Are you ready for LED Lights?

If you have been following my blog, you know that I have gone to the fringes on saving energy.  As humans we are clearly smart enough to do better.  Over the last two years I have finally found a dimmable Compact Florescent Light or CFL that works like a champ.  The only thing we haven't found is one that is in a daylight or natural color.  The bulbs that we found in the daylight range reacted very poorly to dimmers.

For the sections of my house without dimmers, we found that the Lights of American PAR 38 bulbs with 60 LED's worked nicely and provided a semi-focused spot light.  Every other LED bulb that we tried failed within a couple of days.  This week I installed three Four Seasons 120 LED 8 watt bulbs next to the 3 60LED 5 Watt bulbs in my car port.  The Four Seasons 120 LED lights put off a very nice slightly blue daylight color light.  Additionally they have a fluted lens so they have a smoother transition of light closer to a flood light instead of a semi-focused spot.


We have just started testing these, and so far they are working great.  Keep up and I will let you know how they do over the next three or four weeks.  Past history has shown that LED either fails quickly or doesn't fail for a long time.

I also noted that LOA now has a candelabra base LED that is just 3 watts.  Since all of my candelabra fixtures dim, I will wait for a CFL to fail before we try these.  There are two lights in my bedroom that don't dim I may try them in.





It isn't like fixing your air conditioner, but in my house there were 70 can lights  which were Non-IC and had 90 Watt incandescent bulbs in all of them.  We also have 24 flood lights around the house that all had 120 Watt incandescent bulbs in them.  That is 6300 Watts in the house and another 2880 Outside for a total of 8640 Watts if we hit the “all on” button.  The sad truth is cleaning the coils on your air-conditioner and refridgerator probably saves this much power but here is where we are today:

46 Non-IC Cans letting conditioned air into the attic with 15W dimmable CFL = 690 Watts
5 Non-IC Cans with 75W pure white Halogen bulbs (kitchen for color) = 375
10 IC Cans, now sealed and insulated with 15W dimmable CFL = 150 Watts
6 Non-IC Cans outside with 5 Watt LED bulbs = 30 Watts
3 Non-IC Cans outside with 8 Watt LED bulbs = 24 Watts
20 flood lights with 15W CFL  = 300 Watts
2 flood lights with 90W incandescent = 180 Watts
2 flood lights with 5W LED = 10 Watts



New total with “all on” button pressed = 1879 Watts, or 30% of the original load.  70% reduction isn't to shabby is it?

If I could find daylight color dimmable CFL's the kitchen would get rid of the halogens, and I need a better bulb for two of the motion sensing floods.  When the incandescent bulbs are removed the motion sensors quit working.

Our biggest electric users are now are the 700W halogen lights in our bathroom,our refrigerator, freezer and A/C system.  The guest bathrooms all have 13W daylight CFL on switches and they work great and provide fantastic color.  I hope to take out the 700W fixture in my bathroom soon.

The next energy saver test is the spray in “painted” radiation barrier.  I'll let you know....