The Facts About Energy Efficient Light Bulbs
 

A quick and interesting article that provides some good info. As we head into the winter season, looking at lighting again becomes more and more important. I know I'd like to replace a bulb or two that I use a lot with LEDs or something a little more efficient if possible. I have a couple normal 100W (equivalent) bulbs that I'm currently using 23W CFLs that could be replaced and are used for hours each night.

Energy Efficient Light Bulbs - Green Lighting Facts - The Daily Green

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I'm looking forward to LED to replace a bunch of halogen task lighting in the kitchen that my wife uses a lot. The price still needs to drop in half to justify the expense though. Everywhere else LED would be nice since it doesn't have the mercury the CFL's do but from an energy/money savings standpoint I don't see it as a worthwhile change like replacing the Incandescents was.

I agree. I've converted 95% of my house to CFL and the cost wasn't too bad at all. The only remaining lights in my house are 50W halogen dimmable par 20 lights, or outside lights that need to work in the bitter cold. LEDs would be great for either of these applications, however they are still prohibitively expensive at this point, especially for the short duration that they are used. I do plan on replacing the more heavily used lights to LED though.

I presume they're talking about the payback of replacing incandescent with LED.

What about replacing CFLs with LEDs? If it's more efficient, I'd probably buy an LED for the lamp I use most often, but the LEDs I've seen so far produce about the same lm/W as CFLs. In many cases, the LEDs are LESS efficient than CFLs.

I would have agreed with you in the past, and I still do see inefficient LED lights out there. However, I am see them improving as I am looking now. However, to get the more efficient ones, you have to pay a hefty sum. It appears they're ~2x as efficient as CFLs currently are.

I replaced all my Incandescents with CFLs and finally with LEDs, 47 bulbs in total.
The Incandescents rate at a total of 2820 watts..
The CFLs rate at a total of 611 watts.
The LEDs rate a total of 282 watts.
So ya its a great savings .. sort of .. cost of LEDs $1508.19 taxes included.

I've installed CFL's where the light is on for longer than a few minutes per day. The rest are incandescents which are being replaced by halogens. The latter looks like a normal bulb, but has a smaler halogen bulb inside, and uses about 20%-30% less energy (42W instead of 60W24W instead of 40W, etc.). They are good for places where the light is often switched on and off for short periods of time, like in the bathroom or the hallway.

The idea that they are only a good investment if you own your home or plan to stay there for a number of years... it's thinking like that that holds alot of people back! I only used incondecent bulbs in places like my attic (light gets turned on every 10+ years) or closets, or the motion sensor light in the garage by the bicycles, bulb comes on for 15 seconds at a time, mostly use them because the bulbs are still good and I have them.
But rental houses and apartments should have CFL's in all the lights, if the owners don't put them in then the tenants should, if you are worried about the cost to install them then take them with you when you leave!
I have a 3 year old LED as my bed side reading light, a light next to the couch that is just over a year old and as the fridge light that is 6 years old, each of them cost about $45 each and every few years that same $45 bought me an LED almost twice as bright as the last one and I'm impressed as to what a $45 LED's look like now.

WD-40,

I really like your commitment to LED lighting.

Could you go into a bit more detail about what you've learned in the process?

Regards,

-AC_Hacker

The reason I decided to go all or nothing was the fact my kids and their families move in and out of my house as they run into and out of financial hardship.
So as many of us may know, lights are continually left on.
And I was not happy with the wattage being wasted.
Yes I knew I wanted LEDS, I have read about them for a long time but they were never available locally. So when Home Depot in Canada finally got them in I went nuts and filled my boots.
These are very bright and very white almost like daylight. As my son put it .. I don't wanna come home drunk and have to use the bathroom, without sunglasses on.
If I left every light on in the house it would still use less watts then my 52" TV .. yes its next on the LED (back-lit) list.
Overall I am extremely pleased with my choice in bulbs, short of the price.
Of course some of the LEDS at Home Depot have already dropped from $29.99 to $19.99, but such is life.
Thanks for reading .. Dennis

I think I found something that would work for me. I've been waiting quite some time for dimmable par 20 replacement lights. I currently use halogens in my kitchen, and I like using the lights but avoid it due to the power consumption (there are 8 - 50W bulbs). The lumen rating isn't up to what a 50W halogen puts out, but it would probably suffice.

EarthLED LumiSelect Dimmable LED Light Bulbs, Dimmable LED, LED Lamps, Dimming LEDs, Dimmer Compatable LED Lamps

Its very confusing though. The main page lists them as a 6W bulb, when you click the order now button it says it uses 7 watts of power, but in the specs it says 9W... On top of that all, a single bulb costs $90 which is just way too much for me to replace 8 bulbs.

@ 6W you get 99 lm/w which is great!
@ 7W you get 85 lm/w which is still very good
@ 9W you get 66 lm/w which isn't bad, but pretty close to a CFL

Of course, I haven't found any dimmable par 20 CFLs...

Task, Fill & Passage Lighting...
 

WD_40,

Thanks for the info.

I'm in the process of switching over too, but I'm moving much slower than you did.

I'm posting my thinking process on the matter, as I am curious if your considerations were similar.

I have categorized my lighting into:

• task lighting
• fill lighting
• accent lighting

and I have recently added a third category:

• passage lighting

Task Lighting is for doing a specific task that requires the best visual clarity I can obtain. Examples of tasks are writing, drawing, machining, using any power tool, and reading (sometimes even cooking). I 've had a strong preference for halogen lighting for task lighting, since it is bright, contrasty, and has a full color spectrum. The recent crop of high-power LED, like the kind you found at the big-box stores works very well for task lighting. In some cases even better than halogen, because the color balance is good, and the point-source gives excellent contrast, making it my preferred light for machining, where I want to be able to see every nick and.scratch.



Fill Lighting is used to illuminate the volume of a room, and the contrast is not so important. I have also concluded that the level of light can be much lower than I used to use. I find that CFL is great for this. If I'm not mistaken, CFL gives more light per watt than LED, but the light from CFL radiates in all directions, making it really good for fill and less efficient for task lighting. I'm very selective what I watch in TV, but when I do, I like it to be a good experience. I have two strings of white xmas tree lights fastened to the upper edge of the wall behind my couch to provide low-level fill for watching TV. They provide just enough fill light so the TV does not seem overly contrasty, and because of their location, they don't distract the eye from the TV image. I have them on a dimmer, so I can get the exact level I want (and even save a bit of power).


Accent Lighting is for lighting an object or area of interest. The light intensity level is also somewhere between task and fill. This is a way to use light that I am just beginning to explore and I find it to be very interesting. I'm realizing that the proper use of accent lighting can make a small space feel much larger and more interesting.



Passage Lighting for me, this is a recently added category. Passage lighting would be lighting used to provide a minimum light level in a hallway or the route to the garage, or a staircase. Night lights are also passage lights. I have found that the illumination level and quality required of passage lighting is so low that it is the perfect place to use my first generation LED lights that I still have laying around. My son uses thrift-store LED xmas tree lights for passage lighting. They pull little power and also add a festive note.

Overall, I want a fairly high level of lumens per square foot in task lighting, a low to moderate level in fill lighting, and a low level in passage lighting.

I have had to really search out the right CFL for fill lighting, because for my preferences, they're just too bright. I have found some that are about 5 watts (equivalent to 40 watt incandescent) that I like. I have found that I prefer to have several small fill lights than one large fill light. I also want to experiment with very small 12v halogen bulbs, run at 5 to 7 volts. I have collected some cell-phone chargers for this purpose.


Please don't misread these photographs, they are strictly for making a point about different types of lighting. My own digs are very humble, however I'm still using these techniques.

Regards,

-AC_Hacker

I was at Home Depot today looking at their LED lights and noticed that 57 Lumins per watt was about the best of anything that they sold for LEDs and it was two of their 850 lumin lights at around 16 watts each that seemed like the best deal at 53 lumins per watt.
Then I remembered that the last time I hooked a CFL up to a Kill-a-watt meter it drew more power then it was labeled as using, then I noticed that not only are CFL's rated for watts but also amps at 120 volts, my 7 watt CFL is also labeled as a .081 amp at 120 volts or 9.72 watts and that is closer to what it really draws.
LED's on the other hand tend to draw what they are labeled within 5% or so.

We have a floodlight over the driveway with a tube-style halogen bulb

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1288035356 http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1288035356

The first thing I did after installing it two years ago was to replace the 500W halogen tube with a 150W bulb (the neighbors don't need to be able to read with my floodlight), but now that the darker half of the year is here, and with a dog that keeps running around, the light is on much more often than I'd like it to be. Does anyone know of an LED replacement for this type of tube-bulb? Something that would give the lumen equivalant of a 100W halogen would be best.

I think the best alternative there is to keep your lights on time to a minimum. A more efficient bulb would of course help too.

my house has one of those motion lights with the halogen bulbs as well. Mine is coming on all the time due to cats walking through the carport. My plan is to replace the entire unit soon.

At my old house I had a motion light that took regular screw in bulbs. I replaced the two 150 Watt floods with some 20 ish watt CFL floods that although they took a minute or so to come up to full brightness when cold I don't think it made any difference from a security stand point.

The time is already down to 15-20 seconds, but another problem is that it's very hard to adjust the light (dark) level of operation, so sometimes it turns on during daylight. The potentiometer doesn't have good resolution, I've already soldered a resistor in parallel, but this only slightly helped. I may just replace the unit, since it's becoming more and more problematic after two years in the elements.

Yeah, I kind of figured you had already done that. Sounds like a new fixture is the next logical step.

Piwoslaw: Your current lamp makes about 2400lm, but the LED equivalent isn't exactly affordable.

High Power led lights

Prices like these start to make sodium vapor lamps look attractive.

I was talking with an engineer from Ruud lighting a couple weeks ago. They make industrial/commercial LED lighting. He said that even though sodium has the high lumen/watt efficiency, the orange light it emits requires something like 30% more lumens to appear as bright as a white LED. Therefore, they can get away with lower lumen output with LED fixtures and it still looks as bright, and its not discolored.

Wikipedia says the opposite about low-pressure sodium lamps: High pressure sodium has additional phosphors and Sodium electron excitations and is a whole different ball game.

Sodium bulbs need time to warm up, right? So they wouldn't work in a set-up where the ON cycle is only 15-30 seconds?

Try Black Tape...
 

Another approach to this problem could be the judicious use of black tape on the bottom of sensor window, so that the short critters (dogs & cats) can't be seen, but the tall ones can be seen.

It worked on my neighbors garage light, which blinded me any time I went out into my back yard. We put the tape on the side of the sensor so that IR movement in my backyard is not seen, but IR movement in his yard is seen.

-AC_Hacker

The Facts About Energy Efficient Light Bulbs
 

hey doaz,
your article is very interesting.

Yes I agree, almost everything in the stores here are now LED. You could hardly find CFLs anymore since they are being phased out. Floodlights, spotlights, pinlights, dimmable lights, everything I see at the home depot are LEDs. and very efficient ones at that.

How efficient are your very efficient LEDs? The ones here its hard to find something much higher than 50 lumens per watt.

Well I just persuaded the village association to replace the streetlamps with LEDs..and they purchased 7w LEDs to replace those 40w CFLs they used previously and have noticed no difference in lighting at all..streets are still well illuminated

I used the word very efficient since they consume less power than the 40 watt CFLs that were previously used..and yet light up the same area effectively