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> 1) It didn't actually make much difference on our electricity bill. I believe this is because we use most of our lighting during the winter, and the wasted he

> 1) It didn't actually make much difference on our electricity bill. I believe this is because we use most of our lighting during the winter, and the wasted heat from the traditional bulbs isn't really wasted at all -- we just shifted more work to our electric heating system. The only reason people expect them to is the, IMO, obsolete idea that lighting load is a significant driver of power usage. > 2) Many of the bulbs had burnt out. I am now very skeptical of all the "20 year lifetime" claims since we've lost lots of expensive bulbs in two years. Maybe I have just been lucky, but the LED floods I put on the exterior of my house have been working like champs. I used to go through halogen and CFL bulbs like crazy out there. The Cree LED retrofits for my dimmable can lights have also been solid.

nostromo 10y ago
Good points. I still use LEDs outside and they last a very long time. I suspect it's because they stay cool, which extends the lifetime of LEDs. I'm also not as sensitive to light quality for outdoor lighting.
rconti 10y ago
I'm not sure this is an obsolete idea. The lighting in my house is simply an astounding use of electricity. In fact, I think people underestimate how much power it consumes. My house's baseline load is about 200w; networking/computer equipment mostly. The fridge that cycles on and off, and an instant-hot tap that cycles on and off to keep up to temperature. Each bedroom had 60w floodlights in 4 cans. Sure, we don't have them on all the time, but 4x3x60 = 720watts. That's half a hairdryer! Our living room+hallway was even worse. There were a bunch of MR16s at 50w. With 16 of them in the house, that's another 800w. When we're home in the evenings, the living room lights are on all the time, because it's in the main part of the house. To be fair, the payback on the $500+ in LED bulbs I put in is way out there, but a big driver in my spending was to keep temps down during the summer. It seems so silly to artificially heat the house with wasted electricity. In the winter, we don't use much heat, and the gas forced air heat is a hell of a lot better than using lightbulbs.
- mike_hock 10y ago
  > an instant-hot tap that cycles on and off to keep up to temperature It doesn't get anymore first world wasteful than this.
  - WatchDog 10y ago
    most electric water heaters work the same way, just further from the tap
    - rconti 10y ago
      At much greater cost, I might add. I ran my kill-a-watt for a few days, and, IIRC, it uses something negligible like 7 cents a day. I'm looking at Emerson's webpage and they're quoting 6 cents per day at $0.0986/Kwh so my 7 cents seems about right in a more temperate climate but with electricity costs more like 15-16 cents/kwh. Their numbers say .6kwh, so call it 219watt-hours in a year. Or, in other words, 1/365th of my house's normal standby power consumption when nobody is home. And I've got a tankless hot water heater for our main hot water supply which is of course a savings in orders of magnitude more than is 'lost' by the instant hot. The instant hot also probably uses negligibly more energy than the other ways we heat water; microwave (for beverages) or running a burner on the stove on full blast for minutes at a time just to get a large pot of water up to boiling. Of course, you can see from the fact that I bother measuring electricity of new devices with my kill-a-watt (and replacing all bulbs with LEDs at great cost) that I'm somewhat sensitive to electricity consumption. But I choose to spend my consumption where I think it makes the most sense.
      - tgb 10y ago
        Sorry but I can't understand your first paragraph since I can't figure out the pronouns and specifically what objects you're measuring/looking up the wattages of. Can you clarify?
        rconti 10y ago
        Sorry, "it" was in reference to the instant-hot water tap that was referred to as a first world problem.

nostromo 10y ago

Good points. I still use LEDs outside and they last a very long time. I suspect it's because they stay cool, which extends the lifetime of LEDs. I'm also not as sensitive to light quality for outdoor lighting.

rconti 10y ago

I'm not sure this is an obsolete idea. The lighting in my house is simply an astounding use of electricity. In fact, I think people underestimate how much power it consumes. My house's baseline load is about 200w; networking/computer equipment mostly. The fridge that cycles on and off, and an instant-hot tap that cycles on and off to keep up to temperature. Each bedroom had 60w floodlights in 4 cans. Sure, we don't have them on all the time, but 4x3x60 = 720watts. That's half a hairdryer! Our living room+hallway was even worse. There were a bunch of MR16s at 50w. With 16 of them in the house, that's another 800w. When we're home in the evenings, the living room lights are on all the time, because it's in the main part of the house. To be fair, the payback on the $500+ in LED bulbs I put in is way out there, but a big driver in my spending was to keep temps down during the summer. It seems so silly to artificially heat the house with wasted electricity. In the winter, we don't use much heat, and the gas forced air heat is a hell of a lot better than using lightbulbs.

mike_hock 10y ago
> an instant-hot tap that cycles on and off to keep up to temperature It doesn't get anymore first world wasteful than this.
- WatchDog 10y ago
  most electric water heaters work the same way, just further from the tap
  - rconti 10y ago
    At much greater cost, I might add. I ran my kill-a-watt for a few days, and, IIRC, it uses something negligible like 7 cents a day. I'm looking at Emerson's webpage and they're quoting 6 cents per day at $0.0986/Kwh so my 7 cents seems about right in a more temperate climate but with electricity costs more like 15-16 cents/kwh. Their numbers say .6kwh, so call it 219watt-hours in a year. Or, in other words, 1/365th of my house's normal standby power consumption when nobody is home. And I've got a tankless hot water heater for our main hot water supply which is of course a savings in orders of magnitude more than is 'lost' by the instant hot. The instant hot also probably uses negligibly more energy than the other ways we heat water; microwave (for beverages) or running a burner on the stove on full blast for minutes at a time just to get a large pot of water up to boiling. Of course, you can see from the fact that I bother measuring electricity of new devices with my kill-a-watt (and replacing all bulbs with LEDs at great cost) that I'm somewhat sensitive to electricity consumption. But I choose to spend my consumption where I think it makes the most sense.
    - tgb 10y ago
      Sorry but I can't understand your first paragraph since I can't figure out the pronouns and specifically what objects you're measuring/looking up the wattages of. Can you clarify?
      - rconti 10y ago
        Sorry, "it" was in reference to the instant-hot water tap that was referred to as a first world problem.