Lessons in LED lighting

I’ve been trying to write this post for a few weeks now but work has been so busy.

I thought a post about LED lighting would be a good way to ease in to looking at energy efficiency. It’s one of the cheapest and quickest ways to make a difference in your energy usage. However if you don’t know anything about lightbulbs other than how to change one, it can be slightly confusing at first.

So what prompted me to look in to lighting was a combination of two events. 1: my girlfriend Anne bought a new LED bulb for her bedside lamp from Tesco, and 2: I saw this buyers guide on twitter.

I knew there were different types of light bulb and that LEDs are the new efficiency kings, but beyond that my knowledge was pretty basic. Also I could never remember what CFL stood for or what it looked like. So after looking around I made my own quick guide to remind me:

Really the important thing to note is that the more efficient a bulb is, the less electricity it will use (in Watts) to produce the same amount of light (measured in Lumens).

So for instance, the LED mini globe Anne bought is 4W and 250lm. It says on the box that the equivalent conventional bulb is 25W. I’m not sure what ‘conventional bulb’ means. Whether it’s incandescent, or CFL (which are now pretty common that I’d almost call them conventional). But anyway, that’s potentially a change from 25W to 4W (I’m not sure what kind of bulb she replaced). If you were to do this with every bulb in your house that’s quite a saving. You could cut the electricity use in your house (on lighting) to less than a fifth of what you are using currently (although this is likely a big exaggeration if you are already using CFL bulbs).

The other benefits of LED lighting is the bulbs last for a very long time (25 years if used for an average of 2.7 hours per day, the Tesco packet says). Also LED lights produce hardly any heat as a by product of creating light, so they don’t get hot to the touch. And they don’t have a ‘warm up’ period like CFL bulbs, where you have to wait for them to reach their full brightness once you turn them on.

The downside? They are quite expensive. Buying a lot of LED bulbs is not cheap. But you can easily earn your money back in the savings on your energy bill over the years. Also as LED light become more ubiquitous the price will come down (If they’re selling them in Tesco that’s a good sign!).

So having been totally sold on the use of LED lights I’ve decided I’m going to replace every bulb in our new house as soon as we move in. I was so enthusiastic that I pestered Ecotopia on their range of LED lighting (among other things…). As previously mentioned I am slightly obsessed with Ecotricity, and as I already use Ecotopia I was keen to get them to stock the bulbs I was anticipating needing.

They will be getting some in stock, but in the meantime I found a good range on Nigel's Eco Store.

The other thing to take in to account though is that LED light can come in different ‘shades’ of white. The names vary depending on what website you’re looking on, but you can choose from ‘warm white’ ‘pure white’ or ‘cool white’. Which basically means a orange tinge, white, or a blue tinge. This depends on the Kelvin number. I won’t go into this in further detail though, more can be found here.

Also I read that the Wattage needed for a room is the square footage of a room multiplied by 1.5. So for a room 10 foot by 10 foot (100 feet) you would need 150W of lighting. Again I assume this is for incandescent bulbs. So using LED lighting you need the equivalent, which is about 30W.

I don’t think I’m actually going to worry about the Kelvin of my light, or the Wattage needed yet though until there are actually some real life rooms to apply my newfound knowledge to.

Although while reading up on bulbs I did come across this kickstarter, the Nanolight!

It had already been funded by the time I’d seen it, otherwise I probably would have backed it to get myself a Nanolight. I can see they’ve rebranded now to nanoleaf so maybe I’ll revisit their site when the time comes.

And finally. If anyone is looking to switch energy suppliers to Ecotricity (which I can highly recommend) if you quote this referral code ( RAFE-4WKE5 ) when making the switch, we will both receive a £50 voucher for Ecotopia. So I can use it to buy my LED light bulbs once they get their new stock, and so can you! (or you can spend it on toilet paper and dishwasher tablets)

Until next time.