Ah, the old perennial. We've gone over this before a number of times - how are we all doing with lamp technologies?
I've always stuck resolutely to incandescent while waiting for other tech to offer the same light and colour temperature.
Looks to me as if they might have just about got there got there with some tech, but also looks to me as if the very best I can save by swapping my 60w candle incandescent bulbs in the lounge out is about £1 a month in running costs, and then of course I need to buy the lamps.
Why would I do that? Persuade me this time, folks...
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We've replaced 16 GU10 spot or flood bulbs with LED equivalent. They save a bit on electric as they're around a tenth the wattage of original tungsten/halogen items. Main reason though was lamp life. First set installed in kitchen about 2 yrs ago and all four still originals, TH versions only seem to last a few months.
The also run lots cooler with benefits for longevity of fitting and not creating marks on the ceiling.
Most others are CFL. Light output is suboptimal and there's a warm up time before max output. OTOH I can run a 150w equivalent inside a shade marked max 75w for tugsten.
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I've got one of those 150 watt equivalent bulbs but it is too fat for the shade cage of the standard lamp it was intended for, so awaits the failure of the existing hall pendant lamp to be used.
I have tried other alternatives but found they mostly project upwards rather than giving the more even illumination of tungsten. Colour is another factor. My new reading lamp uses
a Philips 6-9 watt screwfit LED bulb labelled "warm" but the light is in fact quite harsh, although I was told it should last for 15,000 hours.
While posting, has anyone used a "Serious Readers'" lamp? They seem to be extraordinarily expensive.
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>>
>> While posting, has anyone used a "Serious Readers'" lamp? They seem to be extraordinarily expensive.
>>
I have 2 - bought the seconds which are cheaper.
Light is definitely very good but probably not worth the money. My mother (aged 85) also has one which she uses in the winter when doing her jigsaws.
They do have a long guarantee (5 years) so when I had a problem with one they replaced it for free.
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SWMBO has a floor mounted LED reading light.
It is very neat with a tiny head but just a simple on/off switch
IIRC it is about £80 and is available in one off the many small advertising books that arrive
regularly.
Seems to do the job.
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>>
>> Looks to me as if they might have just about got there got there with
>> some tech
>>
My thought precisely; I always found compact fluorescents compromised in all sorts of ways and often poor lifetime, but LEDs seem rather better. Bought a couple of '60W equivalent' LED bulbs in my local surplus store for a quid or two a pop and they actually seem brighter than a 60W filament bulb.
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We're all LED now. GU10, candles and normal shaped bulbs. Have no problems with the light outputs and my leccie bills seem to be smaller over the last year. I've got one to fit in the porch photo-cell light but, I think, that's the lot apart from the workshop/garage which is all fluorescents.
Cost me about £120 to do the whole place...but that was from the local wholesale/trade place. They come with a 2 year guarantee.
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>> Cost me about £120 to do the whole place...but that was from the local wholesale/trade
>> place. They come with a 2 year guarantee.
>>
I'm not being provocative, Ted, or at least not deliberately so, but I really don't understand why would you would spend £120 on something that has a two year guarantee, that can barely have a payback period in Rattle's lifetime, never mind the rest of us.
What was the motivation?
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Maybe it's like buying (or leasing) an electric car. Not strictly economically justifiable but satisfying a desire to have some green credentials... :-)
EDIT: that's not having a pop at you, I think you know a leccy car is on my agenda but the maths isn't working for me yet
Last edited by: smokie on Fri 16 Dec 16 at 13:17
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You're absolutely right, smokie - my comment wasn't meant to be a veiled "tell me why so I can attempt to discredit your ridiculous puff and tomfoolery", more a "it can't be the money so is it a green thing, or have I miscalculated and in fact it IS the money, in which case I'm all for it".
I know the car only works if you fill it every three miles with some more man maths.
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>> I'm not being provocative, Ted, or at least not deliberately so,
>>
Well at least not deliberately!
>> but I really don't
>> understand why would you would spend £120 on something that has a two year guarantee,
The 2 year guarantee is useful if some bulbs do pop, although most should last well over 5 years.
>> that can barely have a payback period in Rattle's lifetime, never mind the rest of
>> us.
>> What was the motivation?
>>
I am not having a go at you, at least not deliberately, but:
You gave the answer in your first post. " I can save by swapping my 60w candle incandescent bulbs in the lounge out is about £1 a month in running costs, and then of course I need to buy the lamps". A decent quality LED bulb will cost £3 to £5. So your annual saving for your lounge is >£7. Either that is worth your time to put a bulb in your shopping basket next time you are out and about in town, or are you too lazy or just satisfied to let £7 net of your hard earned cash go to waste. To me it is a no-brainer, even with a bypass.
Now if you can repeat that around the house, like it seems Ted has, the savings become very worthwhile.
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I have some relatively expensive things in the kitchen just now that look a bit like 'pearl' incandescents but are low energy - they have LEDs in them.
www.costco.co.uk/view/p/conglom-luminus-led-a60-with-e27-screw-base-95w-5000k-dimmable-bulbs-4-pack-183916
They behave oddly - if I turn them off, then realise I have forgotten something and turn them back on a second or two later, then they don't light - or maybe one out of the four will come on. On the other hand, from 'cold' they all come on every time. At least one has popped in fairly short order as well, so as an economy measure they probably aren't a very good prospect.
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I'm slowly replacing my CFL's with LEDS, primarily in the rooms where lights are normally left on - kids bedrooms, upstairs bathroom, downstairs cloakroom.
I even tried to change the bulb in a PIR controlled outside light but the LED globe flickered like a bu...horrible flickery thing so I put a halogen back in.
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LEDs do save money over time but they do take a long time to pay off. I like LED lights because they offer so many different types of light output the main reason though is I got sick of changing filament bulbs. We are saving around 1000w if all the lights were on at the same time so that is some saving.
I do lot of electronic stuff and play with LEDs a lot. The problem with LEDs is they are DC unlike other types of bulbs. This requires a bridge rectifier (4 diodes) to convert AC to DC however if that output is not smoothed properly the LEDs will be driven in what is called half wave. The flicker you see on the cheaper LED lights is the power to LEDs switching on and off as the AC sinewave changes phase. To solve this problem they use capacitors to smooth the output however some of the cheaper LEDs don't do this properly.
To put it simply a decent LED bulb should not have any visible flicker. The other thing to consider is that each LED requires a forward voltage of around 3v so this must be taken into account.
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That's interesting Rattle, thanks for that.
For other reasons I've been looking at and playing with what is loosely called "the internet of things".
I note that there are a number of terribly clever and entirely useless things you can do with Phillips Hue lights, such as making them flash red if your house is on fire, or turn blue if it's raining, or blink three times if someone mentions you on Twitter, that kind of a caper. Useless but might be vaguely entertaining for about an hour, I thought.
So I looked at how much they cost, and then I stopped looking. It's not cheap, this stuff, is it!
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It wasn't about the purchase money, Cranks. It was more about the money spent heating up the ceiling. 5 bulbs in the parlour and 3 in the banquetting suite plus numerous other lights which get left on by both SWM and the kids/grandkids. The heat from the eight GU10s in the kitchen could be felt on the worktops...about 6 feet away I wasn't aware of the 2 year thing until one of the candle bulbs in the lounge faled and I went for another., to be given one free. Then another went so the supplier changed to a different make. Hopefully we won't get as many fails now as we did with incandescent...which were always popping off.
Rats...If you're still here can you give me a call sometime....one or two niggles with the PC...nothing serious.
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>> I do lot of electronic stuff and play with LEDs a lot. The problem with
>> LEDs is they are DC unlike other types of bulbs. This requires a bridge rectifier
>> (4 diodes) to convert AC to DC however if that output is not smoothed properly
>> the LEDs will be driven in what is called half wave. The flicker you see
>> on the cheaper LED lights is the power to LEDs switching on and off as
>> the AC sinewave changes phase. To solve this problem they use capacitors to smooth the
>> output however some of the cheaper LEDs don't do this properly.
>>
Have you seen what's inside a CFL? I suspect that's why (in my experience at least) they don't last anywhere near as long as claimed.
payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/150699/2248744/cfl_6.jpg
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CFLs require a power supply too but they are just fluorescents hence are nasty. By the forward voltage 3v (red is less) I mean the individual LED, you can buy LED chips which run on higher voltage but they are just lots of LEDs in series.
There are some videos made by a person called Bigclive on Youtube, his videos are very good for explaining exactly how mains voltage LED fittings work. This video is one of his latest.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hZYli_gKaQ&t=2s
I personally don't play with mains as I am not an electrical engineer so power everything from a DC wall supply.
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Savings do, of course, depend on what you are replacing or, more to the point, how that light is used. Since being burgled some years back I now leave on two LED GU10 downlighters in our porch overnight. Well, to save remembering, I leave them on 24 hours. Now if I did the same with regular halogen downlighters I read somewhere that the cost would be something like £70 per bulb per year as opposed to £6.
(I am OK with the daytime cost as having solar panels the cost of keeping these on is nothing when we are generating.)
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We've just got our first set of leds bulbs. About a fiver each, so not cheap but i didn't have to use the car as the hardware shop is only a short walk away. So far so good, they come on straight away unlike the old energy savers. Not sure on cost to run, any easy way to work it out?
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For the hourly cost, divide the wattage by 1000 and multiply by your price per kWh.
e.g for a 100W lamp - 100/1000*£0.12 = £0.012 or 1.2p per hour
for a roughly equivalent 15W LED - 15/1000*£0.12 = £0.0012 or 0.18p per hour.
So work out the cost of your incandescents and the electricity savings for converting to LED would be about 6/7 of that.
Then you have to consider cost of lamps and life.
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I think we went down to a 6w led from a 20w energy saver so a bit. Although we don't seem to use much so tbh i doubt I'll worry about it too much.
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We are still using our stock of low energy lamps bought at 30p about 12 years ago when they were subsidised as energy savings scheme.
When finshed we convert to LED as and when the old lamps fail.
So another 10 years or so.
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Another factor is that the few remaining kinds of incandescent bulbs still available are nowhere near as robust or long-lasting as they used to be. Even the so-called heavy duty bulbs are fragile - I'm forever replacing bulbs in my inspection lamp every time I accidentally bump it on something.
The longest-lasting bulb in the house is in the pantry. There is only a tiny window, so the light gets turned on and off dozens of times a day. It's never been replaced in 31 years.
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>> I'm forever replacing bulbs in my inspection lamp every time I
>> accidentally bump it on something.
>>
Time for a new fangled LED inspection lamp?
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>> Time for a new fangled LED inspection lamp?
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Yes, I'd thought about that. But then I have a system of separate lamps hanging in all useful spots - 3 - 4 garaged vehicles. I hate having to unplug them and trail them around - the wires always catch under tyres or bumpers or something. All acquired from jumbles and carboots over the years.
Is an LED lamp truly heavy duty? Can it survive being dropped?
Is it true about not using with moving machinery?
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Why not get portable ones, no wires no fuss.
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<< It's never been replaced in 31 years. >>
Now you know that's the kiss of death :) Pop!
Last edited by: Fullchat on Sat 17 Dec 16 at 11:39
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>> Now you know that's the kiss of death :) Pop!
>>
It's just survived the annual Christmas ritual of knocking into it while getting the large mixing bowl down from the top shelf.
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Well look after it, you'll never get another.
Whoever was making everlasting light bulbs in 1985 must have gone bust long ago.
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>>We are still using our stock of low energy lamps bought at 30p about 12 years ago when they were subsidised as energy savings scheme.
Same here. We've got several boxes full of the things. I think one of the supermarkets were doing them for 10p each when they were subsidised.
I find the 'rough handling' bulbs or whatever they're called surprisingly good from Wickes. I use them in my inspection lamp.
Last edited by: The Melting Snowman on Tue 20 Dec 16 at 17:33
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How many have people stockpiled tens, a hundred plus?
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Those early fluorescent types wer a a bit rubbish though weren't they? Dim and slow to start. I remember I could walk upstairs before the light came on properly. Light had a sickly green tinge to it too. Modern LEDs do a better job although I think for atmospheric lighting the old incandescent bulbs still have the edge.
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Yeah I remember them we've got a few still, they were rubbish. The leds we've just got are much better. Although the side lamp pointed bulbs are quite good for atmosphere, we've got old filament type in nearly all the side lights they never seem to fail.
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Bulbs/lamps - Bromptonaut
