Our Warm White LED Light Bulb from LightInTheBox.com

We ordered and received our warm white LED light bulb from LightInTheBox.com an online store which has many choices for the eco conscious lighting enthusiast.

The Warm White LED Light Bulb

Looking at the warm white LED bulb up close you can see that it looks slightly different to a traditional LED bulb, the individual LED’s have a yellow dot in the center and the soldered joints can clearly be seen. This particular bulb is a 60 LED count warm white light LED which produces 240 lumens of light.

If we wanted to quantify the brightness of this bulb with a traditional incandescent then its 240 lumens would be roughly equivalent to a 30 Watt incandescent bulb or a 10 Watt CFL.

Here are the detailed specifications for the groovy warm white light LED bulb;

- Luminous Flux (Brightness): 240 Lumen

- Color Temperature: 3000-3500K warm white

- Connector: E27 standard (Screw in type)

- Rated voltage: 110V

- 60 super bright light emitting diodes (LEDs) inserted

- Dimensions: 2.48 in x 2.48 in x 2.2 in (6.3 cm x 6.3 cm x 5.6 cm)

- Weight: 2.82 oz (80 g)

Warm Light 60 Count LED Bulb Closeup

The bulb housing is a super reflective polished metal which makes it a nice finish if the bulb is being used where the housing is visible.

This particular bulb has the standard E27 screw in type fitting.

LED Light Bulb With Screw in Fitting

So How Does The Warm White LED Compare to CFLs?

We ran a quick comparison with a CFL light bulb, here we have a normal CFL fitted into our light test stand, here we see it switched off;

CFL Light Comparison Switched Off

By comparison when we fitted the 60-LED warm white light LED bulb into the test stand you can see how much space it saves, it has a very low profile and doesn’t take up anywhere near as much space as the CFL.

Warm White LED Bulb Switched Off

Here we see the CFL switched on, this particular bulb was equivalent to a 60W incandescent;

CFL Light Comparison Switched On

Here we see the 60-LED count bulb switched on, it produces a warm white light roughly equivalent  to a 30W incandescent bulb.

Warm White LED Bulb Switched On

SO…. To sum things up, we love our new warm white light LED bulb, we feel that its brightness of 240 lumen is perfect for a desk lamp or office light and we will be using it to light up our workspace for all our green blogging happy in the knowledge that our LED light is super efficient and energy saving!

For more information visit LightInTheBox.com;

**Note: This post sparked some debate so I have edited it to include some real world numbers from our own holiday decorating last year. We used incandescent bulbs last year and I had no idea how much energy they would be using. I will be using figures for LED bulbs from www.HolidayLEDs.com for my calculations.

LED Decorating Can Equal Huge Energy Savings

I found myself asking… How much energy could we save using LED lights for decorating our house?

Calculating LED Decorating Savings:
Lets assume the incandescent bulbs use about 6 watts per bulb, the LED replacement bulbs which will allow reuse of all the cabling can run at just less than 1 watt per bulb;

Quote from HolidayLEDs.com: Both the C7 and C9 retrofit bulbs use only .96 watts per bulb and will last for 50,000 hours or more. Our retrofit replacement bulbs can be used with any standard C7 or C9 socket wire.

Now lets also assume the lights are lit up from 8PM till midnight, i.e. 4 hours of use each night.
Now lets assume the cost of electricity is $0.10 per kilowatt hour.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/david_gray/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Let's assume 1000 bulbs to decorate a typical roofline

In my original post I quoted 1000 bulbs to light up the typical roofline, after some of the comments we received I went out and counted the number of bulbs we used to line our house last season, our home is 2600 sq ft and we used approx 400 bulbs… We can start our energy calculations from there;

Energy Used and Cost for Incadescent Lights:
400 x 6 watts = 2400 watts or 2.4 kilowatts. This equals 9.6 kilo watt hours which would cost $0.96 per night of illumination. (This is much less than I had originally quoted and is much more realistic for the typical home)
Let’s say the lights are lit for 30 nights over the holidays, that would be a total energy usage of 288 kilo watt hours at a total cost of $28.80 in electricity for a month.

Energy Used and Cost for C9 size Screw in Replacement LED Lights:
400 x 1 watt = 400 watts or 0.4 kilowatt. This equals 1.6 kilo watt hours which would cost $0.16 per night of illumination!
Let’s say the lights are lit for 30 nights over the holidays, that would be a total energy usage of 48 kilo watt hours at a total cost of $4.80 in electricity for a month.

I was amazed, the grand total using LED lights on a house in place of incandescent bulbs for the above example would realize a saving of $24.00 for the month of December.

The savings would be even bigger for larger homes, imagine how much you could save if you lived in a castle! The picture below is of an energy efficient sleeping beauty castle which Disney has decorated completely with energy efficient LED lights.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masteryofmaps/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

The Savings Can Be Huge Especially for Larger Homes

LED bulbs save so much energy, they could save you around 60 kilowatts for a typical holiday season of illumination!

To put this in perspective, the 60 kilowatt saving (240 kilowatt hours over the 30 days) would be the energy produced by burning approximately 7 gallons of gasoline. So with the energy you save using LEDs over a single holiday period you could drive a 50 mpg Prius 350 miles!
So this holiday season, if you walk around a local parade of lights, make sure you give extra praise to families who have invested in LED decorations, they’re saving energy and the planet.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who commented on this post, it made me take a hard look at my calculations and the above post reflects multiple corrections!

Once I realized that the red light stopping me from getting home was in fact a new super efficient traffic LED light system I suddenly didn’t mind staring at a red light!

I Love Traffic LED Lights - Red but Green!

This new breed traffic lights is made from groups of LEDs which are literally electric diodes that produce light! They are extremely energy efficient and have a very long life. LEDs are very small (smaller than your little finger tip) so in order to get the required brightness for a street light there have to be lots of them grouped closely together. The old incandescent traffic lights were typically 50 – 150 Watts which means they consumed alot of electricity! There are numerous advantages to using LED traffic lights including;

• LEDs are brighter and can be seen in bright sunlight as well as foggy conditions and through heavy rain.
• LEDs don’t have to be replaced as often as the old incandescent or halogen style bulbs.
• LEDs use far less energy saving big cities lots of electricity and money!

How to Spot an LED Traffic Light

So how much electricity does a new LED traffic light system save?
In a traffic light group (normally three lights) one of them is always on, 24 hours a day, 7 days week! The old 100 watt incandescent bulbs used 2.4 kilowatt-hours per day. Lets assume power costs 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, this means that one traffic signal costs about 24 cents a day to operate, or about $87 per year. There are perhaps eight signals per intersection, so that’s almost $700 per year to supply traffic lights to a single intersection!
LED bulbs might consume 15 or 20 watts instead of 100 so a big city can easily save a million dollars a year by replacing all of the bulbs with LED units.

So next time you are driving home and get caught at a red light, take a look and see whether it is made of lots of tiny red (but green) LED lights and give your city a virtual pat on the back for saving money and more importantly, energy!

If you want to learn more about LED traffic lights check out this “enlightening” video!

Let’s start with some basic nano-knowledge (if such a thing is possible). A nanometer to a meter is the same ratio as a meter is to the distance from the Earth to the Sun. So yes, it’s pretty cuss-wordingly small. If you’re looking down a microscope that can see something this small (and I learned these microscopes exist) then you’re pretty much looking at the building blocks of the universe…atoms!

The boffins at Vanderbilt have been creating nano-crystals of various sizes and examining their properties. What they noticed was that the smaller ones emit colours around the ultra violet end of the spectrum and as you create larger crystals the colours shift down the spectrum to the infra-red. In medicine this means you can attach these crystals to specific proteins so that when looking for viruses, tests can be clearer literally days sooner.

But this is all very nice but doesn’t have anything to do with the environment? Well here’s that bit. Currently environmentally friendly LED bulbs emit a rather harsh light but while performing some experiments, Michael Bowers and James McBride of Vanderbilt University accidentally created a batch of nano-crystals containing but 33 or 34 pairs of atoms. When they were illuminated with a laser they emitted a pleasant white light containing pretty much the entire spectrum. So if you were to coat, say a bright blue LED bulb with a thin layer of these crystals you’d have a very illuminating result.

Now for some facts. A standard 40 watt light bulb emits arount 12.5 lumens per watt which makes it about 2% efficient (not very good). Depending on the size, a strip light emits between between 55 and 100 lm/W making them between 8and 15% efficient. Even LEDs are only working around 20% efficiency.

These revelations have opened plans for a new road map that could create new LED based light bulbs running at an efficiency of 90%!! Unfortunately these goals are unlikely to be realised until around 2025 but the subsequent reduction in energy consumption in the U.S. is predicted to save the nation’s household $125 billion!! It could be well worth waiting for.

That being said, the Vanderbilt work was done in 2005 and since then other universities around the world have made similar discoveries and so there now seems to be a healthy race on as to who can turn the science into affordable consumer technology first. In the end the future maybe closer than we think.

On a recent visit to our local CostCo we found LED flood lights available and it was a pleasant surprise to see affordable LED lighting being distributed by a large chain. Maybe we will soon be seeing these super energy efficient bulbs in the local hardware stores as well.

These LED flood lights are made by Lights of America and they contain about 70 individual LEDs to provide a bright white light.

My first observation is that the packaging does not provide much damage protection and I wonder how many of the bulbs get damaged during transport? The second comment is that the packaging seems overly wasteful, the 4 inch bulb is held in a 10 inch by 16 inch cardboard package.

With the above being said we were still excited to try this new LED flood light in our home.

The bulb cost approx $11 and at hopefully if more retailers start to stock LED lights then this price will drop. We installed an incandescent bulb just to get a baseline brightness photograph and a 65W incandescent produced the following brightness;

A 65W incandescent produces a very bright and warm flood light but is very inefficient and our home does not contain any incandescents now but for the sake of a comparison we installed this bulb to show the results.

Now lets take a look at the LED flood light;

The LED flood light is clearly less bright but it only uses 3.5 W, that’s right, just three and a half Watts!

The light was definitely still bright and it highlighted our fireplace and the surrounding area sufficiently but it was also a very cold white light, we might try painting the bulb lens with some stained glass paint just to give the bulb a warmer color. Since the LEDs produce very little heat painting the bulb lens might actually work, in fact we could create any color we want!

We are going to buy more of these LED lights and install them strategically throughout our home, we already have all of our canned lights using 15 Watt CFLs but we can definitely still reduce our energy consumption further if we move to the 3.5 W LED floods, the only question is, can we afford them at $11 per bulb? The Lights of America company claim a 30,000 hr life so any bulbs that we buy will last a long time.

Well that’s exactly what some of the new LED lighting solutions are offering…  Several companies are working hard to make extremely long lasting and super efficient LED light bulbs more affordable. So where is the cool technology you ask? Well now there are a couple of LED bulbs available which can not only save the environment but mimic it by changing color!

led color lighting - with remote control!

Some of the newest bulbs come with a remote control which allows you to remotely control the brightness and color of up to ten bulbs at the same time… Imagine this, you are sat watching a green television show and you want to instantly fill your living room with green light, a simple click of the remote and you are being lit by the greenest bulbs in town.

The remote even allows you to switch all the lights on and off, you can also select a flash or strobe mode!

You can order these cool and extremely green led lights from The Led Light.com website;

http://www.theledlight.com/remote-controlled-ledbulb.html

Another company offers simpler light bulbs which constantly change color through the entire spectrum of the colors of the rainbow. Simply plug them into a standard bulb socket, switch on the lamp and enjoy the soothing color show.

These auto color changing LED lights are available from C. Crane;

http://www.ccrane.com/lights/led-light-bulbs/color-changing-party-light-bulb.aspx

LED Color Light With Colors of the Rainbow

The LED bulb technology has already reached an advanced stage but prices are high because the large light bulb manufacturers have not yet started to manufacture and sell LED bulbs in large numbers, probably because a typical LED light can last for over 50,000 hrs, that’s almost six years of continuous operation!

So what if you just want a regular light bulb replacement with the benefits of LED technology? There are some very space age looking creations coming our way…