LED Bulbs-One Year Review

[Rick in PA]

Thanks for the report. I've been slowly changing over to the Cree LED bulbs, they've had the warm white 60W bulbs for about $5 at the local Home Depot.

Of course the difficult-to-replace outdoor fixture and the often left on light in the basement got replaced first. I put one in my old style Trouble Light, no worry about breaking the filament or burning myself on the hot reflector.

Those filament style LED lamps look interesting.

 

[Cutehumor]

I'm waiting for LED prices to drop down before I convert from CFL. my entire house uses CFL. Last month electric bill was 74 dollars. I turned off my in ground lights, about 20 of them, which use the old incandescent bulbs. I'm waiting for LED to become affordable to convert them.

 

[daman]

Originally Posted By: Cutehumor
I'm waiting for LED prices to drop down before I convert from CFL. my entire house uses CFL. Last month electric bill was 74 dollars. I turned off my in ground lights, about 20 of them, which use the old incandescent bulbs. I'm waiting for LED to become affordable to convert them.

That would be crazy high for me.

 

[datech]

I have been using LEDs for a few years, and I would say by now almost all of my lights are LEDs.

The newest CREE bulbs are excellent and well worth the money.

I think LEDs would be even better in fixtures designed specifically for them.

Now we are using LEDs adapted for use in regular med base incandescent bulbs and like CFLs there is some disadvantage in this compromise.

 

[DBMaster]

I agree. Now that LED is starting to dominate the market there will be more lighting designed around the light source. Since LED's last a VERY long time when installed in compatible fixtures the newest lights may not even need easy and convenient "bulb" replacement. It's a paradigm shift.

 

[Spazdog]

Price is finally coming down on LEDs.

I buy one everytime I go to Home Depot. Gradually replacing all the CFLs

The light they give off is great. My mother-in-law who demands a 50-200-250 3-way bulb still hasn't figured out that her reading lamp bulb is a 3-way LED.

 

[volk06]

We've started updating to led and we like them a lot better than cfl. The lighting is better, they use less energy, and last a lot longer. Were lucky to get a year out of a cfl.

 

[HerrStig]

Originally Posted By: Propflux01
Has that $28 a month savings negated the cost of 89 new led bulbs? I know those things are pricey.
Payback is a long time in coming but the bulbs do last.

 

[JTK]

Not really consumer grade LED related but, I've made an interesting observation on my long boring work commute over the past year or two. Over a few mile stretch, the city or state replaced all the old and mostly faulty high pressure sodium street lamps with new LED heads. The light output, dispersion and color/temp is awesome, but over the past year or so, I bet 25% of them are inop already. Not good. I know the quality of pretty much all lighting fixtures isn't what it used be. Who knows.

Like I've said in other threads, I purchased a bunch of no-name GU10 LEDs to replace halogen twist-locks. None of them lasted more than a year. Most much shorter. I went back to 30-40watt GU10 halogens.

 

[Cutehumor]

Originally Posted By: HerrStig
Originally Posted By: Propflux01
Has that $28 a month savings negated the cost of 89 new led bulbs? I know those things are pricey.
Payback is a long time in coming but the bulbs do last.


1000 bucks in LED bulbs I bet. I don't doubt that LED bulbs are better than CFL. It's about the $$$

 

[PierreR]

Originally Posted By: daman
Originally Posted By: Cutehumor
I'm waiting for LED prices to drop down before I convert from CFL. my entire house uses CFL. Last month electric bill was 74 dollars. I turned off my in ground lights, about 20 of them, which use the old incandescent bulbs. I'm waiting for LED to become affordable to convert them.

That would be crazy high for me.


That is super cheap compared to my bil...
$370...

Just because the boiler malfunctioned a few times and let the temp go down to +5c inside so i had to reheat the whole house..
It is an electric boiler i have...

I am also slowly replacing my regular lightbulbs with LED,s just have a few rooms left but i wait untill they fail.

Are there any good stores on ebay that sells LED,s that are rated for 230v?

 

[daman]

Originally Posted By: PierreR
Originally Posted By: daman
Originally Posted By: Cutehumor
I'm waiting for LED prices to drop down before I convert from CFL. my entire house uses CFL. Last month electric bill was 74 dollars. I turned off my in ground lights, about 20 of them, which use the old incandescent bulbs. I'm waiting for LED to become affordable to convert them.

That would be crazy high for me.


That is super cheap compared to my bil...
$370...

Just because the boiler malfunctioned a few times and let the temp go down to +5c inside so i had to reheat the whole house..
It is an electric boiler i have...

I am also slowly replacing my regular lightbulbs with LED,s just have a few rooms left but i wait untill they fail.

Are there any good stores on ebay that sells LED,s that are rated for 230v?

Do you get a rate reduction because you have electric heat?
we do over here.

 

[PierreR]

Unfortunatley no we dont.

But i have a soapstone stove in the livingroom to help with the heat during wintertime.
The house also have FTX ventilation to help save electricity by cycle the old inside air through a heatexchanger and then that heat will be transferred to the new air comming in from the outside instead of just letting it out like older houses does.

Since i havent moved in there yet i have not been able to use the stove, the ventilation i fixed earlier this week by replacing the bearings in the fans so that has also been shut off for 2-3 months.

But now we are way off topic.

 

[Pop_Rivit]

Originally Posted By: Warstud
Originally Posted By: dlundblad
I've always been told to replace them as conventional bulbs fail to keep the up front costs low and minimize wasting perfectly good bulbs.


I agree...it's a waste of perfectly good bulbs. Also I could see replacing the bulbs in the rooms that you spend the most time in but not all of them.


Many of our bulbs are in a fairly high vaulted ceiling. I don't care to drag the 10' ladder out a couple times each year to change out one or two failed conventional bulbs. I also don't want different colored bulbs during a transition period-our living room/dining room has a total of 23 bulbs in the ceiling pot lights and fixtures. Changing them over one at a time could have taken years, during which time I'd still be using significantly more electricity with the standard incandescent bulbs. Changing them all at once solved those issues.

Since we also have seen substantial savings on our electric bill, financially it makes sense to change them out en masse. There are a couple guest bedrooms that don't often get used, so we didn't replace the bulbs in them. However, the rest of the house gets used frequently. And since we often entertain large crowds, it's not uncommon for 50 or 60 bulbs to be on all evening (outside, hallways, dining room, living room, kitchen and lower level).

Originally Posted By: 72te27
Pop, thanks for this analysis. I've been thinking about when to make the jump, and your experience gives some good context for the financial side of it.
Where did you purchase your bulbs, if you don't mind me asking?


The Cree bulbs were from Home Depot, the remaining bulbs I purchased on Amazon. My original post is at http://www.bobistheoilguy.com/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/3253159/LED_Bulb_Review#Post3253159 and that has the prices, type of bulbs, and initial impressions including why we went to the Cree TW series in the master bathroom.

Originally Posted By: Propflux01
Has that $28 a month savings negated the cost of 89 new led bulbs? I know those things are pricey.


It will take around 3 years to recoup the initial investment in bulbs. Assuming (and I fully understood the risk when I purchased them) that the lifespan is close to the manufacturer's claim, they should give me 5-7 years of use after the initial investment is captured in energy savings. So far I'm about 1/3 of the way to recouping the initial investment. The energy savings is difficult to perfectly measure since there are so many other variables on the bill, so my savings estimates of what I've saved so far are erroring on the conservative side. Many months the bill and energy used are significantly lower than the same time last year, but there may be factors other than the bulbs. That being said, I have not had a single bill in the last month that is even close to the same month last year, all have been lower, and some months significantly lower.

Originally Posted By: Al
Personally I really like the "Daylight" (5000K ) ones. Its a white light and not dingy. They taka a minute or two to reach full intensity. Goes with the territory.

Their life in not remotely as long as advertised.


The Cree bulbs that we have in the 5000K color come on instantly. I can't yet speak to the longevity, but I have not had to replace a single bulb in the year that I've been using them.

Originally Posted By: bigt61
Bang for the buck, it's tough to beat a CFL. The LED's definitely have a nicer, brighter light. For a closet that just gets turned on occasionally, I'll stick with the el cheapo incandescent.


I don't care for the issues associated with CFL bulbs. The slow warm up, lack of dimmability, and overall poor quality made it a no brainer to bypass them for LED bulbs.

Originally Posted By: Rick in PA
I put one in my old style Trouble Light, no worry about breaking the filament or burning myself on the hot reflector.


I have two of those type of trouble lights out in the shop in which I put two of the 5000K Cree bulbs. I genuinely appreciate not getting burned on the hot reflector, and the Cree bulbs seem rugged enough so that I have yet to break one when the trouble light slips and hits the concrete. The 5000K color works well when working under a vehicle.

Originally Posted By: Cutehumor

1000 bucks in LED bulbs I bet. I don't doubt that LED bulbs are better than CFL. It's about the $$$


Somewhere around $900 if I remember correctly. So far I'm about 1/3 of the way toward recouping that investment.

 

[97tbird]

I got a 6 pack of TPC LED bulbs standard size, 60W equivalent, and we love them in the areas we replaced the regular incand. bulbs.
They are bright white (daylight) and got them for $35 shipped on Amazon.

Our house has many fixtures where a smaller base type is used; need to find some more LED bulbs that base type.

 

[JayhawkRoy]

Check out Home Depot on line using "candelabra led" as the key words in the search. You can see what choices there are.

 

[Silverado12]

LED Bulb at Lowe's

Here's a pretty cheap bulb if you don't need to dim it.

 

[CarbonSteel]

Originally Posted By: Pablo
CFL has been a huge flop and an even huger waste of resources. I literally have buckets of CFL's that maybe just lasted a year. All that to just be thrown out? CFL never lived up to the long life hype. Disgusting.

I have had just the opposite experience with CFL. I replaced incandescents with CFL in the most used lights in the house and after over 6 years, they are just now beginning to fail. On a recent trip to Colorado, we found 40 and 60 watt equivalent CFLs for 88 cents for a 4 pack and so for less than $10 (the cost of 1 LED) I picked up enough to replace all of them again as they go out. At 22 cents per CFL bulb, it is hard to argue the economics for LED, though the ROI is certainly there over a 30,000 hour life, and I agree that LED is the way to go long term, I just wish the cost would be less for the bulbs in order to see the ROI sooner. The savings between CFL and LED is about $5.36 over a 30,000 hour period (LED is cheaper), but on a light that is used as much as 8 hours a day, you would still need to use it for 3,750 days or 10.2 years to see the full ROI--a lot can change in 10 years (either good or bad). Obviously, I am not "poo-pooing" LED, just pointing out the ROI is not immediate and of course, there are the environmental issues to consider with CFL.

Here is a website that shows the cost for all three bulb types. I edited the cost of the bulbs to match what I find locally (I left the incandescent the same), but left the cost of the electricity the same in this excerpt:

Comparing Costs
The best way to compare the three types of bulbs is to calculate their costs over 30,000 hours of usage – the lifespan of a single LED bulb.

Standard incandescent bulbs The incandescent used here has a lifetime of 1,300 hours, so we would need 23 bulbs over the period of this study. I was able to purchase a single incandescent of this type for $0.34, so our total cost for bulbs over 30,000 hours would be $7.82.

As it uses 60 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, an incandescent bulb would use 1,800,000 watt hours, or 1,800 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $180.00 to run an incandescent bulb over this period.

Thus, the total cost of a 60 watt incandescent bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $187.82.

CFL bulbs The CFL used here has a lifetime of 8,000 hours, so we would need 3.75 bulbs over the period of this study. I was able to purchase a single CFL for $.22, so our total cost for bulbs over 30,000 hours would be $0.83.

As it uses 13 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, a CFL bulb would use 390,000 watt hours, or 390 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $39.00 to run a CFL bulb over this period.

Thus, the total cost of a CFL bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $39.83.

LED bulbs The LED bulb used here has a lifetime of 30,000 hours, so we would need only one bulb over the period of this study. Using Home Depot numbers, that single bulb has a cost of $9.97.

As it uses 7.5 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, an LED bulb would use 245,000 watt hours, or 245 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $24.50 to run an LED bulb over this period.

Thus, the total cost of an LED bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $34.47.

 

[DBMaster]

I received that LED bulb I linked to earlier. It really does resemble an incandescent bulb, albeit with multiple bars of filament rather that a single straight or curved wire. They glow a distinct orange color, so more like and old-school filament bulb. Also, it has a clear glass shell which is almost identical in size and shape to the bulbs it mimics. Better yet, it doesn't even get warm to the touch so it could be used in an enclosed fixture, in which most LED bulbs cannot. The wild card is, though, how long will it last. Since it cost $10 it's about the same price as other LED styles.

 

[chiefsfan1]

Good info all!! I too am thinking of going LED. I have a lamp post that has a CFL outdoor bulb that stays on all night. Does heat affect LEDS? During the summer the sun does hit the lamp post for a few hours. I have not looked but I imagine there are LEDs that are for such a purpose and the local power company has a instant $5 rebate off LED.