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Our experiences with LED light bulb replacements

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xtabber:
The Philips "lollipop" (as 40Hz dubbed it) design is supposed to provide an internal channel to circulate heat away from the base, allowing for a smaller heat sink, and thus a lighter and cheaper bulb.

mouser:
Thanks for reminding me of one other thing you have to be wary of with LED bulbs -- they can be HEAVY.
I had to jerry-rig a special support for the bulbs in my kitchen ceiling fan.

mouser:
This quote from CWuestefeld does a good job of explaining why i am moving to LEDs:
"Viewed another way, wiring up fifteen, hundred-watt incandescent bulbs is almost indistinguishable from a space heater.."

I do not want to be running a space heater in 100 degree weather.

mouser:
Further reports -- The Cree 18w (100w equivalent) bulbs generate very nice light and are a no-brainer for my office.

However, my attempts to replace 6 candelabra bulbs in my dining room with LEDs has been a failure.  The bulbs in the chandelier point straight upward and all of the candelabra LEDS i have tried do a terrible job of casting light down.

So it looks like i'm stuck with incandescents in that fixture for now.

CWuestefeld:
none of those points are borne out by my electric bill reduction.  The realities kinda kill the theories in such discussions.  Financially, LEDs have altered my budget.
-barney (May 20, 2014, 11:07 PM)
--- End quote ---

I don't doubt you, but I'd like to feel out the specifics of it. My suspicion is that you might see a relevant difference in the warmer months, particularly when you're using air conditioning. This part is really easy to believe, because you'd otherwise be paying double for inefficiencies: once to run the heat-generating lights, and again to run the air conditioner to get rid of the waste heat.

But in the cooler months when you're running heat, this is much less clear to me. To a first approximation, I expect that inefficiency in the lighting is essentially free. That is, the waste heat thrown off by the lighting simply replaces the running of your furnace that would otherwise be generating that heat for you. The only loss in winter, then, would be a theoretical difference (that's probably not possible to realize for most of us due to the design of our HVAC system) in improved efficiency if you're using a heat pump for wintertime heat.

More simply: in the summer, inefficient lights bite you twice. But in the winter, I expect that inefficient lights simply allow you to run the furnace somewhat less.

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