LEDs

[Trinity-Belle]

Just changed my lighting from halogen to LED!

My living room windows face north and because of the situation of my apartment (proximity to other structures), even in high summer I get very little natural light in that room. Besides which, I don't really want to be seen to be opening and closing my curtains all day long when ever I have "visitors" so I just leave them closed all the time. But it does mean that my living room lights are on pretty much all day every day - about 17 or 18 hours most days!

It took a bit of (expensive) experimenting to find bulbs with the right quality and warmth of incandescence but having tried several different "flavours" of LED light I can strongly recommend the Philips Master 4W 2700K 40D as being an excellent replacement for a 35W halogen providing a good spread of strong but not glaring light at a level of warmth very similar to halogen light.

6W I found to be to bright (although would be perfect to replace 50W halogens) and 1.4W to be too dim... only really suitable for under cupboard lighting.

Warmth was the big problem for me... a lot of LED lights are far too cold, giving a bluey kind of light which makes everything look, well... the wrong colour! I settled on 2700K as being the colour temperature to aim for but to be honest, a couple of bulbs I got which claimed to be 2700K were, in fact, quite cold. The Philips was the only one I found which gave a truly "warm" light comparable to halogen.

The other problem I had with LEDs was the beam angle. My ceilings are fairly low (I'm 5'7 and if I stand on tippy-toe I can almost reach the ceiling!) so I need a really wide beam to spread the light across the room or else everything would appear a bit spot lit. Many LEDs only offer 30° or 35° beams, some even as low as 25° which would be perfect if you actually wanted to spot light something, but not much good for general lighting. A couple of the low wattage ones claim up to 115° and for sure I think they really do offer that, but the light is so dim that it's really of no use for general lighting. The Philips one is 40° which seems perfect for my situation.

Anyway... I have now ended up with my living room being run on 24 Watts (6*4W) rather than 210 Watts (6*35W), so that is a saving of about three and a quarter kilowatts per day on average... nearly 1200 kilowatts per annum which at 13.42p perKWh works out at nearly £160 per annum - just for the living room! And at the rate I use them they should last about 5 years each, so a total saving of £730 over the life of the bulbs. Not bad for a £70 investment!!!

So I am now going to order the same bulbs for the rest of my apartment. I don't use the lights in the rest of the rooms nearly as much so the saving from changing other lights won't be as marked... in fact in some places it is hardly worth doing? The main bedroom almost never gets the lights switched on as I use mood lighting for play so I reckon about an hour a day and with three bulbs to replace the saving is only about £4.50 per annum in there... but on the plus side, those bulbs should last about seventy years! haha!

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, because I know so many of you probably do, like me, work indoors with the curtains drawn and lights on all day every day... and also the fact that in addition to the £70 I spent on the six bulbs which finally ended up in my living room, I also spent about £100 on bulbs I won't ever use again, buying one of these and one of those trying to find the most pleasing light quality... so I thought it was worth sharing with you all to maybe save you some of the cost of experimentation!

If you decide to buy some yourself then I got mine from here:

http://www.novelenergylighting.com/phili...mable.html

They take credit card or paypal and they delivered the next day.

(ps - Philips do also do LED "daylight" bulbs if those look better on cam....)