nosrednayduj

Our house came with a fancy crystal chandelier. It takes 16 candelabra base bulbs, eight of which have to be pretty small. When all we had was incandescent, it cost a lot of money to run this thing, ignoring the difficulty of finding bulbs that actually fit. So at some point we went to a transitional technology of having the chandelier just be pretty and off, and installed some compact fluorescent fixtures adjacent to it. (This was a little ugly.)

Enter LED bulbs! These are much more efficient (and apparently have been getting more and more efficient as time passes). At the beginning of LED availability, there wasn't a lot of size choices, so we continued to use the transitional fixtures. Now, there's a lot more choice. And, one of our transitional recently fixtures "let the smoke out", and so we had to do something new anyway.

Additionally, dust settles on the crystals. So, after many years, they look kind of milky white. When we bought the house, we actually thought that the crystals were intentionally milky white, and early on some contractor washed one crystal to show us how it could be different.

There are over 400 little crystals, most of which have to be washed individually. We've done this twice before – it's a several hour job to remove the individual little crystals, wash them, and replace them. The first time it was an activity at our housewarming 32 years ago. I don't remember the second time, but it was likely 15-20 years ago. But, since we were about to embark on using this chandelier everyday with the new LED bulbs, we decided it was time for a third washing! I took pictures. Unfortunately, I didn't think about taking pictures until after we had begun the disassembly process so we don't have a good "before" picture.