My house is mostly lit by cfl lamps, apart from a couple of LEDs used as bedside lights. I am thinking about switching to LEDs throughout. Is this viable? Pros and cons? I would value your opinions.
Thank you.
LEDs have about half the running cost, AFAIR. And seem to last longer.
You may prefer to keep a few CFLs in positions that get turned when the user's eyes are dark-adapted, as they turn on more gently - but you should know that already.
with the cost of LEDs coming down annually, I wouldn't be going out and replacing mine today.
wait until the cfls die and actually need replacing
tim
+1
Also I have had a few early failures, including one of the Lidl "two for £6" which only lasted a couple of days. Havn't got round to taking it back yet.
That's generally regarded as an annoyance. If you want them to come on gently, use a dimmer (if the lamp type will tolerate them).
Me presented the following explanation :
Pros.. They come on instantly to full output, last considerably longer, cheaper to run.
Cons.. None really, though some complain about the light spectrum.
I converted all of my regularly used/regularly on lights, over to LED
12 months ago - not a single failure so far. They vary from 3w to 9w. Just to be clear, I did only swap out the ones which we use often - I didn't do centre lights and some were 22w CFL's.
spot on ......
I've completely swapped to LED over the last two years and no failures yet. I took the opportunity of fitting (surface mount) LED panel lights in the bathroom, kitchen and hallway which I've found give a nice even spread of light.
As for the colour temperature of the LEDs its really down to personal preference and you have to ignore those on here who preach that those horrendous warm yellow bulbs of yesteryear are more natural because they are the same colour as the candle chandelier they replaced :) You may find that for close up working or reading if you are of a certain age and/or don't have perfect eyesight then a colder blue or daylight type temperature LED suits you better. Buy a couple different temperatures LEDs and try them out. Relegate the bulbs you don't like to somewhere that is used infrequently.
Light wise, LEDs are now very good - better than CFLs *and* tungsten.
(You can get very warm "filament" LEDs that feel very cosy all the way to daylight cool).
Lifetime is an issue - LEDHut will give you IIRC 5 years but you have to do some silly paper based registration.
They cover the first 2 years without paperwork. So I write the purchase month and year on the base in a sharpie.
I've probably called in about 4-5 lamps out of 20 and most of the time, they have just done a credit note without bothering to return the original.
So I prefer to stay with bulb format LEDs that are easy to change mostly. I do have some dedicated strips in the kitchen and shed.
I avoid the junk that the shops sell - too much chinese cheap unbranded crap. The ones that have worked well for me are Philips and LEDHut (which are sort of "semi unbranded" but LEDHut seem to manage to pick fairly decent stuff to resell)
Yes, that's pretty much what we've been doing, but some cfls are being replaced when they start being annoyingly dim, rather than when they're totally dead.
In the early days of LED I had failures with the smaller envelopes (GU10 etc.) possibly because of buying no-name cheaply from China but possibly because the traditional housings are unsuitable for LEDs and allow them (and their power supplies) to get too hot. When changing consider also changing the light fitting.
More recently my purchases have been branded or from some of the more reputable suppliers, such as LED hut. I've had none of these fail in a couple of years.
I should mention that I had a few CFL fail with a bang/fizz/smoke so they were not immune from a short life.
I prefer CFLs because there is less flicker if your eyes rapidly move across the light. I have a Philips Hue LED bulb and I am very slightly aware of multiple images, in different colours, of the bulb if I am looking at something on one side of the bulb and then look to something on the other side. I wonder if the various LEDs that make up the white light are pulsed in sequence rather than all being fired simultaneously although with different mark:space ratios to get the desired colour balance.
Also, can you get an LED bulb yet that is as bright as a 25 W CFL which is I think is equivalent to about 150 W tungsten?
The other thing: LED GU10 spotlight bulbs have a very narrow beam with sharply-defined edge, whereas tungsten GU10s are wider and the cutoff is more gradual. If you have arranged tungsten spotlights to give fairly even coverage, you may find dark patches in between if you switch to LED. I'm not sure whether there are CFL GU10s.
In the past two years, I've had two LED GU10 spotlights fail. They are mounted in a modern 5-spotlight strip that is also two years old (so it may have been made with LEDs in mind - or it may not). The symptom is pronounced flicker, then the bulb goes out or fails to come on when the main switch is next turned on but does come on if the switch is cycled off/on.
LED bulbs are very fussy about the ventilation of the light fitting (the cylindrical shank of the bulb). The light-emitting part of an LED bulb barely gets warm but even a 7W one gets almost too hot to touch close to the fitting.
[snip]
Not my experience, albeit with a niche product. I bought MR16 (12 Volt) spotlights and the radio frequency interference was so bad it obliterated DAB reception in my kitchen. I returned them, they denied receipt, I scanned and emailed the proof of delivery, they said the person who signed was not an employee and the words delivered from named sorting office meant the package was still at the sorting office. Eventually they conceded the package was in their office after all.
Except nearly all the bulbs I have seen on sale are 2700K 'warm white'.
replying to Me, Iggy wrote: LED's aren't worth it AT ALL and may never work out for me in a whole house situation. First off, LED's are only 30% more efficient and that's JUST AT THE LOW-END, they're not even 10% more efficient at the high-end. Neither increased efficiency even matters when you're talking such low wattages to start with.
2nd of all is that, even after a full decade of wild popularity, LED's are still 200% more expensive than CFL's. This equates to you NEVER getting your money back nor LED's ever being "worth it". AND, if you're some moron with recessed-light stupidity all over your house, you're already woefully inefficient and will ALWAYS stay screwed-to-the-wall...my 25 total bulbs put your 60 total bulbs to shame.Finally, do you have the right fixtures? I don't. Except for 2 lamps and 2 outdoor lights, all of my fixtures are enclosed flush mount fixtures. These fixtures put LED's to a very early grave and the LED packaging makes sure to mention that LED's aren't at all meant for enclosed fixtures. And, even in the right fixtures, LED's don't last longer than CFL's and you can even get Double-Life CFL's.
Which is what we've been doing ...
The same problem exists with CFLs in that many have fairly complex power supplies and the life expectancy of some of the capacitors in these supplies at elevated temperatures is/was short.
The power supplies in the LED bulbs tend to be fairly simple and for the better designs a lot more reliable. However the LEDs themselves don't like being operated at elevated temperatures.
CFLs seems to have disappeared from the shelves in many retail outlets in favour of LEDs.
CFLs were never cheap. In the UK most were price subsidised by the energy utility bill payer.
Bit of a broad statement, that. LEDs still don't have the continuous spectrum output you get from halogen - and may never have. But they are certainty better than only a couple of years ago,
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