LED lighting

One of the hardest pieces of the sustainability puzzle for us has been selecting good lighting for the house.  Compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs are so common that it's easy to compare their visual quality and energy efficiency, but light-emitting diode (LED) lighting is still so novel that it's hard to find live displays to help us evaluate the different lighting options. It's particularly difficult to find lighting strips (as opposed to individual bulbs) installed as samples. So while everyone knows what a standard 60 watt incandescent bulb looks like, it's very hard to imagine how an 11 watt LED bulb performs, let alone a 5W/ft LED strip light.




We've wanted to use LED strips to light the front porch, patio and garage, but we've found most LED lighting too faint for these purposes, and the dearth of available information - combined with the high price of LEDs - has made specifying a particular light daunting. So, we've bought two 15' strips to try them out in place. The first was kind of scary - it was bright enough for outdoor lighting and provided a nice, even glow, but the light color (5000K) was purplish, and made the house look like an aquarium. Our second try was much more successful. This is the warm version (2500K) of the first light, with the same power consumption (5W/ft) and length (15ft). The flexible ribbon strip lighting fits into the structural c-channel at the edge of the roof overhang, and is made locally by Futura Lighting.