Can and LED floodlight possibly be as bright as a real floodlight?

Can an LED floodlight possibly be as bright as a real floodlight?

The fixture will be mounted about 24 feet above the ground so it has to be bright.

The people who rate the one below say it's very bright, but have they ever looked into a 100 watt incandescent floodlight? It's probably blinding, so I'm not sure the raters' opinions are really comparisons.

The one below at Home Depot from Lithonia Lighting says it has "2 efficient 10-watt LEDs" where the two incandescent lights would otherwise be. The picture shows two circular devices, each divided into 3 120-degree parts, with what looks like a small concave reflector with an LED in the middle of each part. I guess they are saying the 3 together use 10 watts. Are there really 3 1/3 watt LEDs, and is 10 watts from an LED as much light as 100 watts incandescent?? That's what the floodlights use now, 200 watts total per fixture.

The maker's website

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says "Each head contains (3) 4780K high performance LEDs. Lumen output of 1,222 is maintained at 50,000 hour life. LED driver is 120V and operates at 60Hz."

I like the idea of LED, because it's very difficult to change the bulb on one of my two** double-flloodlights.***, but not if it's not going to light up the area.

Mostly what I'm looking for is a light that won't go on because of the wind, but will go on when a person walks by.

This one, despite the high price, $116, only has 6 LEDs (2 by HD's counting method!).

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The same thing with three sets of three LEDs is 150 dollars, implying that one group of three and the holder is $34 The same thing with photocell but no motion sensor is 98 dollars, impliying that they're only charging 18 dollars for the motion sensor and most of the price is for the LEDs.

Thanks.

Details that the electronics guys may find boring. Hey, everyone may find them boring!

**The other floodlight in the back of the house I put in right under my bedroom window, so I can just lean out and change the bulb. I wired it from the receptacle just below the window, so little effort to run the wires, and it sure looks better than several of my neighbors' who let an electrician or handyman run surface Romex or conduit from the back porch light, most of whom no longer have a back porch light.

*** It's chest high when I'm in the attic, so that's about 24 feet (?, two story house, plus attic. The first floor is about a foot above the ground.) and I don't have a ladder that long. What I've done to adjust the light sensor and change the bulb is to unscrew the winged folding toggle nut inside the attic, remove the big washer, disconnect the Romex and tie a string to the end of the wire, and lower the whole fixture to the ground. Do my work there, and pull tthe fixture back up. The hard parts are getting the romex through its hole, and gettting the long screw to go though its assigned hole (which is a lot bigger than the screw, but still not easy to find) so I can screw the toggle nut back on. I've done this twice with no more than 10 minutes each time trying to get the screw through, but I fear some time it will take me hours, and it woudl be nice if it used LED's and never burned out. But at 23 feet high, the light has to be bright!!

Reply to
micky
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Short answer, absolutely.

Long answer, make sure you look at the lumen output and beam angle specs fo r the specific light you are considering using, compared/contrasted to thos e for the conventional (100W, 200W, etc.) incandescent that you would other wise use for that location. Do NOT trust the "wattage equivalent" verbiage on the packaging; pretty much all manufacturers of LED lighting fudge thos e a little bit, especially with screw in A19 and other similar formats comm only used as household lighting.

nate

Reply to
N8N

for the specific light you are considering using, compared/contrasted to th ose for the conventional (100W, 200W, etc.) incandescent that you would oth erwise use for that location. Do NOT trust the "wattage equivalent" verbia ge on the packaging; pretty much all manufacturers of LED lighting fudge th ose a little bit, especially with screw in A19 and other similar formats co mmonly used as household lighting.

+1
Reply to
trader_4

Compare lumens, no watts. Watts= enegy to produce lumens.

A reflector also makes a huge difference over a raw bulb. Type of reflector also makes a difference...a given area at a given distance from the light source will receive more light from a narrow beam reflector than from a wide beam reflector.

Reply to
dadiOH

Yes. Spend $15 or more on a Lux Meter (photometer), measure the spot intensities, and see for yourself: I have one of these:

However, there's a problem. The total light output of an LED light is rated in lumens, not lux. Lux is just the intensity at a given point. Focus the beam, and you get a really high lux value. Spread it out into your floodlight, and the intensity is much less. Lumens is the total output, in all directions. The right way to measure that is with an integrating sphere: My way is much easier, but not terribly accurate. However, it will do nicely for comparisons. I recently threw together the procedure and posted it to the rec.bicycles.tech newsgroup. Cut-n-pasted:

  1. Point light at the wall in a dark room at a distance of 1 meter. There's nothing sacred about the 1 meter distance. If 1 meter seems too close, just pick another distance.
  2. Measure the spot diameter on the wall. If the light slowly fades away from the hot spot, just guess the half brightness points. If the spot is oval shaped, measure both the maximum and minimum diameters and calculate an average.
  3. At the same 1 meter distance, use the Lux meter to measure the brightness. This is not really correct, since lumens is the total brightness, including the over spray. The brightness will also follow a Gaussian curve over the spot diameter.
  4. Calculate the beam width in degrees. Dust off the long forgotten inverse trigonometric functions on your calculator: Beam_width_in_degrees = 2 * arctan (spot_radius/dist) where: spot_radius = 1/2 * spot diameter, in your favorite units of measure dist = distance between light and spot in same units of measure.
  5. Using the values of lux, distance, and beamwidth, plug into one of the calculators at: to obtain lumens.

I would be interested in collecting results as I only have a few bicycle lights and flashlights suitable for testing. Please include measurements, maker, model, battery type, manufacturers rated lumens, and condition of battery (new, used, old, leaking, dead). So far:

Light spot_dia dist width bright calc mfg (cm) (cm) (deg) (lux) (lumens) (lumens)

5w Cree light hi 80 100 43.6 480 216 500 5w Cree light hi 51 100 28.6 900 175 500 5w Cree light lo 80 100 43.6 140 63 ? Planet Bike 1 watt 20 100 11.4 3000 93 76 (new batt) Maglite 3D LED 13 100 7.4 3600 47 131 (old batt)

There are other problems when comparing LED and incandescent brightness. The spectra is not the same. Therefore the perceived brightness will vary with the color temperature. Most lights have some amount of over-spray outside of the spot area. The lux meter will not capture these, resulting in some error. The intensity across the spot is not uniform but tends to follow a Gaussian curve. Some lights have a very hot spot in the middle, and then just fade out towards the edges. Do your best and see how close to the rated lumens you get.

Good luck.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Can't help you out on the question. But, I installed 21 Lithonia LED can lights throughout my place. They cost a bit more than other brands, but been real pleased with the lights/looks. Had to have 1 replacement afterwards, and they sent me 2 with no questions asked.

Reply to
Mark

I have a Pelican flashlight with a single LED light source. That flashlight is brighter than the old equivalent model Pelican Flashlights with the incandescent bulbs.

So, yes, LED's can be brighter than incandescent bulbs.

I expect you'll have no problems with the LED flood light.

Reply to
nestork

Thanks all.

It turns out this time that the HD price is the same as Amazon, maybe less, but I just went to the store** and it wasn't in stock. I'm in no hurry. I'll ship it to the store, or maybe to my house (over 50 dollars shipping is free)

BTW, it got quite a few complaints about strobing or breaking within a year on the Amazon site (and also on the HD site that was hard to read) but overall still scored a 4.8 out of 5 (which should really be 3.8 out of 4)

**HD didn't have any LED Lithonia floodlights, even though they had a 6 foot wide section, 15 feet high, of Lithonia floodlights etc. Including a motion sensor that would wirelessly turn on an off mulitple light sockets. And another one that would turn on and off a receptacle, and beep when it did so.

WRT lights for the front door, they had Zenith/Heath that had low lighting for 2, 4 hours or all night, and high lighting if the motion sensor saw something. And some of the lights by Hampton Bay (house brand?) had sensor that could control 325 watts, even though the most that could be used in the light was 100. The other 225 could be elsewhere, powered by the extra red wire. Lighting has gotten more complicated since last I looked.

Reply to
micky

Well, someone -- thank you -- reminded me to look at lumens

I wasn't sure if this was per head, so I looked at the 3 head version, and it said "Each head contains (3) 5339K high performance LEDs which maintain 1,719 lumen output "

Different K value, but I guess they are giving the total, as they should be.

And then I looked at 100 watt incandescent. About 1500 lumen times 2 =

3000 lumen.

So since I really can't judge how bright 1222 lumens from LEDs will be, I don't kow whether to buy that 1222 for $117 or 1719 for $150.

Or stay with incandescent for much less and hope they don't burn out so fast if I get a good brand that doesn't turn on with the wind. I almost never go there at night so if they don't turn on in the wind, they'll burn less than 5 hours a year 2000 hour lifespan will be 400 years. Ugh.

Reply to
micky

Reply to
Tony Hwang

Hi, Out kitchen had 75W pot flood lights. All been replaced with bright white (color temp. 5000K,60W equivalent Philips bulbs dimmable, it is as bright as ole bulbs. No problem. Most of bulbs in the house is now all LEDs. Could see some difference in the power bill. They run always cool. Good in summer time.

Reply to
Tony Hwang

I didn't do so well. Through LED lighting transplants and juggling some electronics, I managed to drop my monthly electric burn from an average of 375 kw-hr in 2008 to about 315 kw-hr average in 2014. See spreadsheet and graph at: Note the trend lines. While my electricity consumption was going down, PG&E was busy raising their rates and juggling the tiers. The result was despite the lower consumption, I am still paying roughly the same per month. Grumble.

Some analysis with a clamp on ammeter and kill-a-watt meter showed that the bulk of my electric usage is the electric water heater. They don't make an LED water heater and solar is not an option in a forest. I'm looking into flash water heaters, but it looks like it would take years to recover the initial investment. A wood burning water heater using a hot tub as a hot water tank is a possibility, but doesn't work well with my convenience lifestyle.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I recently replaced a 95W flood light on the garage with an LED. It is a whiter light and looks to be much brighter. I'm going to replace the other bulb soon too. I really like it. The fixture is mounted about 15 feet high and give plenty of light in the driveway.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

Can an LED floodlight possibly be as bright as a real floodlight?

The fixture will be mounted about 24 feet above the ground so it has to be bright.

Snip

I have a one Cree LED porch light that senses movement on our front porch. Amazing how bright and coverage it has. Reflector of course. WW

Reply to
WW

Typical use here is 750 kw so overall, you are doing well.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

I was at a trade show the other day and the RAB rep had a LED that looked like an aircraft landing lamp. They certainly have very robust LED lights.

Reply to
gfretwell

Hi, We consume around 1000KWh per month. Down from ~1300KWh. I think our 4 person electric Sauna sucks lot of juice even running on 220V.

Reply to
Tony Hwang

The general answer is yes. My church has some flood lights at the end of the gymnasium, and also in the chapel. The facilities guys put in LED floods, which work fine. They say the bulbs cost twenty to thirty dollars each.

I'd test the bulb on the ground at night before taking it that far in the air. Rig up a lamp cord.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

On flashlights (My favorite!) I'm doing a battery life test on lanterns from Walmart. They have a new one with ten LED, which really destroys the competition, the Ozark and Dorcy models with filament bulbs. Brighter, and the battery life is at least seven times longer, so far. Test is not complete, yet.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

If the unit was 110 V, do you think the cost would be different?

Hint: Watt is a unit of work. You pay for watts.

. Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus

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Reply to
Stormin Mormon

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