LED Floodlight bulb, 5 watt $13.79 Costco B&M

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.

Thanks OP. Will sure check it out.

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.

Agree on L of A quality. Have a dozen CFLs die prematurely and standard fluorescent units. Ballasts are the weak point.

They are cheap, in both quality and price. It's very good to see LED's coming on the market given their outstanding efficiency.

These are $5.87 at WalMart.

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.

$0.20 Electric rate (cost + delivery)


Type Cost Hours Watts Cost/Day Cost/Month Cost/Year Cost/2 yr Cost/ 3 yr
LED $14.00 5 5 $0.01 $0.15 $1.83 $3.65 $5.48
CFL $1.00 5 15 $0.02 $0.45 $5.48 $10.95 $16.43
Icdcnt $0.50 5 60 $0.06 $1.80 $21.90 $43.80 $65.70

However it's worth noting these produce almost zero heat, which is quite nice and they definitely have their applications.

I had asked AA for his source and he created his own spreadsheet, beautiful!

For the lessor motivated, modify the fields to suit hours/rate etc...
LightBulb_Comparison.xls

AppliedAggression said:

$0.20 Electric rate (cost + delivery)

								
Type	Cost	Hours	Watts	Cost/Day Cost/Month Cost/Year	Cost/2 yr Cost/ 3 yr
LED	$14.00	5	5	$0.01	 $0.15	    $1.83	$3.65	  $5.48
CFL	$1.00	5	15	$0.02	 $0.45	    $5.48	$10.95	  $16.43
Icdcnt	$0.50	5	60	$0.06	 $1.80	    $21.90	$43.80	  $65.70

dmlavigne1 said: AppliedAggression said: $0.20 Electric rate (cost + delivery)

								
Type	Cost	Hours	Watts	Cost/Day	Cost/Month	Cost/Year	Cost/2 yr	Cost/ 3 yr
LED	$14.00	5	5	$0.01		$0.15		$1.83		$3.65		$5.48
CFL	$1.00	5	15	$0.02		$0.45		$5.48		$10.95		$16.43
Icdcnt	$0.50	5	60	$0.06		$1.80		$21.90		$43.80		$65.70

But note that it shows 5 hours. I'm guessing that's 5 hrs/day? That takes care of that...

if from dust til dawn, it could be 10 hours for some folks, varies from place to place...

5-hour period is a good sample.

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

mailnride1 said: ...

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

I built a playhouse for my daughters last year that runs entirely on one 15 watt, 12v solar panel which charges two 12 volt SLA UPS batteries. It was originally just for lighting, as I wasn't able to connect the playhouse to 110v without a building permit. As time went by, I added a cordless phone extension and a car lighter socket. They can now use a DVD player, laptop, etc. It works so well, I was thinking about buying one of these to provide some 12 volt power to the landscape lighting and maybe the house. The only downside is the cost of replacing the batteries every 4 or 5 years.

capobeach said: mailnride1 said: ...

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

I built a playhouse for my daughters last year that runs entirely on one 15 watt, 12v solar panel which charges two 12 volt SLA UPS batteries. It was originally just for lighting, as I wasn't able to connect the playhouse to 110v without a building permit. As time went by, I added a cordless phone extension and a car lighter socket. They can now use a DVD player, laptop, etc. It works so well, I was thinking about buying one of these to provide some 12 volt power to the landscape lighting and maybe the house. The only downside is the cost of replacing the batteries every 4 or 5 years.

FWIW, a cheap source for sealed lead acid batteries is All Electronics, which will ship for $7. As I recall, sealed lead acid batteries are shippable.

AppliedAggression said: ...and bought some for my motion detector floodlights since you can't use CFLs in those.

?! Really? Say it ain't so! I just bought a 4 pack of CFL floods from Sam's Club to use in my motion sensors! Crap! There was nothing on the box that indicates that they don't work with motion sensors (and I would suspect a large amount of flood light fixtures have motion sensors).

Can you confirm that before I take these out of the box?

Thanks

The problem with almost all motion detectors is that they let a small amount of current pass through to the bulbs and it will greatly decrease the bulb life. I would get these LEDs, but you could use the CFLs as long as you're aware they may not last long.

Do these have a single high-watt LED inside or multiple LEDs?

cmv said: Do these have a single high-watt LED inside or multiple LEDs?

They have multiple LEDs. I think we are yet to have a single high luminous LEDs. I might be wrong for the second statement.

For the motion detector lights, why would someone bother to install LED or CFL? Typical on time of a few minutes when activated, incandescent bulb consumes practically negligible power per day/month/year. Poor response time of CFL, low output of LED, cost of bulbs, plus many other disadvantages make CFL/LED poor choice for this application. Besides, the triac circuits in those motion detectors are not designed for anything but incandescent bulbs (resistive loads only--no CFL/LED)

Also you are not doing anything green here. The extra energy and resources to build the LED /CFL bulb would far out exceed the saving in energy consumption.

Let say you activate the motion light 5 times every night with a 100W floodlight for 5 minutes each time. At the energy rate of 15cent/KWH, the cost is: .15x.1x30x5x5/60 => 19 cents/month. Hardly worth the troubles plus poor lighting when you needed most.

kbedwardz said: On time of a few minutes?

The whole sentence read: "Typical on time of a few minutes when activated, incandescent bulb consumes practically negligible power per day/month/year." --- not about the slow warm up of CFL. Rather how long the motion detector keeps the light on.

At 5 watts, these should be putting out more light than a 60 watt incandescent.
They won't.
These are made with the cheapest low-efficiency LEDs China can slap in them.

Until they put some LEDs with > 100 lumen/watt efficiency in commercially available bulbs, LED bulbs like these will only be a deal to those who "think" they're helping the environment.
The light is horrible.
The individual LEDs will burn out quickly.

Just picked up one from Costco, couldn't resist This is quite bright, I'd say the 45W-equivalent claim on the package is accurate. The light quality is more like daylight, which compared to incandescents is cooler (or bluer). It's not blue by any means, it's that incandescents are so yellow that anything looks bluer by comparison. Really it depends on your preference and expectations.

The 1.5W mini-flood LED bulbs I got from Meritline seem slightly bluer, probably because they're dimmer. It's comparable, but I like this 5W light output better.

Will this pay for itself in electricity costs? Probably not in my case as it's in the bathroom which might have the light on a total of an hour a day. I use LEDs there because the constant on/off cycling is hard on incandescents and even worse on CFLs. So, my savings will be more of replacement bulb costs than electricity costs.

BTW - check out the LEDs when the light fixture is turned off. They have a faint residual light output for a while before finally turning off. Probably residual capacitance in the ballast.

(tuinashop: thanks for the correction on VA vs W.. been too long since I've looked at that stuff)

Bill80: Good measurements! Would you try measuring Volt-Amps? Watts doesn't take power factor into account, would be interesting to see how much PF plays into the different lighting technologies. Residential electric bills don't get charged for power factor so for most ppl here it's moot.

Bill80 said: Being distrustful of everything (personal issue) I used a kill-a-watt to measure how much energy the CFLs/LEDs/Regular bulbs used around the house. I had a feeling that their "advertised" usage might be different that their “actual” usage. I was right to some extent. Here are some examples:

LED floods from Costco use 4 watts (discussed in this thread)
Incandescent 90 watt flood uses 76 watts
CFL 26 watt flood uses 24 watts

So while going from a basic 90 watt flood to a 4 watt LED saves a good amount of energy, the "savings" are not as great as expected as the 90 watt flood only uses 76 watts. In my case I was fine with the lower LED light output as the two 90 watt flood lights I had were overkill and probably blinded the neighbors (motion detector out front of the house).

Another great place I found savings was swapping out all the 60 watt bulbs in bathroom (8 clear 60 watt globes) for the white globe CFLs. Energy use was slightly off:

Clear Incandescent 60 watt globe uses 56 watts
CFL 11 watt white globes use 7 watts

I think I paid a total of $20 for two 4 packs (might be subsidized by "SMUD" - Sacramento) at Costco. Works out to be $38 in energy savings a year for the bathroom alone (((3 hours a day x 7 days a week x 52 weeks a year x 8 blubs x 49 watts a blub saved (56-7))/1000)*.10 KWH rate). Of course you have to subtract the initial $20 investment for the first year. My power is cheap here as well – about $.09 a KWH during the winter and $.10 KWH during the summer – so a PGE customer might actually save double what I save.

Some of you should have received letter from Costco, stating the lights of America (LOA) LEDs, sold there have overrated lifetime rating, that you can return them to costco for a full refund.

All of those LED from LOA are now off costco shelf.