How To Save Money With Low Energy Lighting
There are several good reasons to consider installing low energy light bulbs, chief among them being that you can save serious sums of money, you can help to reduce global warming and, thanks to legislation banning incandescent light bulbs, you don’t really have a choice.
So what are your choices when it comes to low energy lighting? In two words, not much, and in two more words CFL and LED (Compact Fluorescent Lamp and Light Emitting Diode respectively).
Out of these two, CFL’s have been available for much longer yet in terms of efficiency they are only about 4 times better than incandescents plus they have a long list of murky issues with regards to aesthetics, health and safety, usability and environmental concerns.
In contrast, LED’s for general domestic use have only appeared quite recently yet in terms of efficiency they are already 10 times better and still improving at an astonishing rate; they also present no particular concerns either.
So then, if LED’s are so much better than either CFL’s or regular light bulbs how come more folk aren’t using them? There are a few factors at play here, but let’s just focus on the two main ones.
The first of which is that most folk have a perception that LED’s are for toys and decorative lights, not serious domestic lighting. This is mainly because viable LED alternatives to mainstream light bulbs haven’t been around long and are still not so easy to find.
The second reason that LED technology is still proving slow to take off is centred on the fact that most folk really don’t comprehend the economics of electric lighting. It’s simply in our nature to assign importance to headline information and avoid figuring out the (usually more complex) full picture.
So we open the electricity bill and grumble then in the DIY or lighting store wince at the price of LED light bulbs. And in so doing completely the miss the point. A significant portion of most electricity bills is accounted for by lighting, and the cost of lighting has little to do with the cost of light bulbs – it’s almost entirely the running cost.
Those apparently cheap incandescent bulbs you’re been buying all these years waste 90+ percent of the electricity (that you pay for remember) as heat; less than 10 percent goes towards producing light. The equation for LED light bulbs is the exact reverse with over 90 percent of the electricity converted to light and less than 10 percent lost as heat.
You can hit break-even on the investment cost of apparently expensive LED bulbs in about a year and from there on just keep raking in the savings. Most LED’s last 50,000+ hours compared to 2,000 hours for incandescent lights, so that’s 25 times less replacement cost too. Perhaps high price, high quality LED’s are actually the cheaper option after all.
So what should you look for when checking out low energy light bulbs? Foremost is quality; there are many cheap LED’s on the market and they’re not worth a candle (well maybe a few, but that’s all).
In general you can spot a high quality LED bulb by the fact that it will state what sort of incandescent light bulb it aims to replace; so if you want to replace a 35 watt, 50 degree beam, warm white halogen lamp then check that the LED you’re considering is a good match for all 3 features (luminosity, light spread and color).
The other main point to get used to is that LED’s are intrinsically very directional and thus compete very well with most conventional spotlights. LED light bulbs that provide all round illumination are available but they are much less common than the spot light formats, which are already becoming very popular as replacements for MR16 halogen spots.
As a side note, the term MR16 has become closely associated with low voltage (12v) lighting but it actually describes both the GU5.3 base format with two pins used for 12v systems and the GU10 twist n’ lock format used for main voltage lighting. In either case though, both 12v MR16 and its GU10 mains variant are an excellent way to get started right this minute with genuine energy saving lighting.