The heat fins do get very hot.. Though that doesn't definitively tell us about heat comparisons.
My limited and shallow understanding of physics does tell me that since the LED bulbs are running so much more efficiently and using so much less energy -- that overall heat output must be significantly less, regardless of whether the fins burn your hand or not :)
But I could be wrong and I'd love to hear more from people who know. If I am wrong, then i have just poured a bunch of money down the drain for little good reason.
-mouser
I don't remember much of my high-school physics either, and I was mercifully spared in college. So I may be talking nonsense. But if I remember what little I do correctly, the total amount of heat generated by any electronic device is a function of its
resistance, not the interplay of voltage, wattage and amperage. The efficiency of the bulb is due to reduction of wattage (don't know about the amperage, input voltage is obviously the same). But considerable heat can be generated at very low power, if resistance is high enough. Even a small flashlight bulb gets pretty hot when illuminated for a few minutes. Indeed, it's the heat produced by resistance that generates the incandescence. LEDs are more efficient because they use less total power throughput relative to incandescents to produce a roughly equivalent number of photons. This all seems pretty obvious. What is not obvious to me is why so much heat is still produced. Is the LED driver the equivalent of a step-down transformer? I think that would account for it.
I understand your desire to reduce heat - I have a similar problem in my place in the summer. I, too, thought they would run much cooler and was surprised to feel the high heat of the fins. But I wouldn't lament too much if you don't get the reduction you expected - if the bulbs perform as advertised, they will pay for themselves many times over. And surely someone has made this heat comparison somewhere. Have to see if I can dig it out.