Let There Be Light!

Okay, one of the things that I did while I was on vacation was to replace all of my incandescent bulbs with LED’s. 

I didn’t report this because I wasn’t sure exactly how the LED’s stacked up against the incandescent bulbs. Were they in fact better at saving me energy or just looked niftier? 

That is until I got into work this morning.  We have some special testing gear here to help us determine these things, so, I put them to test in a head on comparison.

For reference, here is the incandescent bulbs (the incumbent).

 

Here is the LED’ replacement package, designed to go where the bulb went. 

 

In essence all I had to do was change the bulbs in my existing fixture. That was key for me as I didn’t want to run flex strip or change out my lighting fixtures, and with these I didn’t have to.

I did a few basic tests on these two 

1) What is the power consumption?

The bulbs consumed 16.7 Watts of power while the LED’s consumed 1.22 Watts of power. For me, that is one heck of power savings which is vital for me, since I am on batteries.

2) How much light to they give and what is the quality of that light?

The bulbs gave out 3150 Lumens of light at a colour temperature of 2629 Kelvin with a CRI rating of 99 (Which is about as high of a CRI that you can get). FYI The sun is 100.

 

The LED’s gave out 1174 Lumens of light at a colour temperature of 3325 Kelvin with a CRI rating of 69 (Which is about as okay, not great but not bad).

 

So sure these LED’s give out a third of the amount of light that the bulbs do, but they use a fraction of the power. For me, that is a trade-off that I am willing to make. I can still see fine and most importantly not be afraid to run my main lights.

I paid twenty bucks plus shipping so about 25 bucks for a pack of twenty LED bulbs. The one thing to remember is that sure bulbs will work either way you stuff them in the socket but LED’s won’t. So, if you insert an LED bulb in and it doesn’t light up, turn it over and try again.

To get these I did a search online for the LED replacement for X (the bulb type). It is also good to look for Warm White in colour as that is closer to the Light Bulb in colour and what we are used to in a home setting. Of course if you are looking for a more pure white or daylight white (cooler white) you can get those too.

I am just happy that I won’t be sitting in the dark this winter, though it might be cold, I won’t be without light.