Seems a bit frivolous to start a thread on this but am in need of advice.

Are these things now up to the standard of the old tungsten filament bulbs? I hate using our current low-energy wierd twisted tube things - takes ages to warm up when you want to pop into a dark room. Do they have longevity so I'm not replacing them every few months? And do they lower energy bills if I swapped all the bulbs in the house?

Or is it all just an expensive waste of time?

We have one in the dining room, it's a clear bulb which is bright and garish, no fade up like low-energy bulbs and they're no good if you have a dimmer switch. We're going to buy an opalescent one next time because the clear bulb is very 'spot' ish. So far so good on the lifetime, ours has been up for about 4 months and no trouble so far.

We've used some in the kitchen.
They're good (warm white) but expensive.
Avoid ones with lots of little LED's and go for ones with one to three big ones.

On the advice of, I think it was Alex, I got some LED bulbs when I moved in to my new place (which was just over a year ago now).
There's no warming up for them, they are reall quite bright and I'm very happy with them.
I think I got some of the halogen replacements from Homebase and some of the tungsten replacements from Tesco.

Mark

The one in my room is about a year old now I think, they're great!

There's bound to be some handy guide online for the sort of output you'd need for average-sized rooms.

A 40W equivalent is the one I'm using in my bedroom, and it would certainly be bright enough for the living room if I needed to replace whan I'm using at the moment.

Mark

Just found the box for mine lol, 6w bulb puts out the equivalent of 31w, certainly good enough for my bedroom.

25 year life span allegedly...

Yeah I saw that too.

Mark

The two main types are cool white and warm white. The warm white are similar to the old tungsten bulbs in colour, and with instant on so totally unlike the low energy bulbs. They are also generally twice as efficient as low energy bulbs so you can use half the power for the same lumen output. The cool white are more blueish and otherwise the same. While generally they will last many years it does depend on the quality. Cheap ones can last weeks only. You can slash energy usage by 90% by switching to LED bulbs. Overall I have more than 20 LED bulbs in my home and if I have them all on at once my power demand only increases by 88 Watts.


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We have them in the kitchen too - they are expensive but only pull 4 or 5 watts.

Why? We've had those ones in for more than a year.

How do you know how many leds there are?

While they may be more expensive you do not have to replace them as often and the energy reduction can significantly reduce your power usage. If you replace halogen bulbs with LED equivalents the savings are huge. I am looking at replacing a 150W halogen with an 11W LED in my kitchen. The only problem is I do not put that light on because it is a halogen so could skip replacing it completely.

A I am slowly replacing my halogen spots (GU10 fitting) with LED’s (as they fail)

In the kitchen I have 8 spots so when finished will have cut consumption from 280W (35x8) to under 20 W

If you are replacing them in GU10 fitting some of the LED spots are slightly bigger and the reflector end so make sure the ones you buy fit

When I moved in to this place the main lights in the bathroom were four 50 W GU10 Halogens and I replaced them with 3W LEDs from Amazon. That is nearly 190 W saving on one fitting alone.

In the case of the clear ones you can see and count them, I think it says on the packet how many LEDs there are though.