I wanted to revisit an earlier post comparing LEDs, CFLs and traditional incandescent bulbs. I found two different values for the power and light output of the Lemnis Lighting Parox II bulbs, and same folks at work were wondering the same thing.
I decided to bust out my trusty Kill-A-Watt and see how much power the bulb was really drawing.
I watched the meter for a bit and it never went above 4 Watts. So that’s a bit of a bonus. Out of curiosity I decided to plug my CFLs in and see how much power they actually drew.
The 15W CFL spiked to 18W for a second but then settled in at 12W. After a while it climbed up to 13W and would have presumably stayed there. The 7W CFL globe settled at 5W. The incandescent was the odd one of the bunch, measuring 63 W instead of 60W. So when you replace those old lightbulbs, you may be saving a little more than you think.
Here’s the updated spreadsheet:
Again, the total lumen output might not be directly comparable because the LED bulbs really only emit light from a half globe, while the other bulbs cast light in almost all directions. Depending on the fixture this might make the LED seem brighter in comparison.
Let’s put it this way: our family is very green in lifestyles. We recycle and reuse everything we have in the house. The plus, we save about $285/month more by reusing everything as much as we can without throwing out to the garbage. One day, we were thinking about installing solar panels but the panels are way out of our budget. In our research, we found out the is an easy solution of saving electric, just chance the hungry electric burning incandescent bulbs to LED light bulbs. Simple as that, we save another $45 every month.
With the way things are going, I do think LED will ultimately come out on top for most lighting applications. At the moment though CFL is still the best choice for most household applications unless you require dimming. While dimmable CFLs are available, they are difficult to find, expensive, and the dimming performance is quite inferior to the incandescents most people are used to. At the current time, CFL lamps are a tiny fraction the cost of a quality LED lamp and while there are good LED lamps out there, a lot of them are junk. Avoid those that are made from a mass of small LEDs, I find they tend to use very cheap LEDs that dim and color shift rapidly. Also, efficiency of typical LED retrofit bulbs is still substantially less than even the cheapest CFLs.