Best cheap LED light bulbs

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.

too bad

99.999999999999999999999999999% of people would not know what it was, though

At this point I want get full specs online as happen with consumer electronic products.
This is the minimum required

Just got a 6-pack of Lidl bulbs on a sale for 15 PLN which comes out as $0.62/bulb. 5.5W, 470lm, CRI97+. That’s not a regular price and it wouldn’t really be worthwhile to run around searching for the last boxes out there but in exceptional circumstances it’s possible to get a high CRI bulb for well under $1.
BTW, I misremembered, the regular price is not just under $2 but $1.24. So not $1 but quite close.

There are at least 4 different LED bulb threads atm…

but few of the posters actually measures anything and lots of the posters dont care about CRI, nor do they care about flicker.

for those that care about CRI and Flicker, I suggest buying an Opple Light Master, they are on sale atm. Page Not Found - Aliexpress.com

Somehow i missed this thread until now.
You are correct that it is self certify.
However a first world manufacturer can be sued by you or the electrical authority in your country, good luck suing a Chinese shell company in a Chinese court that has been laundered several times over.
The interesting thing that even HKJ found in his tests are insufficient electrical isolations. The bulb/charger works fine until there is a surge in the lines that would not cause a problem in a legal device but shorts and can cause fire in an illegal device.

And you would think how can they screw up plastic, its cheap, its universal and the manufacturer has plenty of choice.
A few years back i was looking at twin socket devices, the ones that turn a single bulb socket into two. They are legal and sold at big box stores but one from a no name company on amazon found the plastic was melting. To save perhaps less than a penny the company cheaped out on something that saved them probably a fraction of a penny in manufacturing cost. A fraction of a cent.

Of course when you are talking millions of copies even half a cent adds up, lets say 5 million socket doublers, half a cent savings, $25,000 in your pocket.
5 million screwed customers.

regarding Lights of America mentioned earlier:

“The FTC sued Lights of America Inc. for overstating the light output and life expectancy of its LED bulbs.
A federal court ordered the company to pay money to the FTC to provide refunds and banned the defendants
from misrepresenting material facts about lighting products.
The FTC has mailed more than $15 million in refunds to date.”

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/refunds/lights-america-refunds