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.
Showing posts with label LEDs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LEDs. Show all posts
Friday, June 1, 2012
Thursday, September 8, 2011
lighting
Consumer Reports has a great article on light bulbs, which includes some of the most extensive testing yet of light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, a few weeks after a good comparative essay on bulbs in the New York Times. The good news is that commercially available LED bulbs are both reliably durable and pleasant to the eye. We suspect that, like compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), LEDs are going to quickly become popular with consumers (except for a small segment of tin-foil hat types who associate LEDs with a government plot to take away their guns, bibles and/or medications), and that their price will drop markedly. We are planning to use LED replacement bulbs in conventional track lighting fixtures in the kitchen, and living and dining rooms. We still haven't settled on a strategy for lighting the dining table, but friend of tin box Cathy Bell reminds us of these compelling beauties from Plumen.
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