The Truth About Low Energy Light Bulbs

Posted on August 11, 2009
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by Briony Kennicot

There are several good reasons to consider installing low energy light bulbs, chief among them being that you can save serious sums of money, you can help to reduce global warming and, thanks to legislation banning incandescent light bulbs, you don’t really have a choice.

So what’s on offer in the low energy lighting stall? Well when it comes down to it, there’s CFL’s (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) and LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes) and that pretty much covers it.

Of the two, CFL’s have been fairly widely available for longer but are only about 4 times more efficient than incandescent and have a lot of serious issues relating to health, aesthetics, usability and the environment.

LED light bulbs for general domestic service have not been available very long at all, however they already exceed existing efficiency levels by a factor of 10 and continue to improve at an incredible pace; and aren’t hampered by a list of issues either.

So if LED’s are way better than either incandescent light bulbs or CFL’s then why aren’t more people installing them? There are several reasons but we’ll look at just the main two.

The first main reason is the lingering perception that LED’s are for Christmas lights and such like rather than mainstream lighting. This image persists because genuine LED replacements for domestic light bulbs have not been in existence all that long and can still be quite elusive to track down.

The second reason for the slow adoption of LED’s to date is lack of widespread understanding of the economics of electrical lighting and the tendency for people to pay attention to what appears most immediate and neglect what’s actually going on.

Hence we moan when confronted with the electricity bill yet also moan when we see the price sticker for LED light bulbs at the local store and totally fail to spot the underlying relationship. The cost of electric lighting is a major factor in most electricity bills and it’s not the cost of the light bulbs that’s the culprit; rather it’s the cost of running them.

Those “inexpensive” regular light bulbs convert less than one tenth of the electricity supplied to them (and paid for by you) into light – all the rest is lost as heat. Now let’s look at those rather pricey LED bulbs again – the convert over nine tenths of electricity into light and waste very little as heat.

The payback period on those apparently costly LED’s can be as little as one year and given that most boast life spans of 50,000 hours and upwards compared to 2,000 for regular light bulbs you would need to replace your cheap light bulbs over 25 times to keep pace with the LED’s. Hmm… maybe “expensive” high quality LED light bulbs aren’t so pricey after all.

What then should you look out for when purchasing energy saving light bulbs? Top of the list has to be quality – there are loads of cheap LED light bulbs out there and they’re frankly a waste of money.

In general you can spot a high quality LED bulb by the fact that it will state what sort of incandescent light bulb it aims to replace; so if you want to replace a 35 watt, 50 degree beam, warm white halogen lamp then check that the LED you’re considering is a good match for all 3 features (luminosity, light spread and color).

The second thing to understand is that LED light is highly directional and so they are naturally excellent as spot lights. There are general purpose all round LED bulbs available but they’re nowhere as pervasive as spot lights. The most popular application for LED low energy lighting at present is replacing MR16 spotlights, especially halogens.

As a side note, the term MR16 has become closely associated with low voltage (12v) lighting but it actually describes both the GU5.3 base format with two pins used for 12v systems and the GU10 twist n’ lock format used for main voltage lighting. In either case though, both 12v MR16 and its GU10 mains variant are an excellent way to get started right this minute with genuine energy saving lighting.

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Briony Kennicot also suggests this additional article that looks in detail at MR16 LED spotlights.

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