed the new fitting into the original ceiling mount.  
Handy tip : I found it helped insertion if you use two strips of shiny thick cardboard for the spring clips to run along. You simply remove these once its inserted fully.

Using cardboard to help retrofit the new GU10 eyeball fitting into the old one.

4) Here is a view from above (in the attic) of the two eyeball downlighters, you can see the spring clips from the new and the old eyeball fittings.

Attic view of the two sets of eyeball downlighter mounting spring clips.

5) Here is a view of two of the four retrofitted recessed downlighters installed and working perfectly.

My new recessed GU10 eyeball downlighters up and running.

I have currently left the GU10 bulbs in place but in time I will be replacing these with GU10 LED bulbs as these use hardly any power at all compared with Halogen GU10 bulbs, GU10 LED bulbs seem to be quite common and cheap :


Hope this is of interest to someone.

Thanks
Andy