It sounds like you have a lot of ways that you can trim your power bill!
The way I see it, those light bulbs are going to be on pretty much the whole time we’re at home. Why not have them use 80% less electricity? In fact, the 285W less that we’re using pretty much offsets my desktop - when it’s on. I turn it off unless I’m actively using it.
Residential lighting consumption (in 2010) was about 207 billion kWh, equal to about 14% of all residential electricity consumption.
If everyone switched to more efficient bulbs, that would save 165 billion kWh per year! If an “average” power plant produces 12.4 billion kWh (according to the EIA site), that’s like eliminating the need for 13 power plants.
At least, that’s what I tell myself while I’m idling my H3 and throwing incandescent bulbs out the window.
Those graphs are almost always outdated, due to how quickly LED advances. You mentioned a 900 lumen at 9W bulb (which I know nothing about, but use for example here): That’s pretty trivially 100 lm/W, whereas that graph shows white LED at 30-60 lm/W.
The thing about buying a bulb that’s very pricey, but may last 20 years or so…
The technology is improving so fast, that in 1-3 years, there may be much better/cheaper LED bulbs, but if you’ve already bought a bunch of 1st/2nd generation bulbs for a lot of money that will last ~20 years, you’re not going to be able to take advantage of the improvements, unless you put your original expensive investment to waste.
Or not. I wouldn’t buy a used light bulb, unless it had a manufacturing date on it so I’d know (theoretically at least) how much longer it would function.
I tell myself that buying some expensive ($15) bulbs now is a good thing, as it shows there is a market for awesome bulbs like that. I figure that if I’m blowing a bunch of money on steam sales for games that I barely play, I can at least spend a portion of that on things that will save me money over the long haul.
I mitigated the wallet damage by only converting the most commonly used bulbs in my house. That way, when the better bulbs come out in a few years, I can move the older bulbs to the less-used spots in the house.
Electricity is expensive in the Northeast, too. I think my most recent bill was like 16.1 cents/kWh for generation, and 9.1 cents/kWh for delivery.
My bad - that’s what I get for trying to post from memory. I double checked, and it’s actually 7.9 for generation, 9.3 for delivery. Still, utilities are expensive up here.
They suck. We bought a house with several of them in too. One of them has (thankfully) been replaced now ith a strip of 3 shiny new LED spotlights. That means
lower energy
instant-on
No flicker
no horrid noise when they turn on
25 year lifetime.
With 3 spots, my light is now much brighter with 3 6 watt LEDs than it was with a 60w flourescent bulb that was ugly as fuck.
I thoroughly recomend replacing a strip flourescent with an LED-compatible fixture.
I haven’t used them, but the site I seethe most referrals to is http://1000bulbs.com/, and they are based in Texas but do ship intl. They do have a large selection.
Appreciate the link. I am looking for a “place to call home” when needing to buy lightbulbs… a place that sells are a reasonable price. I will check this out.
You can get conversion bulbs for those, they’re basically a giant strip of LED’s in that form factor to place in the fluorescent fixture. I have no info on them beyond that, still worth looking into if you don’t like them.
I have no idea! My local home hardware carries them though and while I can’t give an exact price I think they had some around the ~$100 mark which is only 3x the cost of a good florescent bulb.
Arise! Here we are 1-3 years into the future as requested up-thread. LED bulbs are out for every bulb type, from tiny to large and even CFL tube replacements. I was looking at a sale at Home Depot on 3-packs and a guy bought a case. Said he’s not changing another bulb ever, his kids can have them (bit of a grim thought, I guess :)).
So I’ve rotated into LED for seven of my highest-use standard sockets, and moved the prior CFL into some of the older incandescent sockets. Much nicer color rendition, even compared to the ‘warm’ CFL I made sure to buy at the time. I’ll keep the 5 incandescent that are still good for exterior lights as they need to be changed. For a regular socket I recommend the Philips slim-style 10.5 watts soft (2700K) as a 60 watt replacement, you can get them on Amazon for about $5 each (Canadians have to wait for a sale to get them at about $7.
If I have all 7 turned on for 4 hours a day, the house is well lit and they are costing me 28hrs10.5watts/1000$0.103 or 3 cents a day (!) to run, at most 11 bucks a year. So I feel pretty good about that.
The problem I’m having is the GU10 halogen socket, of which I have 8. Cheapest option I can find for a high-quality brand (GE, Philips, Cree) is $30 a pair. The cheap alternatives on Amazon almost all have poor reviews. Plus the expensive ones are more narrow-beam spot light style which is much nicer for a bit of dramatic lighting. I need two right now so I might as well do it, but this implies $120 total outlay for the GU10.
The G9 in my under-cabinet lighting on the other hand are even harder to find and might not fit. So I need to try a couple first before I commit to buying 10.
Finally the candle socket (small socket) problem is I want them to look nice, since they are exposed in my bathrooms. I need 12 and couldn’t change them over time as it would look bad. Nice looking ones seem to be about $25 for 3, so another $100.
Anyway, thought others may find this interesting. Anyone else with success at this?
Also, this thread is the first time i saw that you can get led replacements for long florescent tubes. The house i bought a few years back has old tubes in the ceiling lights. I’m definitely going to replace them with leds now.
For GU-10, we have these. We originally bought some by HitLights, but a couple failed. The LightingEVER ones have been going for over a year now. (We do have a bunch of HitLights A19 bulbs - they look great and none have failed)
We are also waiting for decent candelabra-base LEDs, as our dining-room fixture is on several hours every day.
