Best cheap LED light bulbs

I checked out their AliExpress store.

Shipping kills the deal yet again.

I can't find any interesting Osram LED bulbs on AliExpress.

Did you order them online, maybe from China, or did you buy them locally at "The Light"?

I don’t order form Chinese websites or no name from Amazon because the CSA/UL/CE certifications are typically fake and the bulbs may not be safe to use. If they have insufficient electrical isolations for example the bulb may work fine until there is an unintended line surge which causes it to spontaneously combust where legal appliances would not have.
Then your insurance refuses to pay out because you used illegal electrical products.

Out flashlights are a grey area, they are not connected to line voltage and they are low voltage (hence may evade need for certification) but if an insurance company wanted to screw you and knew one of our lithium batteries started a fire they could deny you coverage because its not an item sold from a first world business and the batteries are sold in bulk to be used in packs which should be certified but are diverted to resellers who sell them individually for flashlights (against the wishes of most manufacturers agreements of sale).

Bought locally. They don’t have a CRI rating, but they do have a nice warm tint that I find pleasing.

If you live in some chosen european countries and you have a non food discounter called “Action” at hand - they have E27 17W 2500Lm Bulbs for just 2,99€:

That makes a theroetical 147Lm/W - very rare to find as you all know.

I have bought multiple ones and they are indeed very bright and the light doesn’t seem to be of low CRI as well.
With 17W and that price, I think they won’t last forever, but which one of those lights does.

Action also has some 4000K and 6500K bulbs - both not as efficient and powerful, but especially 4000K bulbs are quite rare

I get mine at Dollar Tree, they are fine for me.

Had to take a look since I don’t pay the invoices at the office. Looks like up to around 24 household bulbs is around $13 UPS Ground, bumps to $14 for more. That’s really pretty fair all things considered, especially these days with all the carriers increasing (boo). Same $13 if you only want two bulbs, though. The free shipping threshold sure changed, though, wow. lol. That must have been very recent. They used to be at like $99 and I believe every order we’ve placed with them as a business account had free shipping (decent quantities each time, though)…but $1000 for free shipping. What a bargain. :slight_smile:

Good luck in your search! If you have any local suppliers (industrial/trade types) you might see if they will sell to individuals and what they have…most will and sometimes they are surprisingly competitive on price.

I don’t know Canada but I thought you and the US were fairly well aligned in how these things are approached. For products and devices, if it’s sold it’s supposed to be legal, and therefore the onus of damages is on the manufacturer (and/or retailer sometimes). Where you would get in trouble is if you alter devices that then cause the damage, or of course doing unlicensed work in the home where you’re not supposed to.

For these normal household edison-base bulbs, I can’t see any surge ever causing a meltdown or combustion. They all have one of those fat grey resistor-fuse things, but if that were to fail to stop the current then you’re going to blow out caps or rectifiers or something almost instantly, and last ditch I suppose the emitter(s) would fail and open the circuit at that point. Those that have metal bases of course wouldn’t burn…not sure if the plastics typically used for the bases/base shells or the diffuser would actually burn or just melt for a moment. There are a lot of shoddy topologies these days across whole families of appliances and devices…it’s a shame really…but most things are not just going to catch on fire with a surge or even a lightning strike. I’m more concerned with heat-creating devices like toasters/toaster ovens, rice cookers, space heaters, mug warmers, etc…so many of those are disasters waiting to happen and I think a lot of them should probably be made illegal for sale until they incorporate safe engineering and legit certification/testing. But bulbs….eh.

Cree last a long time. Can’t say if they are cheap or not because I bought mine when the power company ran a deal with HD.

I see talk of surges. Whole house surge protection should stop that. It is NEC mandated now going forward. It would be a good investment for everyone.

Edit- Just looked them up. Not cheap but they do last. I replaced mine about 3-4 years ago and haven’t lost one yet. KOW

guessing that people are getting color temperature [warmness] confused with CRI again…

what i think is, color temp is easy, a warmish tint pleases most people, CRI is hard to measure, no one knows what it is, and don;t care why it might be different from ‘color temperature’

any bulb not listing color temp, is probably going to be either cold blue, or have a wide variation box to box

(ie they bought whatever was cheap that week and stuck their label on it)

I received these light bulbs today.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VVVVDCH

They claim to be warm white, but they are a cross between warm white and neutral white, which is good enough for me.

They were packaged quite well, and none of them were broken.

Overall, I'm happy with them so far.

I think I'll have to use them for a long time before I know about their longevity first hand.

I get mine from Costco. They seem to have good tint, good CRI, certainly are 2700K, and for the most part pretty reliable. More reliable than the CFLs of the past, but I just to replace one in a bathroom that is about a year old. It started to flash on and off.

Here’s their latest version:

I was at Costco today and in case anyone is interested, these 6 pack Feit bulbs currently cost $9.99.

I’ll recommend the Costco Feit brand also. I purchased 12 of the 2700k BR40’s about a year ago. Very eye relaxing light.
What Costco doesn’t seem to realize is advertising more the fact that they are 90cri would help their sales. I wasn’t sure when I was looking at them from the Costco website, so I researched the model number given at Costco and found they where 90cri. Sure enough when they arrived, I opened the box they all said 90cri on the box. I just looked and Homedepot has 90cri A19 Feit bulbs for $11 for 4, the better deal is for 6 at Costco posted above.

Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation on this site. LED bulbs are not a significant hazard no matter where they are made (most come from China) . I looked up all of the Consumer Product Safety Recall list for LED bulbs dating from 1/1/2018 to the present and came up with exactly ONE recall (in 2019 for bulbs sold by QTOP) where the hazard was fire. The only other recall I could find was for a large bulb that could detach from the base and fall from a ceiling unit and bean you on the head. Not a fire hazard though. All of the bulbs I bought directly from China are now available from US sellers on eBay so would be covered by CPSC recalls. I find none.

Expecting someone to produce and sell a high CRI bulb for a dollar? Not likely. That takes precise control of the manufacturing process that usually means they are much more costly to make and therefore costly to buy. BTW I never buy and of the bulbs with the A19 design (standard light bulb shape) because it is too limiting in the way the LEDs can be arranged on a plate below the globe. It’s a really bad design perpetuated by consumers reluctance to buy any bulb that doesn’t look like an old Edison bulb invented a century ago.

No one in this thread expected that.

For example, I was never looking for a high CRI light bulb.

That’s simply not true. You don’t need your manufacturing process to be any different. You just buy high CRI LEDs for your bulb. And these are not expensive. They don’t need any special manufacturing process either, just a different phosphor mix. That mix is going to be more expensive and to get the same output you need more LEDs because efficiency drops. So bulbs will be more expensive but that’s like 10% more/diode. With the same LED count (and lower output, after all we’re counting price per bulb, not per lumen in this thread) that’s several percent price increase.
I won’t comment on whether it’s possible to make a $1 bulb with high CRI. I don’t know. I paid twice as much for mine (the 470lm ones, more for brighter) and I’m happy with that.

It is really unfortunate that the forum focus so low on light bulbs that we use every night at home which should have high quality instead of the mediocrity that we find too often on the market. And it’s shame that major brands didn’t show spectral data on the label even the on the most expensive bulbs

I agree with you, but like food labels, only a handful of people would read them and less could probably interpret them. Still, you have to start somewhere.

I tried a GE 2700k 90cri “Filled with Sun” It isn’t any better than others in the price range.