New Reasons to Change Light Bulbs
By DAVID POGUE
People sometimes have trouble making small sacrifices now that will
reward them handsomely later. How often do we ignore the advice to make a
few diet and exercise changes to live a longer, healthier life? Or to
put some money aside to grow into a nest egg? Intellectually, we get it —
but instant gratification is a powerful force.
You don’t have to be one of those self-defeating rubes. Start buying LED light bulbs.
You’ve probably seen LED flashlights, the LED “flash” on phone cameras
and LED indicator lights on electronics. But LED bulbs, for use in the
lamps and light sockets of your home, have been slow to arrive, mainly
because of their high price: their electronics and heat-management
features have made them much, much more expensive than other kinds of
bulbs.
That’s a pity, because LED bulbs are a gigantic improvement over incandescent bulbs and even the compact fluorescents, or CFLs, that the world spent several years telling us to buy.
LEDs last about 25 times as long as incandescents and three times as
long as CFLs; we’re talking maybe 25,000 hours of light. Install one
today, and you may not own your house, or even live, long enough to see
it burn out. (Actually, LED bulbs generally don’t burn out at all; they
just get dimmer.)
You know how hot incandescent bulbs become. That’s because they convert
only 5 to 10 percent of your electricity into light; they waste the rest
as heat. LED bulbs are far more efficient. They convert 60 percent of
their electricity into light, so they consume far less electricity. You
pay less, you pollute less.
But wait, there’s more: LED bulbs also turn on to full brightness
instantly. They’re dimmable. The light color is wonderful; you can
choose whiter or warmer bulbs. They’re rugged, too. It’s hard to break
an LED bulb, but if the worst should come to pass, a special coating
prevents flying shards.
Yet despite all of these advantages, few people install LED lights. They
never get farther than: “$30 for a light bulb? That’s nuts!” Never mind
that they will save about $200 in replacement bulbs and electricity
over 25 years. (More, if your electric company offers LED-lighting
rebates.)
Surely there’s some price, though, where that math isn’t so off-putting. What if each bulb were only $15? Or $10?
Well, guess what? We’re there. LED bulbs now cost less than $10.
Nor is that the only recent LED breakthrough. The light from an LED bulb
doesn’t have to be white. Several companies make bulbs that can be any
color you want.
I tried out a whole Times Square’s worth of LED bulbs and kits from six
manufacturers. May these capsule reviews shed some light on the latest
in home illumination.
3M ADVANCED LED BULBS On most LED bulbs,
heat-dissipating fins adorn the stem. (The glass of an LED bulb never
gets hot, but the circuitry does. And the cooler the bulb, the better
its efficiency.) As a result, light shines out only from the top of the
bulb.
But the 3M bulbs’ fins are low enough that you get lovely, omnidirectional light.
These are weird-looking, though, with a strange reflective material in
the glass and odd slots on top. You won’t care about aesthetics if the
bulb is hidden in a lamp, but $25 each is unnecessarily expensive; read
on.
CREE LED BULBS Cree’s new home LED bulbs, available at
Home Depot, start at $10 apiece, or $57 for a six-pack. That’s about as
cheap as they come.
The $10 bulb provides light equivalent to that from a 40-watt
incandescent. Cree’s 60-watt equivalent is $14 for “daylight” light, $13
for warmer light.
The great thing about these bulbs is that they look almost exactly like
incandescent bulbs. Cree says that its bulbs are extraordinarily
efficient; its “60-watt” daylight bulb consumes only nine watts of juice
(compared with 13 watts on the 3M, for example). As a result, this bulb
runs cooler, so its heat sink can be much smaller and nicer looking.
TORCHSTAR These color-changeable light bulbs (available
on Amazon) range from $10 for a tracklight-style spotlight to $23 for a
more omnidirectional bulb. Each comes with a flat, plastic remote
control that can be used to dim the lights, turn them on and off, or
change their color (the remote has 15 color buttons). You can also make
them pulse, flash or strobe, which is totally annoying.
The TorchStars never get totally white — only a feeble blue — and
they’re not very bright. But you get the point: LED bulbs can do more
than just turn on and be white.
PHILIPS HUE For $200, you get a box with three flat-top
bulbs and a round plastic transmitter, which plugs into your network
router. At that point, you can control both the brightness and colors of
these lights using an iPhone or Android phone app, either in your home
or from across the Internet, manually or on a schedule.
It offers icons for predefined combinations like Sunset (all three bulbs
are orange) and Deep Sea (each bulb is a different underwaterish
color). You can also create your own color schemes — by choosing a photo
whose tones you want reproduced. You can dim any bulb, or turn them all
off at once from your phone. (Additional bulbs, up to 500, are $60
each.)
Philips gets credit for doing something fresh with LED technology; the
white color is pure and bright; and it’s a blast to show them off for
visitors. Still, alas, the novelty wears off fairly quickly.
INSTEON This kit ($130 for the transmitter, $30 for
each 60-watt-equivalent bulb) is a lot like Philips’s, except that
there’s no color-changing; you just use the phone app to control the
white lights, individually or en masse. Impressively, each bulb consumes
only 8 watts. You can expand the system up to 1,000 bulbs, if you’re
insane.
Unfortunately, the prerelease version I tested was a disaster. Setup was
a headache. You had to sign up for an account. The instructions
referred to buttons that didn’t exist. You had to “pair” each bulb with
the transmitter individually. Once paired, the bulbs frequently fell off
the network entirely. Bleah.
GREENWAVE SOLUTION This control-your-LED-lights kit
doesn’t change colors, but you get four bulbs, not three, in the $200
kit. You get both a network transmitter and a remote control that
requires neither network nor smartphone. Up to 500 bulbs (a reasonable
$20 each) can respond. Setting up remote control over the Internet is
easy.
The app is elegant and powerful. It has presets like Home, Away and
Night, which turns off all lights in the house with one tap. You can
also program your own schedules, light-bulb groups and dimming levels.
Unfortunately, these are only “40-watt” bulbs. Worse, each has a weird
cap on its dome; in other words, light comes out only in a band around
the equator of each bulb. They’re not omnidirectional.
The bottom line: Choose the Cree bulbs for their superior design and low
price, Philips Hue to startle houseguests, or the GreenWave system for
remote control of all the lights in your house.
By setting new brightness-per-watt standards that the 135-year-old
incandescent technology can’t meet, the federal government has already
effectively banned incandescent bulbs. And good riddance to CFL bulbs,
with those ridiculous curlicue tubes and dangerous chemicals inside.
LED bulbs last decades, save electricity, don’t shatter, don’t burn you,
save hundreds of dollars, and now offer plummeting prices and
blossoming features. What’s not to like? You’d have to be a pretty dim
bulb not to realize that LED light is the future.
