Renting a room in an old house. The landlady is one of the rare good ones and cooks for me somtimes so I’m trying to be handy where I can.
This light in my office died, and a few others in the house are in dire need of replacing. Rusted and covered in decades of caked on dust, probably hazardous.
I keep seeing units like this. https://a.co/d/iU3hAd3
But I’m wondering if I should get a few of those or get another bulb style ceiling lamps and just use LED bulbs?
I’ve been using those integrated flat LED fixtures in my place lately. I don’t find them too difficult to install, and at least one of my rooms has a rather low ceiling so I’d rather not have stuff dangling down where I can bonk myself on the head with it.
I haven’t had a single problem but if they die they’re trivially easy – for me – to replace. They’re just held onto the ceiling electrical box with two screws, and the electrical connection is two wire nuts. It’ll take me longer to find and lug my stepladder into position than it will for me to replace one. Light fixtures are dead easy, you don’t even have to find and turn off the breaker. Just turn it off at the switch before you mess with it.
The example you linked is suspiciously expensive. I’m getting these for around $15 each.
If you are going to go the socket-and-bulbs route for any of the reasons raised by the other comments here, make absolutely certain that you don’t get a fixture that is enclosed in any way. Enclosed fixtures will kill LED bulbs quickly, and in extreme cases you’ll go through them faster than filament bulbs.
One word of caution here. If the light fixture is hooked up to a three-way switch, it is possible for the light to be off and BOTH sides of the circuit to be hot. This isn’t a common way to wire three-way switches and it isn’t to code anymore, but there are many homes out there with legacy switches wired as such. See: Carter 3-way switch.
Edit: Now with diagram!