Swapping my lights: fantastic!

Anthony,
Great post. Very informative.
Mike

Bear in mind that in the future, without any intervention or cries from green activists and environmental campaigners, we’ll have better and better solutions for home, office and outdoor lighting. One of these solutions is simply wallpaper made up of pixels. Your wall will not only be an interactive display but will also use sensors to allow it to give variable lighting to a room at different times of the day. You won’t need wall or ceiling lighting in the future unless you need a spotlight. You won’t need a TV. You won’t need a computer monitor. Your walls will do the job cheaply and intelligently, using fewer parts and less energy.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
🙂
Well done Anthony!

Watts on watts

The A380 cabin illumination also is a nice example what one can do with LEDs. After the ban of incandescent light bulbs it has to be LEDs or gas lighting 😉

Anthony:
What is the actual payback given the expense of the new fixture? You can assume zero cost for installation.
REPLY: see the link in the article for the payback calculator. -A

Cost?
I’m in the middle of replacing my attic insulation, and part of the job is replacing my non-IC (insulation contact) cans with IC cans. Will the lower temps of this LED solution allow me to use my original cans WITH insulation contact?

LED street lights don’t have the heat needed to melt snow…
Halifax spends more cleaning streetlights with LED lights than the savings of electricity to run them….
File under ‘Stupid green ideas’…

Looks interesting. Are these them? Looks like Amazon has them for $80

Thanks Anthony, this is great information. I am still wondering why we don’t insulate our houses in NZ and get subsidies to do it (we have extremely poor house insulation here) yet we seen destined to a stupid Emissions Trading Scheme.
Let’s hope for an era where common sense will prevail.

I use CREE LEDs for mountain biking in the woods at night – they are very good: powerful, long lasting batteries, good spectrum.
I had not considered them for ordinary lighting in the house.
Thanks

Colour me suprised if they get a patent for mixing light, but look far more practical than ‘compact’ flourescents. The heat sink looks rather hefty, do they really run that hot?
I still think if governments were serious about reducing energy consumption they should mandate changes to building regs/wiring codes to make lighting circuits low voltage in new builds mandatory. Would save on the transformers per fixture, unit costs and increase overall efficiency. While they’re at it, look at grey water. Initially it would benefit new builds and major refurbs, but long term seems to make greater savings.

Cree is one of the manufacturers in the forefront of high-intensity, high-efficiency LED development, and the field in general is one where US companies are either dominant or highly competitive. Another is Lumex, whose “Sunbright” line is at or near the top of the industry. Here is a listing (courtesy IC manufacturer Maxim) of LED manufacturers.
There are several manufacturers whose white or near-white LEDs are beginning to approach 200 lumens per watt. For perspective, a high-quality incandescent gives 70 to 90 lumens per watt.
I don’t expect our walls will glow any time soon — it would simply be too expensive. Replacement fixtures like this are coming along very nicely, though. It will be longer before there are really good light bulb replacements; LEDs inherently produce directed light, and the “beehive” structures necessary to approximate omnidirectional light output are expensive to make and not very satisfactory.
Regards,
Ric

I am interested to see how the color holds out over time. Junctions that emit different colors tend to degrade in their output at different rates. Junctions emitting blue degrade the fastest so over time the LED output “yellows”.
This can be compensated for somewhat by measuring the emitted color temperature and changing the drive to various color elements. If it has fixed drive, the color will “drift” over time. I am very interested in how they hold up after several weeks of “on” time.

BTW, don’t trip over them!
(The “lights fantastic” of course.)
/Mr Lynn

Nice write up, and with out a doubt LEDs will have a place in the future. However, right now the LED fixtures need to come down in price before it makes sense to me. WIth a ROI of a little over 12 years vs a 65 watt bulb, I will wait. *Assumed $0.10 per KWh with 4 hours usage a day.”

We spend 7 months of the year in our trailer traveling about North America and have replaced our incandescents with LEDs, a tremendous load reduction on our solar powered battery. By the way RVing has a very low carbon footprint for us retired types, though not my goal. Norm

I am shocked. A liberal professor was the bestman at your wedding?
REPLY: Yup, we share an interest in science, tech, and amateur radio, but we learned not to talk politics. – A

There are LED fixtures for aquarium hobbyists, but prices range from 80 dollars up. Since they don’t actually reduce operating costs by much over fluorescents and cost 2 to 3 times as much, my aquaria will stay fluorescent lighted.
The heat lamp for the turtle is a twisty fluorescent, she can bask directly underneath it with no risk of overheating and dying from that.

If you go with LED lighting go with the SMD versions. The other versions that use a gazillion little leds mounted on printed circuit boards and then enclosed in a plastic capsule have some serious thermal problems. Granted a LED does not create a lot of heat. But the cycle on off is enough to fatigue the solder joints at the wafers and start to knock whole wafers off line. It the LEDs are open air its a different matter.
For 30W the 4 LED spotlights in the ceiling fan in my kitchen more than equal the amount of illumination I would get from about 200W of incandescent. A 7.5W LED spotlight makes an excellent reading lamp.
Put it down to my Yankee instincts. Use it up, wear it out, do without. Besides I am a cheapskate. Up front costs on a bulb are a bit high, but amortized over the life of the bulb, you save money and energy. I am not one of the global warming CO2 dim bulbs, but my objective is to get the heck of the grid all together or as a maximum have the grid as a backup.

What a great post, Anthony.
The photo series on how to replace the old fixture is splendid.
You do walk the walk.
Damned inspirational.

“twawki (14:05:23) :
[…]
There are reports out that people who work in fluorescent lit offices have a higher rate of cancer than those that lie on the beach. ”
That could be associated with Vitamin D deficiencies more than with harmful effects of office lighting IMHO…

Last year I ordered some exotic chile peppers and built LED grow lights out of LED’s from CREE and Phillips. I had to use a computer power supply and my first unit used water cooling for the LEDs. I achieved higher intensity than tropical noon sunlight and in a narrow beam that could shine down from the ceiling without much dispersion. 🙂
For my second unit I wanted to go air cooled, and heat sinks are expensive UNLESS you wander down to your local computer repair shop and ask for a bunch of used monster heat sinks.
BTW, am I the only one here who’s used whale oil for lighting?

Very cool – dimmable!!!!!
Well, at least partially dimmable – very cool! LED lights also have no warm-up time which is an issue with CFLs (i.e. they’re dark at first)
But wow, at $98 a pop, that hurts. I think I’ll have to hold off until the prices come down more. LED computer screens (or, more acurately, LED backlit LCDs) are about 30% more than comparable LCDs… LED TV’s are roughly 2x. At $98’s we’re talking a 1400% premium vs. CFL.
Don’t get me wrong, lighting is a significant part of home energy use… but in terms of bang for the buck there are plenty other places where you can get a better ROI.
Anthony,
Just out of curiosity, did you ever consider motion sensor switches? My friend put those into his bathrooms and they turn off x-minutes after they stop detecting motion. I’ve also seen these recommended for bathroom vent fans, because not running the fan after you bathe/shower can contribute to mold growth.
REPLY: You can get them as low as $80 in a 5 pack, which is what I did – Anthony

It looks like the future of lighting will include OLED devices. Due out in 2012
http://www.lomox.co.uk/articles/technology

Atomic Hairdryer (14:14:35) :
I still think if governments were serious about reducing energy consumption they should mandate changes to building regs/wiring codes to make lighting circuits low voltage in new builds mandatory. Would save on the transformers per fixture, unit costs and increase overall efficiency. While they’re at it, look at grey water. Initially it would benefit new builds and major refurbs, but long term seems to make greater savings.
A friend of mine (EE) was talking about building like this. Under the current building codes (specifically residential) is it even legal to do that?

His Grace posted this about an hour ago. http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/7/has-jg-c-found-an-error-in-crutem.html. It’s 23:00 here in UK and I have to be up early tomorrow, so I don’t have time to dig into it. I’m sure a few readers here could answer his request for help.

Very impressive, but lets hear it for the World’s longest serving light bulb at Fire Station 6, in Livermore, northern California, for old time’s sake.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243138/Still-glowing-strong-109-years-worlds-oldest-lightbulb.html

Nice article.
You missed one step in the installation.
Turn off breaker to prevent kids from coming along and turning on the hall light while redoing wiring!!!
By the way, why are you reducing CO2 emissions??? Think of all the poor CO2 starved PLANTS in California!!!!!!! (especially the Politicians!!)
REPLY: breaker off – that’s in the instruction manual. Didn’t think I needed to repeat it here. -A

I believe the original life expectancy of the CFLs was based on never turning them off. Thus, use in homes where you have on/off multiple times each day makes those estimates useless.
I like the “sun tubes” (& Moon) effect and plan on installing a few this spring when the roof will be replaced and I’ll add to the insulation. That will also be a good time to add a few of the LEDs. Timely post, thanks.

They seem ridiculously expensive to me. They pay back eventually, but in the meanwhile you’ve lost money. They say it takes money to make money, and this is a classic example. I simply can’t afford to invest the money up front to get the payback years into the future.

REPLY: Yes, but in a couple years you won’t be able to buy incandescent floods, and that was part of my goal. I don’t ever want to ahve to replace these – A

I’ll pass. Purchase price of 2 of those cans is equivalent to one avg. month of my current electric bill. I have a 2200sqft all electric house on the grid plus a shop full of power tools that get used almost daily. When the tech gets to the point where I can unscrew an incandescent and screw in something else in the same fixture for the same upfront cost, I’ll consider it. But feel free to do your own thing. 🙂

Great technology.
As this market develops, prices will go down.
Very nice article.
Thanks

I am a partner in a startup company that uses LEDs (including Philips, Cree, and Osram) to make aviation and outdoor area lighting. We are partnered with another local company that makes solar powered streetlights, and have licensed our LED module design to them.
LEDs are definitely the future for lighting. The costs are still a little higher than other solutions, but when you look at the long life (50,000 plus hours), high efficiencies (comparable to fluorescent), wide temperature operating range, immunity to power cylcing life reduction, lack of hazardous materials, recyclability, and instant-on characteristics they pretty much win on all fronts.
The complaint about not melting snow only really applies to to the stoplights, the streetlights emit light from the bottom, so snow accumulation on the top of the fixture really isn’t an issue.

LED bulbs are showing up at Costco and Home Depot. Fairly small and low wattage so far. I am waiting for 100 watt equivalent at a reasonable price, about $10 or so.
In the meantime, I am using compact CFLs most everywhere, except where we read. I did it for increased efficiency of the Air Conditioning during summer. (Here in Texas, the usual seasons are “Early Summer”, “Summer”, “Late Summer”, and “January”.) During cold weather, the heat from the 100 watt bulbs help to warm the reading areas, but we can wear a sweater for that.
Of course, General Electric (who owns MSNBC) and the other Big Name companies make nothing on an incandescent light bulb (the patents have long since expired and everyone makes them). They do make a “tidy” profit on these “save the polar bear” bulbs. Hence all of the lobbying for “green regulations”. They aren’t stupid (that’s why they are rich) and they learned fromt the windfall Dupont/Dow made from refrigerant replacements.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack

One of the drawbacks of most LED lights until now was the reduced light intensity. Most were less than 100 lumen, indeed for very low consumption (1-2 W), but not enough to replace spotlights in most cases. Until recently: I just bought a 315 lumen 3500 K, 4 W spotlight, comparable in light intensity to a 20 W halogene spotlight (GU10), for 20 euro (Makro, Belgium).
Now it begins to be affordable comparable in light to the old spotlights, without the drawbacks of CFLs.

OT
Want to watch a country called Greece implode? Run on, not banks but, countries has begun. They call those first countries to implode, the PIIGS. See here for an explanation of the run on Greece.
The Run On Greece Is Here: Investors Pull Out €10 Billion From The Troubled Country; Crisis Escalation Approaches
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/run-greece-here-investors-pull-out-%E2%82%AC10-billion-troubled-country-crisis-escalation-here

and break! i forgot that one

Thanks Anthony. I’ve been mulling LED domestic lighting over for a while now. You’ve just made my mind up for me!
Anybody know of any good wholesalers in the EU who can be approached for re-distribution?
Forget about Global Warming. LED Global Lighting is easily measured, achievable, non-controversial and, compared to governmental supported heavy metal alternatives, environmentally benign!

CFL give me a blinding headache and I refuse to have them in my home. I stocked up on 100 and 60 watt incandescents shortly before moving into my current apartment, which is mostly lit using halogen lighting. Annoying, but there you go.
LED lights have a few more years before they’re at a decent price. A bayonet-cap 40W equivalent LED bulb currently comes in at about £80 around here. Far too much.

PaulH from Scotland (16:22:55) :
O/T, but kind of a rubicon being crossed
This weekend, ‘Have I Got News For You’, one of the BBC’s flagship comedy programmes made fun of global warming alarmism.
I’ve always thought that the real tipping point on AGW in the UK would be when mainstream comics (who tend to be very PC) found the courage.
Heartening.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qmbwr/Mock_the_Week_Series_8_Episode_3/
(Apologies to those non-UK viewers who can’t view this).
Totally agree Paul. I too am in Scotland and the thought that the tide is turning I share that also.
On the same channel, “Mock the Week”, took the ur*ne as well.
Times, they sure are a’changin

I use a CREE LED flashlight at work regularly. It’s incredibly bright (about 180 lumens) and runs on two AA batteries. It will only last about 2 hours continuous on the highest brightness, but I only use it for 20 seconds or so at a time to see inside broken power wheelchairs and such.

An excellent thing to know about, hopefully they’ll come out with versions that’ll fit in full sized track lighting cans too. I have numerous track lights and recessed lights that are on very high ceilings, the long life of these would be a real plus. I hate the light from CFL units, sickly, and it tends to exacerbate migraines (or cause them), and as you say previously LEDs were too blue.
Give the market time and it’ll come up with a real useful solution, rather than jamming CFLs down everyone’s throat. In the meantime, I’ll stick with incandescent and halogen bulbs.

Another great sucker-punch to the wallet, just like those useless screw-in flouros and the current range of downlights. They will be expensive to buy, expensive to install, expensive to replace, unreliable, and will require an eletronics degree to change one. The marginal operations savings will take a billion years to pay back the capital investment.

I agree that this a superior technology to A lambs and Compact Fl. As an architect I have spent some time talking to manufacturers. The are a few things people need to keep in mind when making this change. First of all this is a young industry. Currently there is no standard for the actual color rating for the LEDs. What I understand is they are hand sorted into different colors by each maker by their own standards. This can be very problematic if you have a line of lights that you want to be color consistent. The next thing is they start to degrade as soon as you wire them up, so those color issues will be a problem if all the Leds don’t operate uniformly. Because of this degrading and the fact many new manufactures have not been around very long I would be very suspect of lifetime claims. They may last 50,000 hours, but at 20,000 they may start to be blue or orange. An important thing to prevent this a fixture with enough mass to eliminate heat. It looks like the pictures show a good heavy fixture with enough surface area to get rid of the heat, which is the main enemy to LEDs. If you get a cheap fixture without a decent heat sink, it will not last. I like some manfactures that use UV LEDs and a lens with a phosphor coating, like flourescent lamps, to get much better white light and predictability.
So, I have specified some LEDs, but before I do it regularly I am going to wait for some uniform standards and some maturing of the industry. By then OLEDs will be the next big thing.

I, too, appreciate efficiency in design. Not because I am worried about how much CO2 we put out, but because I am a skin-flint and like to save on energy bills. As an electrician, I have installed various lighting equipment. Including retrofits of flourescent lighting in commercial locations, changing from the old T-12 lamp and magnetic ballast to T-8 and electronic smart ballast, which senses the incoming voltage, making it simpler to install. A T-8 of lower wattage puts out as much or more usable light as an old T-12. That sounds counter-intuitive but it is not, really. The T-8, at a lower wattage, is more efficiently putting out light at a lower power comsumption and heat signature than the old T-12 and mag. ballast set-up. Likewise, I am sure, with the advances in LED lighting. I have a portable light that I can wear around my head or hardhat, like a miner’s light, that is LED and it is bright enough to dazzle your eyes in a dark room or attic.
Even though they may be a few dollars more expensive, the light lasts longer, passing savings on to the consumer over time. Whether it saves “CO2” or not is a political football. The fact that it does is a “happy” coincidence, depending on your perspective.
I believe we should drill our own oil. Just the same, I drive a car that gets 33 mpg because it’s easier on my wallet. The answer to anything is the free market.

Oldseadog (14:30:48) :
Remember that in G.B. only a qualified Electrician is authorised to carry out this work – Brussels has banned all electrical DIY.
REPLY: Well I’d hook them up just to spite them 😉
And many of us do just that Anthony 😉
I just spent Sunday morning looking at some LED stage lighting cans. Incredible brightness, little heat, light and no more broken bulbs!

I love this kind of article. If you ever do another on the electric cars, I’m ready to read.

OT: Heads up, Guardian running with …
Detectives question climate change scientist over email leaks

Norfolk police have interviewed and taken a formal statement from Paul Dennis, 54, another climate researcher who heads an adjacent laboratory.

… and

A third blogger with whom Dennis has posted is Anthony Watts, a weatherman for a California radio station who is involved in a sometimes vituperative sceptic blog called Watts Up with That. He has had a book published by the Heartland Institute, a denialist organisation which until 2006, received funding from ExxonMobil.

REPLY: Oh, gosh. Paul Dennis posted about three comments here in October and December 2009 related to a story I did on isotope reconstruction and on that endorsement list the Met Office was pushing. That clinches it fer sure.
Gavin Schmidt has posted a comment or two here a long time ago. Maybe they should question him too. 😉
– Anthony

Its all about saving money. Nothing else matters.

I am looking for something just like this, in a very shallow fixture. I have only about 4″ of less of ceiling to work with. Looks like all of their lamps are meant for existing fixtures. Too bad!

Audi just had a “Green Police” commercial in the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl (wish I could post it?). It was funny, but I also believe that this talks directly to the core issue that fuels revolt even amongst the anti-AGW wave currently sweeping the globe.
While the commercial makes fun of being “green”, it points to a fundamental reaction of people who are sick and tired of having this eco crap shoved down their throat – the pinnacle of which would have been a global treaty like Copenhagen driven by IPCC.
Bad science – yes it was…
Bad politics – absolutely, and a very corrupt process…
Bad timing (worldwide economic downturn) – possibly the most important silent component…
Bad karma – “the watermelons should not have tried to take over our (normal people) lives with such arrogance because the retribution will be a @#$%^&* ! “

Something not mentioned is reliability and safety. Incandescent light bulbs are dirt simple, consisting of a single resistor (filament) across the mains supply. They are inherently safe because a failure results in the filament opening and removing itself from the circuit.
I mention this because my house nearly burned down due to electronic ballast failure in my garage fluorescent light fixtures (48″ or 1.2m). Silicon invariably fails “shorted” but the ballast design was such that it caused a soft failure; the current wasn’t sufficient to blow its internal fuse. This resulted in significant heat dissipation on the ballast printer circuit board. The ballast caught fire and melted through the plastic covering. The fixtures were recessed into the ceiling, there were soot marks on the ceiling and a puddle of molten plastic on the floor. The rafters and house could have caught on fire.
These were 50W fixtures and it happened on a hot summer’s day. LEDs require a regulated current so I’m guessing the electronics is a high-frequency line voltage buck regulator configured as a current source via a feedback network. That places several silicon devices across the mains inputs.
My day job? I design sub-1kW servomotor drives and amplifiers. I had all the electronic ballasted fluorescent light fixtures replaced with transformer ballasted ones at my company. At home I prefer the warmth of incandescent lighting and like knowing they won’t kill me while I sleep.:-)
REPLY:Lights don’t kill people, ballasts do. No argument there, but what to do when incandescents are outlawed? Will only outlaws have incandescent? – A

Light shines on more problems for Pachy:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7182567/Dr-R.K.-Pachauri-Indian-climate-chief-endures-attacks-at-home.html

I wouldn’t hold your breath on the 50,000 hours with the Cree light. I work for an LED light fixture manufacturer and like most LED lighting companies Cree is making claims they probably will not be able to back up. That goes for standard lighting companies as well. Thermal management is the issue with LED’s and stuffing them up into a ceiling with this particular fixture will cause the life to diminish.
REPLY: Maybe, but in the 30 years I’ve been working with LED’s I’ve never had a single one burn out on it’s own. Even if I got 1/3 less from these, I’d still be happy with them. -A

Anthony, did I understand you correctly to say that they have an LED Edison screw in base version that would work for lamps as well as overhead can lights? I certainly am electrically challenged and wouldn’t want to risk doing the fix you have suggested (although it’s certainly a capital idea). I don’t have any recessed lighting in my house; I have one overhead can fixed to shine in my living room. I don’t use it very often. I have LEDs installed underneath my kitchen cabinets and they work quite well, I like them a lot, as well as an LED night light. All of my other lights are either twisty or halogen bulbs, and they have lasted me for at least three or four years so far – I’ve only had to replace one since I bought them.
REPLY: check the links in the article for the screw base versions

One of the commenters posted bad numbers for lumens per watt. Rough numbers that look right to me are ~10 lumens/watt for incandescent and ~100 lumens/watt for flourescent. I’ll believe higher numbers for LEDs when I see them. It looks like they’re starting to get into the low range for flourescents.
I recently remodeled a medium-sized (< 400 sq ft) room. I put in IC cans with airtight inserts. I use incandescents mostly because of the dimmers. One benefit of running incandescents in the winter is that the lighting will maintain about a 30-degree F differential with no other heat source, and that's with a 20-foot glass wall. Yes, I used energy-efficient glass and plenty of insulation.
I haven't tried dimmable CFLs – I'm nervous about the "works with most dimmers" bit. Anybody have experience with these?

The true gains wont be made until all new installations use LED lighting…and they stop with the MASSIVE amount of copper required for housing construction. Think about it… your entire lighting circuit for that hallway is now at least 10 times oversized.

Lighting? I use the sun….stupid.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with the color temperature of CFL’s. My brother has a few “daylight” CFL’s that are supposed to produce a more “natural” color temperature, but their light seems off to me. I do recognize that it’s a matter of personal choice and know several people who don’t like CFL’s color.
I’ve been waiting patiently for LED technology to mature in the home-lighting arena. I’m waiting for E27 bulbs (the ones that use the standard base used for most incandescent/CFL fixtures) that actually have lumen output comparable to regularly used incadescent/CFL bulbs. I’ve only seen 3-4 watt LED bulbs with an output of ~400 lumen, the equivalent of a 40w incandescent. When E27 LED’s with a 800 lumen output (60w incandescent) or 1700 lumen output (100w incandescent), I will start buying them.

I owned two houses in NZ in the Rangatikei in the early part of the decade. Yes, insulation was poor — but the cost of buying property was easily 1/10th of what I would have paid for the equivalent home in the U.S. The $140,000 or so I saved on the purchase price went a long, long, long way toward paying for any extra energy costs relating to the lack of central heating.
In fact, it may have been more energy efficient to not have central — when we retired for the night, the only room heated was the bedroom we slept in, instead of the whole house (one of those electric, oil-filled things that look like an old timey water radiator was enuf).
One of the overlooked reasons for the high cost of real estate prior to the recent big crash was the high costs required in the U.S. relating to energy efficiency when building a house. The payback on expensive energy-saving devices like solar and LEDs is very long, and many of us cannot afford the upfront costs required. When this stuff is mandated, as it is in California where I live, the cost of housing is pushed out of reach of all but the rich.
To be practical, LED cost would have to be comparable to where CFLs are now, which in our area is almost as cheap as buying incandescent were a couple years back. If LEDs costing $80.00 a pop are mandated in the future, I’m going to back to start a bee colony, harvest the beewsax and make candles!
Incidentally, have been using CFLs extensively for a couple of years now. I can’t imagine why some commenters are getting greenish light and flickering, unless they have voltage problems with their power supply. Slow brightening, yes, but not enough to bother. I like the white light much better than the old yeller incandescents, easier to read by, see by.

Thanks, but no thanks. LEDs considerably lack in their color reproduction due to having spikier spectrum than high quality fluorescent tubes. Even though the light appears white, objects illuminated by it appear discolored. For the best results, only buy products with CRI (Color Rendition Index) of 0.90 or better. Unfortunately the best LEDs are still around 0.80.
Another huge problem with LEDs is the lack of light. My one-cell pocket flashlight is specified for 900 lm and in reality it gives around 600 lm. At home, when not running on batteries, I prefer the option of having much brighter lighting. I have 4800 lm overhead lighting (dimmable) + 2400 lm above kitchen sink in this room only, and I wouldn’t trade for less.
Fluorescent tubes are also available in all color temperatures, so you can get the incandescent 2700 K if you wish, or cloudy day blue 6500 K. Or the sunny day pure white 5500 K, which is what I prefer, and which also nicely matches with the image on flat screen displays.
Power-on time also isn’t a problem with fluorescent if you use a modern instant-on controller (which does reduce tube life slightly) and I am quite happy even with those regular electronic controllers (power-on times of less than two seconds, no flicker at all and better lifetime than instant-on).
Apparently all your experience of fluorescent lighting is from the era of mechanical starters that caused flickering and slow power-on, driving the tubes directly on AC, which causes 100 or 120 Hz flickering – and half of that or worse, if a tube is near its end of life. Modern T5 tubes and their controllers use very high frequency control so that no flickering occurs. CFLs also use similar electronic controllers.

I don’t have a car. I believe that is enough said.

Lets get to the bottom line.
1) Separate Energy from Climate.
2) Use all PASSIVE SOLAR energy saving methods – tested since the beginning of man – and they still are the most cost effective AND energy saving methods available.
3) Daylighting is the application of the sun to light your building (House).
4) In your hall, Anthony you should consider 2 Velux sun tubes from home depot – once installed – 0 energy use, and much better light.
5) I have yet to see an unsubsidised PV installation pencil out within the systems lifetime – except when the building is remote and requires diesel equiptment, fuel and maintenance.
6) The EPA is stuffing CFL’s down our throats, but they are fooling themselves once more (like MTBE), CFL’s have about a 50% power factor and require an increase in generating capacity plus the mercury thingy, and they do not dim so well.
7) LED’s have been correctly described as unstable, unproven, and expensive.
8) I have recently become aware of a new bulb – VU1corp is the website – that is similar to the incandescent in manufacture but uses much less energy, has a decent P.F., is great in color temperature and much closer in cost to the CFL’s than to LED’s, and they dim great.
9) I would be very careful in regards to using a LED or a CFL in a non-IC rated can or a can not rated for that use.
10) I am an architect in a sole practice and I have NO financial interest in ANY lighting provider.
11) I have decades of energy saving design experience and have saved my clients millions in energy costs without increasing their construction and maintenance cost by 1% – K.I.S.S..

well here in the great white north we get 10-20% of our HEAT from lighting!
If you want to be Green , buy some light ” dimmers ” and install them every where
and add 20% to the wattage of the replacement bulb( care full not to exceed rating of the light fixture) now enjoy a bulb that last decades in stead of months or years.
set the dimmer for 10% and use LESS power than LEDs OR CFLs
How much GHG is released from making the LEDs?
that is it!!!

I have found that my central electric heating system runs much more frequently and needs to be used more in mild weather since converting to the fluorescent bulbs. For me, the primary advantage of these bulbs has been the reduced frequency of replacement.

Not wishing to pour cold water on this but energy saving is not necessarily, taken overall, a great benefit. I know that this seems counterintuitive but see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
for a description of the Jevons Paradox which “Willian Stanley Jevons first put forward in 1865 in his book The Coal Question”.
However, on the individual level, if the ROI is realistic, energy saving can be a case of “You know it makes sense!”.

I once posted a comment on RC about Anthony Watts’ green home. I made the point that just because someon is sceptical about the impact of AGW on Earth did not mean they were not green or concerned about the environment.
I also pointed out that there are a number of left leaning climate dissenters and not all sceptics are rabid, right-wing, oil-funded “deniers”.
I’ve been using CFLs for over 10 years now, I make sure my appliances are running at their most efficient and avoid waste whenever possible.
Here is a video of
pedal powered LED lighting for homes in India.

I have replaced all the halogen downlights in my kitchen with LED lights but initially had some problems which it may be helpful to explain here, as information on this topic was not readily available on-line (at least, it wasn’t a 2 years ago when I started.
I am referring to MR14 low voltage halogen fittings, the type with two prongs that plug into a flying socket in the fitting. These are powered by transformer units which produce approx 12V ac output and may be dimmable. I was replacing 20w, 30w and 50w halogens with 1.2W LED units and was prepared to accept the reduction in light output. They will not work on dimmable transformers but the implication was that they were OK on fixed output units.
Initially I tried a few LED units mixed with halogen s because the halogen transformers need a reasonable current draw to work). This seemed fine at first, but after some months some of the individual LEDs in the light bulb died.
To cut a long story short, although the LED lamps are pin compatible, they are not happy with the high frequency AC output from the halogen transformer. My supplier said a 12V ac transformer at mains frequency would do, but further research eventually revealed that a regulated 12v dc output gave longest life and I eventually sourced LED lighting transformers (or more strictly, PSUs) at a decent price on E-bay.
Because of the rated output of the new transformer (max 30w) I couldn’t run a mix of halogen and LED, but with the passage of time higher power LED units had become available at sensible prices so I uprated to 2W units and they have been running satisfactorily for the last year or so. Please also not that although the supply is DC, the lamps are not polarised so work either way.
I should add that there are also LED lamps that claim to be compatible with halogen transformers but I don’t see how they could meet the higher current draw requirement of these transformers without some sort of shunt to increase the current, but that would negate any power savings of using LEDs.
One downside, the bedroom above is a little cooler now that all the little heaters under the floor have been eliminated.

all this is cool and funny but overall, on nation scale, the energy that can be saved on lighting is so low is almost irrelevant.
it only makes sense because electric energy is sold so expensive. same as gasoline. if it wasnt for the crazy taxes on it, there would be no point whatsoever in developing electric cars.
all this is the result of the enormous market distortions created by the massive scale state tampering with economy.

Anthony
These LEDs have been available in the UK for some years now. In the early days they were mixed with the halogen type so you might, for instance, have LED, Halogen alternating along the corridor or in the kitchen. People tended to put the halogen where they needed direct and bright lighting as above a work surface. BUT great article. Complete and self explanatary.

As a long time hydroponics enthusiast I’ve been growing plants under lighting for many years. I’ve tried all manner of lighting sources and like most indoor gardeners, had pretty much settled on HID bulbs of the HPS and sometimes MH varieties. The useful range of wattages of these bulbs typically runs from ~150w to 1000w. At 1000w, these bulbs produce deeply penetrating light (5-6 feet) which yields excellent growing results, but they also produce an enormous amount of heat as a by-product, not to mention it’s like having a hair dryer running for 12, 18, even 24 hours of the day. The bulbs lose illumination intensity fairly quickly and depending on the application, may need replacement in a year.
About four years ago, I switched my gardening lighting to LED sources and I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at my results. I’m currently using two different LED sources for a total of 207w. One is a commercially-made 120w fixture which contains LEDs in three colours. The second is an array of six roughly 6″x 5″ circuit boards, each of which holds 272 5mm LEDs which come in red and blue colours. These circuit boards were purchased as kits, and I did the soldering to assemble them. I’ve mounted the boards on a wooden frame to create a fixture which is about 20″ x 15″.
These two fixtures have replaced HID lighting which had a nominal power consumption of 1450w, or just a skosh more than 7 times the amount of power from the mains. And added bonus is that in one of my garden areas, the 1000w bulb there necessitated a special fixture which is cools the bulb by encasing it in a glass envelope and directing air flow through that envelope to carry the ‘waste’ heat away. I no longer have to run that axial fan system all the time the lights are on, which saves additional power – probably 10w-12w. Oh, and in four years, I’ve yet to need to replace as much as a single LED.
One advantage of LEDs in gardening applications is that one can make them with LEDs of precise colour/frequency, thus allowing designers to produce fixtures which have only the frequencies of light which plants use the most for their biological processes. There’s no need, for example, for a lot of green light, because most plants reflect most of the green light frequencies which strike them, which is why plants look green to our eyes. LEDs allow fixture designers to tailor fixtures to the needs of particular plants while only using frequencies which are the most beneficial to the plants. Very efficient.
In terms of garden output, I’m still getting the same amount of produce, maybe even a little more, and the quality of the produce is as high as it’s ever been. A 1000w bulb produces light which can penetrate the plant canopy down to 5-6 feet. The fixture I made with the home-brew kits definitely don’t have that kind of penetrating power. But since I use this fixture on my herbs garden, and the plants in that are only 2-3 feet high, it’s not a problem. I’m using the commercial fixture on my taller plants (tomato bushes right now) and I don’t see any difference in penetrating power. That fixture is made using high-power LED’s which run hotter than the little 5mm LEDs in the other fixture. The commercial fixture does have two muffin fans at the top of the enclosure to vent the heat the LEDs produce. The fans are throttled way back (I suspect they’ve reduced the voltage to the fans to keep them running slowly) and the 120w rated power includes the power drawn by the fans.
I couldn’t be more pleased about cutting out the old power wasters and plan to continue to seek out LED lighting for other plant applications.

Oldseadog (14:30:48) :
Remember that in G.B. only a qualified Electrician is authorised to carry out this work – Brussels has banned all electrical DIY.
Actually no they haven’t, the Uk regulations are as usual ‘gold plated’ and in addition they try and pretend you can’t do anything. I think you’ll find you can do quite a bit more than you think.

Tony Osborne,
If you read your wiki link on the Jevon’s paradox, you will see that according to wiki (Wili Connelly?), the Jevon’s paradox doesn’t apply to conservation measures when mandated by Government.

Martin Hale,
You should go into a side business making LED fixtures for amateur home indoor gardeners like myself who are electronically challenged. Reading about your experience has given me the idea that I may soon be able to afford a proper indoor herb garden, currently impossible due to lack of windows facing south and the expense of running grow-lights. I just need to find a source. On the other hand, hope dope growers are too stupid to catch on to this! Great post!

I see that nobody made it to the bottom of my first post. Incandescent bulbs are going to be outlawed in Ontario in 2011, and my query about substitutes for incandescent bulbs in ovens, appliances, and oven hoods has not been responded to. I am not aware that exceptions will be made for these applications. Are there any non-incandescent bulbs that are safe and reliable alternatives?

Thanks for a great piece, Anthony!
These would presumably be more economical in new construction than as retrofits. But do they stand alone, or have to be installed inside generic cans?
Also, how do you get the socket loose from an already installed can? Don’t you have to go above the can to unscrew the nut holding it in place?
I have 8 incandescent cans (on 3 circuits with dimmers) in my kitchen that would be good candidates for these. They leak so much cold air that just closing the opening would save a lot of heating fuel (and maybe even cooling power). Any heat generated by my incandescents probably goes more into the attic in the winter than into the house, so it’s probably lost anyway.
REPLY: They also offer a version with an Edison screw base. All the cans I’ve seen have the Edison socket either as part of a spring loaded press fit inside the can, or on an L bracket secured by a wingnut on the inside of the can. Either is easy to remove. – A

Nice article. I have replaced nearly 30 light bulbs in my house with CFLs and will be happy to replace them with LEDs when they are inexpensive enough. It bothers me that CFLs so rarely last anything close to the lifetime claims of the manufacturer. I’ve been making trips to Home Depot’s customer service counter for their free disposal program for CFLs. They don’t advertise it to much because I’m sure it costs them some $$$. But it makes me feel better to know that the CFLs are properly disposed of. The program could use a little more exposure so these dead CFLs don’t end up in the land fill.

These lights are ok but expensive. LED’s tend to shine all of the light in one direction but lights containing numerous LEDs partly solves that problem. I don’t think that LEDs are good enough or cheap enough to interest the masses just yet but they certainly will be in future.
Another point that I’d like to make is that we should have more nuclear power then who cares if we have low energy lightbulbs or long lasting conventional ones (which incidently help to warm your house too). I’m all for saving resources or curbing polution but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to live like energy paupers.

I live in Vermont. I am guessing that my oil bill will go up if I stop using incandescent lighting. It is not like I will make it up in air conditioning in the summer either, when days are much longer and the lights are used less, and I rarely use air conditioning anyway.

I took a slightly different approach to the impending ban on incandescent bulbs. When congress passed the legislation, I calculated my annual bulb usage, matched it against my age and life expectancy and bought a lifetime supply in case lots at wholesale while the prices were still low.
Total cost: $360! If I’m still here in 20 years I’ll consider switching. I find that the older I get, my focus is not so much on ROI as it is on thumbing my nose at the government.

LED is a very good technology, I’ve been using some of the lights for my volunteer theater productions for a couple of years now (http://www.colorkinetics.com/). For this sort of work the 5W variety has helped tremendously both in direct energy draw and cooling costs considering that we replace several 575W lights with a 250W array.
The primary draw back on them is that they are a direct-view light. ie works great for down lighting, not so great for standard floor lamps. Progress has slowly been happening to make LEDs better for common household use including more color temperature selections, and reducing the amount of color splay.

I installed ten Cree LR4 fixtures as task lights during my recent kitchen remodel, and they’re honestly the best lights I’ve ever installed. The LR4s are essentially the same as the LR6, but fit in a 5-inch can (yes, the “4” in LR4 really isn’t 4 inches.)
Believe me, I really wanted to put in halogen cans. But living in California, my hand was forced. CA Title 24 requires at least 1/2 the lighting wattage in kitchen areas to be from high efficiency luminaries.
Since I absolutely loathe every single CFL can I’ve ever seen (yes, even the current generation ones), I had to give these a shot. But at $200 *per can* (including light engine, can, and trim piece), they’re not for everyone.
The light color and quality is phenomenal. No one ever guesses they’re CFL cans, and they really look much like halogen. They’re bright, dim to a pretty low level (no, they won’t go to 1%) without any flicker, and just add a very pleasing light to the space.
If they were half this cost, I’d replace all my halogen cans in my home in a heartbeat.

I have also seen most of my CFL failures with the Silvania bulbs. Their life time was so short (weeks) that I will no longer buy any of their CFL bulbs.
I went to a low light environment years ago. I have two main lights that I use most. Both have 10w (electrical) CFL bulbs in them, installed in torchiere style floor lamps. They provide low level general room illumination in the living room and the study where my computer is. In the winter time they run for perhaps 5 hours a night each on average. The bulbs themselves sell for $1.99 USD and I have not had any burn outs with these bulbs, so I have no clue how long they will last.
At 5 hours/night and 10W power consumption each, that is an electrical draw of 50 watt hours per night/lamp or about 1.5 KWH per light per month. At an average power cost of 0.12 cents per KWH they cost me about 18 cents a month each. It makes no sense for me to try to reduce my lighting power consumption lower than this level. I would burn up 10 months power cost in gasoline just driving to the store to buy a replacement bulb.
When I switched to this low level illumination, I also added some small local spot lighting for those occasions when I need/want higher local light levels for reading or some other task.
In most cases, these are using 27 w (electrical) warm white CFL bulbs with 5500K color temperature. I might turn these on for an average of 1- 2 hours a day while reading or doing some other close work. I may go several days without using them at all. At 2 hours a day (total for spot lighting), these lights would cost me 3.2 KWH of electrical power ( probably closer to half that except in the dark days of winter). Net cost for them would be 39 cents a month at most.
My kitchen in the apartment has a fixed long tube fluorescent fixture but it is only on for an hour or so each day when fixing dinner. With (2) 14W tubes that works out to about 0.8 KWH per month, making my power cost for the kitchen at 10 cents a month.
Throw in another 10 cents a month for the other room lights that get switched on for minutes a day, and my total power bill due to lighting is on the order of $0.80 USD per month — ie. totally insignificant compared to other uses.
I spend about 8 – 16 hours a day with my desk top computer on each day. It on average consumes 100W. At an average usage of 12 hours a day, that works out to 36 KWH per month or around $4.33 USD per month.
My last electrical power bill for the month of January was $32.27 and most of that was to run the blower on the furnace (average $1.16/day)
It makes no sense economically for me to try to cut my lighting power consumption below those levels. At the current cost of LED lighting, especially given I have a stash of spare CFL bulbs that will last me for many years at a minimum.
From a technological point of view it is nice to see the development of new more efficient designs, but even with today’s technology, you can reduce your lighting power requirements to completely insignificant levels with a small change in life style and a change to low level general illumination augmented with natural light and spot lighting for tasks that require good light levels.
Larry

Thanks for the “How To” essay Anthony. It saves the tinkerers a lot of time and grief to know there are commercially available solutions.
Cree is certainly one of the big(gest) players in the LED Illumination Industry, so it is nice to see an actual shovel ready solution from them.
The statndard peak of the Photopic Luminosity curve is 680 Lumens per Watt, at something around 555 nm in the Grellow region.
It is known that the very highest efficiency “White” light reaches 400 Lumens per Watt for a monochromatic pair of sources at 448 nm (blue) and 568.7 nm yellow; but even though that source is visually white; it isn’t a usable white light “illuminant”, since it contains no other spectral components. It can at most be used as a flashlight.
The most common “single chip” white light LEDs use a Blue Gallium Indium Nitride LED emitting at about 460 nm. This wavelength matches a very strong absorption line in Cerium doped Yttrium Aluminum Garnet; which is a somewhat broad yellow emitting phosphor. The resulting yellow emission plus the residual of the 460 blue, not absorbed, is balanced to result in a “white” overall emission. Well yes it is a rather cold white, and is noticably deficient in any read emission, so it is not a particularly good whit elight either. Some makers add a red phosphor to spike up that part of the spectrum, to make a warmer white, that gives a better color rendition for ordinary scenes, and objects.
The three color LED approach is another way to do it; and does offer some advantages; particularly tho possibility of color tuning the final light to suit your mood.
The big problem for LEDS is not so much efficiency, but the ability to make High power devices. the light is produced in a very small volume, and small surfgace area, and a lot of waste heat has to be extracted to keep the emission efficiency from degrading too much.
Another problem is that LEDs are current operated devices, with a forward Voltage that is a Logarithmic function of the current; and unfortunately a negative coefficient function of temperature.
In low power indicator light usage of LEDs, it is simple to run the LED from a current source that may be just a resistor limited voltage source. Thgat unfortunately is a great waste of power in the driver circuit, which negates the luminous efficiency of the LEDs.
So high efficiency driver circuits are a big area of technology for LED power usage, to retain the hard won luminous efficiency.
But it is coming; and it certainly is the way to go.
And like Anthony; I have always been in favor of efficient use of energy resources; or anything else. When you grow up in the middle of a World War, you don’t take waste as an acceptible way to go.
CFLs are also a huge source of RFI, that sooner or later is going to become simply unacceptible. The Mercury problem is also a big negative for CFLs
Ordinary cylindrical fluorescent tubes; just happen to have a very useful optical geometry, that can in principle be optimally shaped using non-imaging optical concentrators, to restrict ALL of the emitted light to a carefully controlled output angular beam; without the use of egg crates, and other energy wasting baffles. So far, nobody seems to be designing industrial fluorescent fixtures using the ideal CPC optical configurations.
LEDs have reached the 100 Lumen per Watt point; but they are still a long way from the theoretical 400 L/Watt maximum. I believe that those in the industry think they can eventually get to 200 Lumens per Watt. That’s pretty damn good. I can still remember back in 1965 in St Louis Mo at the Monsanto Chemical Central Research labs, looking through a microscope in a darkened room, at the dull red 640 nm glow from a primitive Gallium Arsenide Phosphide LED wafer. Nowadays; LEDs are subject to emission safety standards similar to those for laser sources; to prevent eye damage.
The Aluminum Indium Gallium Phosphide amber LEDs, are so bright, you can do real damage to your eyes if you look directly at a typical 1 Watt packaged lamp.

Did I read somewhere that CFL alter the power factor (which I dimly recall is to do with how AC current lags or leads the AC voltage) so that the power station has to make more power than the rating on the lamp? presumably lost in transmission.
If so, the saving in CO2 is less than one might think, and the hidden costs will go onto everyone’s bills…. icandescent – lamp users cross subsidising CFL users I suppose.
Don’t know about LED’s … anyone?

Those puppies are pretty expensive, so it looks like I have to wait until the price comes down or I win the lottery. Until then I’ll use the CFLs, where they work. The corkscrew CFLs produce 800 lumens and consume 13 watts so the lumen per watt ratio is the same as the LED (650 lumens and 10.5 watts).

“”” Spector (11:48:50) :
I see that Amazon.com has the following listing:
“LED 60 Watt Incandescent Replacement: Cree Super Bright LED Light Bulb- Natural White” $58.99, ships and sold by EagleLight LEDs.
This appears to be the highest replacement wattage available. Pricing seems to be about one dollar per replacement wattage. I believe they need to reduce the cost by an order of magnitude (10) before these will become popular. “””
Well that isn’t too likely to happen. Anybody who thinks that a light bulb that lasts about 700 hours max, if you are lucky, and puts out a lot less light in the process, should sell for the same price, as one that lasts tens of thousands of hours, just isn’t buying on value.
If the government was to apply the same “subsidy” concept that they apply to solar cell power sources, to cut the price of LED bulbs, they would get a lot more action.
But then I am not in favor of the taxpayers being asked to subsidze anything; including solar cell energy. If iyt is going to replace squished dinosaurs, it will have to do it on its own merits.

My only question is how do they do when it’s cold?
Like below freezing to -40C cold?
I have outdoor lights and an unheated garage and if they aren’t incandescent they don’t work worth a hot damn as soon as the temperature gets colder.
The fluorescents just sit and weakly glow. I can’t use my flashlight to test because the batteries freeze and if I keep the seperately they move heat when I drop them in.
Anyone know?

Don Shaw (14:56:11) wrote:
“As an Engineer, another question comes to mind re the claimed economic benefits. Aren’t the benefits exaggerated for those of us that live in locations that need to heat our homes a large percentage of the year?
“Doesn’t the energy “wasted” from the heat from conventional bulbs really replace the fuel we have to burn to heat the home? Of course the summer time is different when we use the AC but that is the period when we use our lighting demand is less.”
Good point. Politically incorrect incandescent bulbs do have a Wintertime role to play. If you live in a climate that’s too cold for an above-ground heat pump to work efficiently, and if a geothermal system is not feasible for some reason, and if you don’t have access to natural gas, you may be stuck with old-fashioned electric heating. If so, incandescent hall lights should be as energy-efficient as the old-fashioned electric heating. (Obviously they’re going to supplement the heating system, rather than supplanting it.). Most of the energy output of an incandescent light bulb is the IR (heat). The small portion that’s in the visible range is absorbed by the walls and carpeting, and then re-emitted as IR.
The upshot: Incandescent bulbs in the hall can be a dual-use technology during the Winter. In the Summer, it’d be prudent to switch over to the twisty CFLs, so that the air conditioning is not fighting with the lighting. 🙂
The living room and bedrooms are a different story. A significant fraction of the radiant energy from an incandescent bulb goes straight out the window. In terms of energy efficiency, CFLs would be better in these rooms–even during the Winter.

“”” Fred2 (16:03:57) :
My only question is how do they do when it’s cold?
Like below freezing to -40C cold?
I have outdoor lights and an unheated garage and if they aren’t incandescent they don’t work worth a hot damn as soon as the temperature gets colder.
The fluorescents just sit and weakly glow. I can’t use my flashlight to test because the batteries freeze and if I keep the seperately they move heat when I drop them in.
Anyone know? “””
Well the LEDs themselves, just eat up all the cold they can muster. The efficiency of light outpur goes up as the temperature goes down. Now the driving circuitry can mess that all up of course.
One of the biggest problems of large arrays of high power LEDs is getting their self heat out of the middle of the array; in simple arrangements, the surrounding LEDs can lower the efficiency due to heating.
But when they are in relativley large assemlied devices like Anthony show here, that effect is minimised.
When we demonstrated out first vanilla red GaAsP LEDs in 1970 at the LA Wescon show, we had a set up to actually dip the lighted LED into liquid Nitrogen to show how bright they got. The amazing thing was that they didn’t just shatter due to differential thermal expansion problems. suffice it to say, that that is not the recommended operating conditions; but the LED die itself just loves low temperatures.
Forward Voltage typically drops about 2 mV per deg C at a fixed current; per junction, so sometimes it is necessary to temperature compensate driving circuits; but the lighting systems designers are all up on that.
Of course if you lower the temperature a lot, the band gap tends to increase, so the wavelength will shift to shorter wavelength.
That can be a big problem for yellow lights since the eye only recognizes about 5 nm wavelength range as yellow, as distinct from “Gold” or “Grellow”.