Cree LED bulbs from Home Depot. I bought a couple.

OK, I am ready, you can proceed to the mooding phase :smiley:

in my country they will not be available at least one more year or maybe even 2… :open_mouth:

Big list of LED lights, many which are 1/2 the price of those...but you have to wait for em to ship (I prefer the 6000K or higher "white" bulbs, lower than that and they look "yellow" to me, but how you see light is always subjective)

P.S. The incandescent light isn't dead in America..it's just been "redefined"
http://www.newcandescent.com/

I picked up 9 of the 60W and two of the 40W Cree bulbs last month at my local HD, 60W for $8 each and 40W for $7.
I’ve found the color temp similar to incans and I would say a bit brighter that their suggested wattage.

I have two in enclosed outdoor fixtures, four in a ceiling fan and one desk lamp. The ceiling fan is on a dimmer. No indication of any heat issues at all, the outdoor lights work fine with their motion sensors and the dimmer is fully functional.

If the bulbs prove durable and price continues to fall I’ll start replacing all the crappy CF bulbs in my house.

I’ve used the WW I think 60w ones before and they seem ok; 1 gen probably and got picked up for about $12 with much smaller HS’s than you seem to have. That model is probably preferable however they work ok for replacing incans.

Believe it or not the CFL’s made much more heat in my last fixture to the point of nearly burning up the fixture insulation! Led bulbs seem to have a much lesser issue with this and are probably just as reliable if not more.

At least when they go they don’t leak toxic smoke everywhere and make high pitched wining noises :~.

I’m using Cree bulbs for most of my home now. The price and efficiency is nice, but in some ways they’re disappointing.

I really like how they look in my bathroom fixtures. Each fixture holds four bulbs, and I use two 2700K plus two 5000K bulbs. The combined output looks very nice, bright and natural with broad-spectrum light. Color rendition is awesome in this setup, and is particularly nice for putting on makeup or digging out splinters or otherwise seeing subtle details.

One bathroom has two fixtures, or eight bulbs, so I use a dimmer to avoid blinding myself. That’s 6400 lumens in a little bathroom, and every time someone turns the light on at full for the first time, they flinch and cover their eyes. The dimmer can take the output from ~5 lumens up to 6400, and the lower end is only limited by the setting I configured. However, at the low end (~20 lumens or less), the cool white bulbs have a bit of difficulty “catching fire”, so to speak. The warm white bulbs are able to start producing light at very low levels, but the cool white ones often need an extra push, by turning the brightness up and then back down, or some of them won’t produce any light at all. Also, my dimmer seems to run at a difference frequency than the bulbs, so some levels flicker gently between two levels with an erratic pattern. Other levels are fine. However, all levels produce an audible hum.

I’ve tried just the 5000K bulbs in a few rooms. I like the output, mostly, and it’s great light for cleaning, but the light is still cooler than I’d like and doesn’t render color as well as I had hoped. They claim to be 80+ CRI, but it doesn’t feel like high-quality light. On a dimmer, the low settings produce a nice moonlight-like feel.

I also recently tried using only second-gen 2700K “60W” bulbs in my living room, because 5000K didn’t fit with the steampunk decor. I figured it would go well with the theme, along with my Edison bulb lamp and some incandescent downlights… but it ended up just looking like a sickly yellow instead. I am not impressed with the 2700K Cree bulbs at all. Color rendition is terrible, and the ugly yellow light makes my eyes hurt. I’d prefer to do half-and-half (2700K+5000K) like in my bathrooms, but the light fixture holds only three bulbs pointing in different directions… so mixing tints there just looks awkward.

I hope Cree will produce some genuinely high-CRI lights soon, preferably in tints like 3500K and 4500K. Or I could perhaps get some Philips lights instead, since they seem to have better light quality (but, unfortunately, they cost twice as much).

instant $5?

are they available to purchase online & Asian source ?

60W LG branded LED was over 25$ in local market. 40w Osram one around 15$

Cree Asia-Pacific

CreeLightingAsia@cree.com

Cree Australia Sales Office

CreeLightingAustralia@cree.com

Cree Canada Sales Office

CreeLightingCanada@cree.com

Cree Europe, Middle East & Africa

info.europe@cree.com

Maybe contacting them will give you the info you are looking for.

I bought some LED ceiling lights for my parents kitchen, we also have the same bulbs in the bathroom. I bought 3000k tint, and I think the brand is Aurora.

I am sold on LED bulbs for household lighting but it is difficult to know what is decent and what is junk - especially if you’re buying online.

I have one of these for my ceiling light in my room, much brighter than the 40W clear bulb that was there before, and puts out more even light. I was wondering, though, for those of you with multiple Cree bulbs, if mounting vertical vs horizontal had any effect on heat dissipation. I don’t have any hard data, but the heatsink was hot enough that I couldn’t hold my finger on it for longer than a few seconds.

I have a table lamp that I may experiment with soon. This is my first time using an LED bulb, so this may be normal, but I was concerned that perhaps the bulb was meant to be oriented vertical and not horizontal like it is in my ceiling light. I can see why the glue holding the dome in may fail. (also, they could have done a better job at gluing the domes in, I had to cherry-pick one that didn’t have crooked, uneven glue.

As a random note, the old discontinued remote phosphor philips gray alienhead bulbs were on clearance for ~$22 at my home depot.

The current Cree bulbs should have better heat sinking than the original ones did. At least, when I last looked, it seemed that they had upgraded to bigger heat sinks. I don’t know if the orientation matters much, but I do have a few mounted sideways in enclosed ceiling fixtures and haven’t had any trouble with them.

I’m still looking for some neutral white and/or high-CRI LED bulbs, if anyone has suggestions. 3500K to 4500K would be ideal, especially with ~90+ CRI, but I get the impression that such a thing doesn’t yet exist.

I've been using the 40 and 60 watt versions since Home Depot got them 8 or 9 months ago. Maybe it's longer than that?, not sure. So far I've been 100% happy with them. Out of the 20 I have, not one has given me any problems including the 2 I have installed in outdoor fixtures that run 10 hours every night. I do like the warm white they produce. My only minor complaint is they don't dim as low as incandescents.

With the right dimmer, they do. :slight_smile:

These are the two fixtures in my bathroom, dimmed, with a L3 L10-219 on moon mode (0.09 lumens) next to it for reference. I should mention that it is not dimmed as low as it can go; it’s merely dimmed to the lowest setting which still lights all eight bulbs at least a little.


The total illumination in the room, with eight bulbs lit, looks about the same as if I ceiling bounce the L3 L10 at its “low” 3 lumen setting. At full brightness, the room has 6400 lumens of light (based on manufacturer specs of 800lm / bulb) which makes even my father flinch when turning on the light.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember which dimmer I used, but it’s a Lutron of some sort and I think it uses PWM to do its job. The Cree bulbs handle this reasonably well, keeping a fairly constant brightness instead of strobing, but there is a humming sound.

thanks for the info

i have a few bulbs to replace around the house, and will probably end up switching some others over to CREE as well

FWIW, the Cree bulbs don’t seem to produce light of quite the same quality as some of the nicer Philips bulbs. I’d take a Philips for overall light quality and aesthetic appeal of the bulb itself. However, the Cree bulbs cost less and get more lumens per watt.

I find the Philips to be an excellent bulb as well, and they do dim quite a bit better with the dimmers I'm using. Plus they put more light out the top of the bulb. These (40 watters) were on sale at Home Depot for $5.97, and the 60 watters were $8.97. I bought 5 of each. I'm pretty sure they are still on sale.

Have anybody tried them with 220V ?

Its been some time after publishing these and it still seems there is no option for E27 / 240V.

Maybe they don´t need our money? :slight_smile:
Some agreements between manufacturers not to sell in somewhere?

I always use incandescent GE Reveal light bulbs. The ones that are blue on the outside. I love the light they give off.
When I ran out and was restocking 60 and 100W, I noticed they had GE Reveal LED bulbs as well. I bought one 60W equivalent to try out, and am very impressed.
As my supply of Incan reveal bulbs runs out, I’m going to replace them all with GE Reveal LED bulbs.

Has anyone tried the Costco 60 W…they are 5000K, iirc. My wife and I like the closer to daylight color temp. It seems better than the 2700 K of the Incandescents. They are $49.95 (?) for 10. We are still running our CFLs to failure, and will replace as necessary. I’ve always used GE Reveal for my photography. Will probably give the LEDs a try, once the wattage increases.