You are just not buying the proper LED bulbs. Every LED bulb that I have puts out more and better light than their halogen equivalents. All are actual measurements done in my sphere (and those LED numbers matched the manufacturers published specs within a couple of percent, no Chinese lumens here)
Here in South Africa, the electricity company introduced an initiative to replace all bulbs in households to energy saving equivalents.
I had already replaced all the standard bulbs with CFL’s. Most of the house has mains voltage downlighters though. The LED replacements are just so expensive, I couldn’t justify it.
Needless to say, Eskom replaced them all with 3w LED’s for free.
They are excellent and are brighter than a 30w downlighter and maybe, just a touch, dimmer than a 50w. The clean white light is much better than the yellow tinted halogens too.
When the price comes down, everyone will use these.
The good old incandescent bulbs were purely resistive and the (pure watts) real power used was metered correctly on the electricity meter for billing purposes.
Non-Incandescent bulbs are not purely resistive so they are either capacitive or inductive … The older electricity meters do not record the reactive power (Vars) at the moment and once the majority of people are using non-Incandescent bulbs , the Electricity Supply companies will fit new meters to all domestic supply points … It is possible that newer meters now fitted to consumers premises are already capable of measuring both types of power.
This means that we will eventually be paying more for our electricity … This is going to happen in the UK in the future and it is us (the consumers) that will have to foot the bill as usual.
I use an assortment of types of bulbs at the moment , but at my age I won’t need to worry about the new metering system that will also charge for reactive power … If your devices have an input transformer to step the voltage up or down , then that is an inductor.
Hopefully one day the bulb manufacturers will be able to make their products purely resistive with a zero phase-angle supply requirement.
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There's less than 2 watts difference between those bulbs for a given light output. So let's go crazy and say those 2 watts are just wasted 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and costs my maximum rate of 25.4 cents per kilowatt/hour. That's $4.45.
That's for 8760 hours. From the reviews I've seen here and vendor sites, LED light bulbs just don't seem to last anywhere that long. Probably due to cost cutting, resulting in over driven and under cooled lights. Granted, CFL's won't last that long either. Even so, on a cost basis, I'd take the unsubsidized CFL over the subsidized LED almost every time. The exceptions are for lights more likely to be physically abused. Like that bulb in my patio over my weights that I occasionally shatter, or in that lamp that occasionally gets knocked over. For those I'd like to switch to an LED light bulb. For the rest, I'm already using CFL's and plan to keep doing so until LED's become a much better value. Actually, if the LED light bulbs would actually last an honest 50,000 hours, then I would be much more inclined to use them.
I still haven’t been able to find LED’s cheap in the UK. A CFL for £1 vs an LED for £10 makes it a very hard choice to go for LED. I have moved to fast start CFL’s and I’m happy with them for now. When LEDs drop to ~£5 a bulb for a decent output I might move over to them. For now though they are too expensive for me to justify.
LIFETIME:
LEDs have about a 25000 to 50000 hour lifetime which is actually fairly likely to be accurate as they don’t poop out like Incans do. They are also pretty much indestructable and even when one of the LEDs goes out there is an array of many of them, so even really bad luck is mitigated.
CFLs have much shorter lifetime and are way more likely to break. You will likely buy many CFLs for the lifetime equivalent of 1 LED. This is where the ‘green’ part comes in.
LEDs have other advantages too.
CFLs are terrible in dimmers. Even with their specialty ones, they dont work all that good. LEDs work great with dimmers. No problems at all. They work better than incans actually and aren’t unduly stressed by lower light levels like Incans are.
CFL ballast sucks. They have to warm up and sometimes have flickering issues. Even today its hard to find CFLs that are good and immediately give full brightness. I have some and they exist, but they are hard to find and theres NO WAY TO KNOW when buying them. You just hope for the best.
For the most part you are right… I do mostly CFLs. They have new types of CFLs with no mercury. However, for any dimmer switches you may have, or if you have areas where you really want immediate brightness, LEDs are quite good.
I don't have much issue with the CFL's I have in use. We moved into our current house 2 years ago and the previous owner left CFL's installed everywhere. I have had a couple oddballs that died and I replaced, but for the most part have been very happy with them. They look like they have been installed for years before we moved in (evidenced by how dirty they are). They are not instant-on, but aren't that dim on first turn-on.
I’ve got some CFL lamps. Mostly they’re ok, but I’ve yet to find any that have really nice CRI. Our local Costco (Seattle, WA USA) had some nice FEIT LED lamps on sale for $5 each recently. Both BR30 floods and standard 60W replacements. The come on quite quickly, don’t flicker, have nice color (not perfect, but good), and have a nice even light throw.
Hopefully in the next 3-4 years we’ll be seeing some really high quality LED lamps at low prices. $30 is nuts for a general purpose lamp.
clearly there is a large YMMV gap among users here of cfls. starting with the first rebates several years ago i made a decision to completely switch to the cfl format. seemed like a no brainer. as has been pointed out, with the subsidies offered they are very inexpensive and whenever one burned out or started flickering i just replaced it. when the first led house lighting bulbs came out i tried them and got nowhere, the wife hated the color, they were too directional for general household lights. as i stated above i put them in some places where accessibility was an issue and the family tended to leave them on. over the following years i have tried a number of led bulbs attempting to solve some of the issues described but with limited success. just recently i read about the nationally sponsered “L” prize competition with a $10million cash prize for the winner/ Phillips won this competition with their 10W (9.7W) 60W replacement bulb reportedly with 93.4lm/W. current subsidized prize is ~$25 per bulb going down to $15 and then to $8bulb in the following years. i am going to purchase a few of these (just because i can) to give them a try but it seems that the future may be getting brighter (NPI) for household led replacement bulbs. meanwhile i can not wait to throw out all of my remaining cfls.
btw lest i be called a shill for philips, i have no former, current or future affiliation with home depot or phillips or pretty much anyone. it would be nice to have someone more knowledgeable than i take a look at these new generation bulbs and give a review.
I recently replaced some pot lights. The original ones were GU-10 halogen bulbs, and now they’re Cree CR6’s. I didn’t go for CFLs. My reasoning:
CFLs in pot lights (where the bulbs can be visible) look funny
The few dimmable CFLs I’ve tried were not very dimmable. They’d go from 100% down to about 50%, and then off.
I don’t want any mercury in the house
in my experience with CFLs, frequent on/off switching makes them die about 10x sooner than advertised
as others have said, CFLs are just an interim lighting solution
we could have bought CFLs and replaced them with LED bulbs when LED bulbs were cheaper/better, but the CR6’s look nicer than any bulb, CFL or other.
The Cree CR6’s are superb. The CRI is I think 90, and we truly can’t tell the difference between them and the halogens we had up there before (colour-rendition-wise). They dim really well, they are 2700 K (the colour we like), they look nice on the ceiling, they’re nice and floody (the GU-10s were too “spotty” for my liking), etc. I won’t mention other benefits over the halogen GU-10’s, but there are many.
The only way I could be happier with the Cree lights is if we were able to get the NEW CR6’s, which are 800 lm instead of 575 lm, at a good price. But in our application, 575 lm was plenty, and they were on sale. For our kitchen, where we do want more light, we’ll wait for the 800-lm ones to drop in price.
That’s what I use as well, about 70-80% bright instantly my ones from MEGAMAN (a german co I think), but have had one explode in terrific fashion, thankfully was in garage, and don’t know if moisture was a factor there tbh, I use 23W ones, about £10 each though.
Is that landy in your piccie ?, me mate works on them all day for RAF, I even use a Land Rover series 2/2a clutch master cylinder on my sierra cossie after I converted it to hydraulic clutch with a southwest.com(us) concentric slave.
It’s not the LED that “poops out”. It’s the circuit. I’d be highly suspicious of anyone telling me to expect 50,000 hours out of ANY light bulb. I don’t know what cfl’s everybody that has trouble is buying, but I don’t recall one EVER burning out after several years. I’ve broken a few though.
Same here. I have been using CFLs for over 5 years and have never had one quit. I have one in a bedroom lamp that has about a 1 second delay at turn on, but it has done that for 3 years now. I guess it may be on it’s way to quitting.
I’ve only broken one and that was while cleaning a ceiling fan.
Another reason not to buy the LED. If it lasts 23 years, WHO CARES. It will be obsolete LONG before then. My strategy in buying high tech is to buy behind the “bleeding edge” curve (leading edge, but you bleed money) and update fairly often. Never invest so heavily in a technology, or product, that you wouldn’t be willing to throw it out and start over. I can’t tell you how often I will see someone buy a computer, or TV or whatever and spend 2-3 times more than they have too for “quality or features” thinking that they can then postpone their next purchase. Very poor investment.
I went big for CFLs a long time ago, but have been switching to LEDs in the last 3 years or so. Reasons?
1. Higher CRI makes for a much more pleasant light. CFLs currently top off around 80. As you know, LEDs can be above 90.
2. Waiting for CFLs to warm up got annoying. I much preferred having instant-on at full power. Especially when I'm just walking through the hallway or grabbing something from a room.
3. CCFLs address some of these issues, but are less efficent and more expensive.
4. Disposing of the CFLs properly is a pain in the butt when you don't have a car.
it would be nice to have someone more knowledgeable than i take a look at these new generation bulbs and give a review.
