Lights of America, Par38, 5 watt (45 watt equivalent) LED Floodlight bulb. Considering an incandescent night light is 7 watts, this 5 watt LED bulb was much much brighter than I expected. Of course its not as bright as a conventional floodlight, but I am very happy with it. I may be adding more security lighting outside and leaving them on dusk to dawn.
The light output is very white, similar to moonlight.
Similar to this one though not as many LED's (5w vs. 9w). This was in Southern Ca. There was no mention of this being subsidized by Edison (Costco normally states this on the shelf tag).
Edit: This is a better link for reference than the one I gave above. No reviews on it yet though.
Message edited by: capobeach on 2009-02-11 09:31:49 CST
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I bought a few of these at Costco. The light is very white, and it is overly bright if you look straight at it. However it produces good light and I bought some to replace CFLs in my hallway because these come on instantly and bought some for my motion detector floodlights since you can't use CFLs in those. In the hallway they replaced 15w R30 CFLs reflectors and produce about the same light, out in the driveway they replaced incandescent 75w bulbs and don't quite match the power or spread of light of those, but it does a decent job while using 15x less energy.
I bought mine in Waterbury, CT and I've had them for about a month and so far so good.
Message edited by: AppliedAggression on 2009-02-11 08:44:45 CST
L of A has a really bad reputation for reliability. I bought some of the first cfl's 5-10 yrs ago on clearance for $1-1.50 at WM. The ballasts burned up after just a few hours. Will never buy L of A again.
I have also had some quality issues with LOA products in the past, but they seem to be getting better. I use their CFL floodlights with the huge bulb (65 watt I think) for garage lighting rather than 4 foot or 8 foot flourescent tubes. I have a few that are going on 5+ years with the original bulb.
I think the LED floods would be great as landscape lighting (maybe uplighting trees). Hopefully there will be more 12 volt LED products available in the future. Running 120v out for landscape lighting isn't very practical.
Message edited by: capobeach on 2009-02-11 09:42:38 CST
Actually Wally has a bunch of LED lights at the $5.87 price point. I bought a couple of the 1.5watters as hallway lights. They work great and now there's no guilt about leaving them on all night.
The good thing is it's Costco so if it dies prematurely it would not be a real problem to get your money back. What's the break even point on a $14 bulb though? With CFL's for a buck each at Costco (last month) it seems like you'd have to wait an awful long time to make up the difference.
Can these be used in motion sensor flood light fixtures that are always on at a dim setting and then kick on to a bright setting when tripped by motion?
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Message edited by: ranchopedro on 2009-02-11 12:44:39 CST
ranchopedro, thanks for sharing that spreadsheet, and for making my data actually readable, haha.
milkman, right the estimated cost is based off 5 hours/day. I should probably have labeled that better.
Some LED bulbs are dimmable, most are not though even though LEDs support dimming, the electronics in most don't. I'd be interested if anyone tries it on these.
I bought one for grins. It is wayyyy too weak to be used as an effective spotlight and the light gives off a bluish tint. I put it in the basement where the kids always leave the light on. Might pay for itself in a decade but by then there will be better and cheaper LED lights available. LED is the future. I suspect you will see LED's replacing flourescents in the future, but for now, they aren't economically viable.
LED technology holds tremendous promise for household lighting, but these "retrofit" bulbs are not there yet. That's really what they are. This and CFLs contain a transformer or ballast that converts the socket electricity into something the LEDs can actually run on. Couple with that, the LED emitter technology is barely there, which means the manufacturers are just now getting the raw parts they will craft into the next generation of fixtures. The limit thus far was output per emitter, that's why you need like 80+ LED elements to get any decent output. But in no time the high-output CREE emitters and the like will become cheap enough and we'll see the number of emitters shrink drastically as output goes up.
I've built my own LED aquarium fixtures and these are great to work with, low voltage, low power consumption, great output with low heat, relatively easy to understand, but the wiring can become tedious since you're wiring a resistor in some cases to every emitter.
The thing about dimming is no one commercially has gotten it right yet. You can't dim LED's (or CFL's) the same way you dim an incandescent single-filament, by lowering the voltage, it just doesn't work that way. LED's have a limited range for dimming by cutting the voltage, but it's nowhere close to the nice linear "nearly off to full-on" type of dimming you get with incandescents.
To get that linear dimming, you need to be able to turn the emitters on one or two at a time, and no one has commercially perfected that yet, since the first thing a LED fixture does is step down the voltage from 120v anyway. Hopefully this will mature commercially in the next few years, but more than likely it will be cheaper to provide LED specific fixtures (not just a screw in bulb) that give this capability among other things based on detecting variances in the line voltage. This would be a true retrofit, but it will likely be more than a bulb.
Think about how many things in your home are already powered by 12v (go around and count the number of "wall warts" you have. I have at least 80 in my home, about 50 of which are plugged in 24/7) Each of those is a step-down transformer. Each one also wastes electricity doing it's job by releasing heat. Right now the cost and complexity is borne by the product manufacturers who have to produce and ship these heavy transformers for every product they sell (plus it's another part to break or burn out). I think we'll live to see the day where the 12v transformer is built into the wall socket itself, with a special plug that you could plug directly into your cell phone/printer/network router/iPod.
That would also provide a boost to low voltage lighting since then you could have a bulb that contains only the emitters.
Or, even better, power all of that 12v secondary wiring off of rooftop solar panels (much closer to solar's output) on the roof of the home, going directly to each wall socket, right alongside the 120v (different plug configuratio, of course). Now you've just taken all of your "wall warts" out of the equation, "off the grid", freed up nearly all of your 120v outlets, eliminated the need for surge suppressors, cut down on the ambient heat and dramatically extended the life of your electronic equipment
Message edited by: mailnride1 on 2009-03-16 10:49:28 CDT
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