That was 'IN' ten years ago; my brother and sister-in-law bought a new house with the most WTF lighting, heating and lack of thermal boundary design I've ever seen. NO ceiling fans in the downstairs at all, very high vaulted living/dining room ceiling with a direct way for all the heat to concentrate in the second floor only, etc.
Still not done with the kitchen, still have base and crown to do. My wife designed It and my neighbor and I built it, nice little 400 sq, ft kitchen addition. when all of the lights are on its hard to cast a shadow anywhere. By the way, the lights were my idea.
Because they are very cost effective compared to the alternative and will probably out live me besides the fact that they don't put out the heat of conventional canned lighting or leave you with the sunspots in your eyes if you look at them. Soft white and very illuminating.
A standard incandescent light has a lifespan up to over 100 years; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting_light_bulbs Their (LED) average lifespan is around 5 or 6 years with regular usage (read the package), about the same as a $2 compact fluorescent lamp at a much higher price. Right now, government subsidies give them a small economic advantage over other light sources, yes, small, when they stop taking money out of your pocket to keep the price down you will see the true economics of the situation, and it is not good. I spend as much time replacing LED fixtures as I do repairing others. That's right, replacing, they are not repairable you throw them away when they fail. When you consider that LED's account for less than 10% of installed lighting you will get an understanding of the issue. It is not better technology, if it were people would embrace it without subsidies and regulations forcing people to buy them. But, what do I know, I have only been working with lighting systems for 40+ years. You may be better off listening to the Chinese that are peddling this, ahem, product.
Well, I may not have 40+ years experience working with electricals and electronics, but in my entire life, I have NEVER seen any incandescant bulb last more than a few years, and considering they DO SUCK UP electricity like it was going out of style, I welcome anything that will eventually replace that obsolete--yes, I said obsolete--technology. Everything technological, relatively speaking, has a cost gradient; the most useful ones do end up costing so little to make, new features, new materials, so that the gradient gets pushed back. But when I see my electric bills actually take a big swing downward right after replacement with CFLs, I definitely see the advantage in replacing incandescants. In the 13 1/2 years I've been in this apartment, only about the first two had 60-watt bulbs (max wattage for all three fixtures) in use, and my electric bills were pretty high, even though I turn off lights when they're not in use. And two sixty-watt bulbs in a 10X15 room requires another lamp for reading, doing intricate work on models, etc. I replaced all six bulbs at one time, GE bulbs from Walley World, and they last about 4-7 years, approximately. So that ten-pack lasted up to about maybe four years ago, when I put all new CFLs in. About a year and a half ago, my landlord offered to replace them at his cost with LED bulbs, and out of the six I initially installed, two have gone bad, but they do not waver in intensity, cold does not affect them, as CFLs are, and I can have higher lumen-equivalent bulbs in these fixtures, giving me better light coverage. So I will keep my eye on these as I continue to live here, and as the prices have come down considerably in Western Washington, my brother Tim and his wife Kate are changing over to LED bulbs in their house that I previously described (I found that out yesterday evening). The economics are there, if you know where to look.
Two years ago I converted every bulb in our house to LED, and couldn't be happier. There has been a noticeable decrease in our electricity costs as shown by the bar graph on our bill. Plus very little to no heat produced and no slowly increasing brightness or mercury content as in fluorescents. I used to have a bunch of spare incandescents on hand for when they ultimately failed. I will never go back. Well, except for my motion-detecting porch light; that doesn't want to work with an LED.
I have been working with LED lighting since the late 70's when it first became commercially available as other than small indicator lights. There have been improvements in color control, and the drivers are better and smaller, tiny incremental improvements over the years, but nothing substantial changed until the Chinese convinced a bunch of politicians here to dump $billions in subsidies into the industry. Even that had little effect until it was coupled with a massive false advertising program. They have cut back on the false advertising, moving closer to actual energy and light output statements, and they have scaled back from 'last forever' to 'last 20 years' to the current, almost factual 'last as long as 6-8 years'. For many, using the subsidized lamps makes sense because the economics of the situation have been turned upside down by government intervention. They don't save any energy. The cost of an LED is almost entirely the cost of the energy required to make it, and compared with other modern lighting systems is rather inefficient. If the subsidies were to end, the cost of the lamp would exceed the energy savings except in the case of certain incandescent lamps and most of those are exterior floods. I have nothing against LED technology. I have installed a lot of it. There are things you can do with LED that can't be done with any other type of lighting. There are many applications where the added cost is outweighed by other factors, such as size and weight, and in battery operated situations like emergency lighting. One more thing. Anyone wonder why the use of 'lumens' to describe light output came into popularity around the same time as the push toward LED? Well, that is because while LEDs rate very low using industry standard lighting measurements that compare lighting to natural light, they excel at lumen output per watt.
I've come to find that for whatever reason, be it politics, big business or inventiveness, times & technologies change, and there's very little I can do about it. This seems like one of those situations, and I don't see a big rush back to incandescent lighting.
So happy to be a part of this forum! Not only learning the ins and outs of the Rancheros, but so much `enlightening` information.......
Stick around sometimes it even gets better. I didn't know that my kitchen was going to be such a good conversation piece and although Ribalds two by four upside the head comment was witty it was also not necessary without knowing the facts.
I think the only missing facts are the reason for the comment. I knew the kind and type of lamp used from the photo, the lamp choice was a large part of the reason.
