Replacing fluorescent tube with LED

I found them annoyingly slow starting on outdoor PIRs, so swapped them to LED before they died.

The only CFLs here now are in the loft, where usage is so infrequent they'll effectively last forever, but I have a handful of the 10p supermarket 'giveaways' as spares.

When I moved to the new house last year, virtually every lamp was CFL, have now changed every one to LED. Also bought enough LED tubes to replace all the dim fluorescents in workshop and shed, just waiting for the tuits.

I suspect that's where my stock came from. Unfortunately we now have a bunch of different fitting types in the house, so they're not always compatible where I need to replace em.

They do have a noticeable start-up, especially in cold weather, but I find them good enough for getting to the worm bin or the shed (which has a better light inside) in the evening. I'd rather put up with that outside occasionally than inside frequently (until I use up the CFL stock).

After we moved, I went round the house and tallied up the fittings, then threw away all the bulbs we had no use for (actually, I gave them back to to the people who bought our house, since they had the appropriate fittings and I can't bear to throw away perfectly functional "stuff".) When the end of filament bulbs was announced, I stocked up. Totally unnecessarily as it turns out, since they're still widely available, and we had loads left over.

Annoyingly, I've just had to buy some R63 spotlight bulbs for our study, since I hated the CFLs in there and couldn't find a good LED equivalent. They're about the only incandescent bulbs left in the house.

Yes, one of the problems with modern light bulbs is that they have various different fittings - large bayonet, small bayonet, large edison screw, small edison screw. And some CFLs and LEDs are only made with one fitting, so you need to change your fitting (or get an adaptor which increases the overall length).

My previous house had been a show house for the development and so all the light fittings were supplied with the house. And almost every fitting used a different type of bulb, so I needed to keep a stock of candle bulbs (SBC and SES), conventional bulbs (LBC and LES) and *low-voltage* mini-spotlight - the bathroom, the hall, the landing and the kitchen all had transformers in the loft to power 12V spotlights (ie not mains-powered GU10 bulbs). Most shops stocked GU10 bulbs, but not many stocked the similarly-sized 12V equivalent.

If all you're doing is using a light for a very short time, does how much energy it uses really matter?

Probably why so many CFLs end up lighting cupboards, etc.

Not so much energy use as:

1. using up the stock of CFLs;
2. not being left in the dark by a failure (incandescents just stop working completely; CFLs usually get dim before they fail)

Yes, I think I posted here years ago asking for recommendations for good, bright R63 CFLs, but you guys confirmed that no-one made any over "60 W equivalent".

I had to rip out the false drop ceiling in the kitchen a couple of years ago because of a loose screw terminal in a junction box buried in the real ceiling, but one long-term benefit (apart from a bit more storage space on top of the cupboards) was getting rid of the last 4 R63 fittings in the house.