When I want light in my home, I usually just want light. I.e. it’s dark outside. With a well insulated, earth-sheltered home, I’ve run the heat for about 3 hours so far this winter. But I’m not willing to sit in the dark for the 4 hours after sunset before I go to bed.

LED: longer life, better dimming, quick-start, no mercury
CFL: much lower cost

It will be very exciting to see if/when the long-term LED problem gets resolved: high brightness LED’s currently use a ton of power…

As to the initial pricing and the state of the LED lighting market right now. It only makes sense from an ROI perspective to start replacing your highest usage lights with LEDs because that is where you will see the quickest payback, or in certain locations there can be some rebates or incentives from local government or energy suppliers that help subsidize the purchase. If you care about the broader perspective of environmental impact and using eco-friendly products, there are some great studies out there that detail the reduced amount of carbon emissions and required power plants should we as a nation cut back our energy usage, and approximately 25% of residential energy usage comes from lighting. Throwing away fewer light bulbs every year, especially those incorrectly disposed of CFLs, is a benefit too. I can’t tell you how many calls we get from customers who absolutely hate CFL bulbs and don’t see them as a viable alternative to incandescent. They complain about the slow warm up time which leads to the “blooming” effect, product that burns out or explodes prematurely or don’t work well in the cold, and some aren’t even aware of the mercury content and the special disposal requirements.

As of Feb 2010, no one is currently selling an honest to goodness replacement for a 60W incandescent A bulb, so don’t be fooled by the exaggerated statements. We travel to the light shows in China and visit the factories where the LED bulbs we stock are produced and therefore have a pretty good idea of what claims are totally unsubstantiated by fact. We are getting close to that product being available but we aren’t there yet. There are a lot of great LED products on the market, but you have to do your homework and separate out the junk that many retailers are carrying.

Efficient lighting equals higher heat bills: study

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/03/04/mb-light-bulbs.html

iball68 wrote..
As a professional energy engineer I partially agree with the aforementioned study. Using CFL reduce your energy consumption by the % saving will depend on the type and efficiency of the heating system. Lets do the math: Assume lights on in living room, total 200 W, and lights on in kitche 300 W. Assume heating in living room is 2000 W and 1000 W in kitchen. It is known that 90% of energy of incadescent light bulb is emitted as heat, thus assume 500 W x 0.9 = 450 W waste heat going into the occupied space. This represents 15 % of the available heating when the lights are on. Now, we replace the light bulbs with CFL, that has 1/3 of the energy at same light ouput. Thus we now have 0.33 x 500 W = 167 W of energy input. It is known that CFL emit approximately 80% as waste heat, therefore, we now have 133 W of extra heat available, which represents only 4.4 % of the available heating. This means that the waste heat reduced by 10.6 %. In terms of total % energy savings accounting for the “free waste heat”, for electric heating we calculate as follows: 100% – [(3000-133) W + 166 W]/[(3000-450)W+ 500W] = 3.7%. In the case of oil/gas heating, assuming on average 75% effeciency, all heat output is divided by 0.75. Thus the energy savings % is calculated as follows: 100% – [(4000-177) W + 166 W]/[(4000-600)W+ 500W]=14.8% savings. Therefore, greater savings can be accrued if you are heating with oil/gas. There is another issue that the author of the Winnipeg study does not account for is the color rendering index of the lights. CFL have lower CRI than incadenscent lighting. In other words, most people can attest that CFL feel cooler, because they emit less range of natural light as compared with incadesent bulbs. Jury is still out, but definetly there are savings.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/03/04/mb-light-bulbs.html#ixzz0fLFpymrd

You obviously can afford this, and since it works for you, that is awesome.

I have a houseful of digital wallbox dimmers, each of which has a minimum connected load of 50 watts. I like the color of incandescent lamps, and I keep all of my sources dimmed to some extent pretty much all of the time. As a result, CF lamps are not an option for me, except in closets and exterior lighting fixtures which were designed to use edison base lamps. I use them in those locations.

In my office, I have a pendant fixture that uses F40 3000K ultralume, high-CRI lamps, in addition to incandescent fixtures for ambient lighting, although I was careful to design the space for ample daylighting.

I recently remodeled my kitchen, and I purchased very inexpensive LED strip lights for undercabinet lighting. http://www.inspiredled.com/products-display.html. Installation is a snap, but even the warm white color is a bit cool to my taste. LED strips are excellent for this type of application, and for other applications in which the LED is incorporated into a product.

Here’s an example: http://www.led-lighting-systems.net/index.cfm?dsp=led-systems

The balance of the fixtures in the room are either 120-volt 50 PAR 20 in cans) or 12-volt halogen (MR_16 in a strip).

I like Steve J’s reference to VU1 Technology, which uses a new technology that they call Electron Stimulated Luminescence. They tout it as: • perfect light quality
• instant-on
• ability to fully dim
http://www.vu1.com/technology/technology.htm

My point is that the market for lighting fixtures and lamps is large, varied, and innovative, and it irritates me to be told what kind of lamp Ihave to use by a government that always makes the wrong bet on technology. The market, left to its own devices will offer an amazing variety of choices.

CFL is a transitory technology that will soon be outmoded. Unfortunately, in some places, it will be mandated by statute, and that’s the crime.

A 60 Watt incandescent lamp doesn’t have any heat sink on it; well not that you would notice it; so it clearly can’t be wasting any power. Of course it operates at far too high a temperature to be safe to touch or have in contact with flammable materials; or even inflammable materials.

So it might be about 3 inches in diameter for the main bulb, and occupy about 250 CC of space. It is generating probably 50 Watts of “heat”, which is about 200 mWatts per cc. or if you like 200 microwatts per cubic mm. Totally peanuts power density that nobody would even notice.

A “One Watt” LED chip on the other hand is about 1 mm square, and maybe 1/4 mm thick. It runs at around 3 Volts and 350 mAmps of current for its one Watt of input power; and it has an internal quantum efficiency that is very close to 100% so all of that one Watt is converted into light. Unfortunately, much of the light is trapped inside the die, by Total Internal Reflection; due to the high refractive index of the LED wide bandgap semiconductors. But the best modern chip designs have been able to achieve over 50% external quantum efficiency, so about half a Watt of light is emitted, and the rest gets re’absorbed and converted into about 1/2 a Watt of heat; all inside that 1/4 cubic mm of LED die; for a “heat” density of about two Watts per cubic mm as compared to the 200 microWatts per cubic mm of a 60 Watt incandescent lamp. That is 10,000 times the power density for the LED lamp; compared to the incandescent.

Now the incandescent thrives on heat; that is what makes it work; but the LED would rather stay cool; preferrably with a junction temperature under 100 deg C. Oh the chip itself can operate ok at 200 deg C or more, but the optical packaging materials need to be kept below 100.

So we have a 1/4 cubic mm device that is dissipating 10,000 times the energy density of a 60 Watt light bulb of incandescent technology, yet it needs to be kept below 100 deg C or thereabouts.

Long ago, people figured out how to take large amounts of heat, and transfer that from a tiny space to a much larger space, form whence it can be dissipated to the surrounding environment, without the source temperature having to get extremely hot.

They call these devices “Heat sinks” for obvious reasons, the couple compact heat sources to cool surrounding environments.

LED lamps use heat sinks to keep that high energy density light source cool.

You replaced a 65w CFL… there is no such thing. There is a CFL equivelant to a 65w incandessant. That draws 13w max, and tapers down to 10w, which is less than your LEDS. Those lights also produce 900+ lumens, which is more than the light output of that LED replacement.

You could have just moved to a lower CFL light which matches that lumens, and that would be only 8 watts, which is more efficient than the LED light, with the same output.

By the way… if you were paying $14 for a CFL, and it only lasted you 2 years… you got ripped twice. Most energy-star lighting has 5-10 year replacement guarantees for CFL’s, and those only cost about $1.50 in most places. (You purchased a special “Flood” that was “Dimmable”, which was just pointless. Dimmable lights draw more power than any equivelant other light, unless you have a super expensive digital lighting dimmer. The dimmer consumes the power that the dimmed light would normally produce, which is why they get hot and burn-out. The fact that you used a dimmer, is partially the reason why you killed the lights so fast.)

Notice that the LED’s have large heat-sinks on the back… that is because they waste more power than they say. Thoe heat-sinks are to disipate the massive heat generated by the power-driver for the LEDs. LED’s only operate on low voltage, so they need a wastefull power-driver. The LED bulbs themselves consumes 10.5w, but the voltage-driver consumes twice that much. Hook it up to a “Kill-a-watt”, and you will see the true power. The CFL was clearly the beter choice. CFL’s use a high-frequency driver, which is also a higher voltage, so it consumes less.

The new CFL’s are even better. They produce more light than the older CFL’s, and are smaller, and consume less power, and obviously they produce less heat.

If you are using another form of heating, you save the differential cost. Of course, when you turn on the air conditioner, the deal is off.