6" Air-tite™ IC Housing - H7ICAT  Product Reviews

"I personally like the H7ICAT. I used this to add recessed lighting to my existing ceilings where the attic was accessible above. You will need at least 7.5" (see actual specs on Halo's website) of clearance. which stands above the 6" (5.5") beams in my attic. Even with an open attic, you will find cross beams that block a particular situtation laying across the beams at 5.5" of depth. They make the H27ICAT (or just H27IC if not air-tight) to fit in 6" of space. I have found the actual hole size to be 6 3/8". The air-tight seals aren't always perfectly affixed... but air-flow should definitely be very limited if any. It comes with a ring gasket that you stick on to the ceiling hole after you slip in the can. You basically cover the gap between the edge of the ceiling hole (on the room-facing bottom side) and wrap to the inner-can edge. Your trims go right over it. Personally, it doesn't fit (I too large for my can & hole), so it easily tears and is very sticky so I could shorten it and seal it up. I liked that this model had a plate with the light socket in rather than requiring a trim that the socket fit into (although you can remove the plate and use those trims). *However*, you actually cannot adjust the height of the socket plate very much in the IC cans. There is a safety inhibiter that seems to be in all IC cans of all brands. So you can't really push the bulb up higher to the top edge. I found this to be a major issue at first. Putting in a PAR30L hung nearly to the ceailing edge and looked awful (my personal opinion). I found PAR30 (short) bulbs to fit much better. The can lists support for specific trims and bulbs. This 6" models supports many, but you cannot just swap any trim and any bulb type. The can (and Halo's specs on its website) lists the bulb types and max wattage supported for each trim. You are pretty much limited to 50W in PAR30 bulbs (the only ones short enough to not hang near the cealing edge). In the end, I am very happy with my recessed lighting, but was a little surprised that it was limited to 50W max in a PAR30. This seems to match other brands I have checked. The "new construction" cans such as the H7ICAT & H27IC cans seem to work great for existing ceilings with an open attic above, except that they have a bracket that is meant for you to install from the bottom side that slips under the beams (as if there is no ceiling). I cannot slide the rails all the way in place because I cannot slide the lower lip of the bracket below the beam which has the ceailing nailed into it. The easy solution to this is to take two plyers, grip the bracket on the vertical edge where there are a few holes and grab the horizontal lip and bend back & forth until the metal fatigues and breaks off. Then they nailed in just fine. Personally I found it tough to nail in my existing attic. I bent some nails, drilled my own hole and just used a screw, and in other places I just didn't bother to secure it (the remodel cans aren't secured anyway). They seem to sit up there just fine. You might need the right tools to break the metal off. I recommend needle-nose plyers for the vertical edge and pipe-clamping wrenches that can grab on and hang on (if you know what I am referring to). Otherwise could take some effort to squeeze with both hands. I also found spacing to be a problem (not necessarily related to this can or this brand). Some websites seemed to indicate 6' - 7'6" was fine. Perhaps it is the 50W max and height adjustment limitations, but it left uneven lighting with dark bands in between. They really looked like separate spot lights, even though they were "flood" bulbs. I ended up going back and adding more cans in-between and now am very happy with the lighting. It is said that recessed lighthing works best as accents anyway and not for uniform lighting. The better rule seems to be for any distance down to a surface (counter, table, chair, or floor), you can place lights in the ration of 1/2:1 to 3/4:1 (where the first number is the distance down. So for an 8' to the floor, tha't 8*1/2 = 4' to 8*3/4=6' (if I understood the ratios correctly -- I'm not a contractor or expert). Obviously shorter if a table is only 5' from the cealing. I have found 4' to 6' to be much more reasonable than 7'6" which really didn't work well for my 8' cealing. If you dim your lights, the bright spots are smaller and there is more separation too. For the H7ICAT cans, I have seen them priced from 8.97 to 17.99 each. Regardless, they seem to be a smaller price of the overall project once you add trims, bulbs, additional wall switches, more romex, etc. I am not an expert or contractor, so this is just informal opinions of what I found and did with my H7ICAT."