I have hardly any LED bulbs in my house. Here’s why: for my reading lights, I need at least 100W at my age and LED bulbs that provide equivalent illumination are either non-existent (at Costco, anyway) or very pricey (the one I did buy cost $30, admittedly 3 or 4 years ago). Most of the remaining lights in the house are behind closed ceiling fixtures (which, I have been advised, will kill the LEDs in short order) and three torchieres. One has some sort of high/low switch that works for ordinary bulbs, but doesn’t light an LED bulb on either position. The control is built in to the stalk and I have no idea what it does. The second uses a specially shaped fluorescent tube and its own base. The third uses a halogen tube. Beyond that are a couple of lamps that we don’t use very often and a chandelier in the DR that uses small base bulbs and I am not sure whether I have seen LEDs in that form.
Short of having all those ceiling fixtures changed, I don’t know what I could do. That and replacing those torchieres.
100W incandescents are using 1KWH every 10 hours.So, if you have them on 10 hours a day, in a month you will have used 30KWH. At 10¢/KWH you will spend $10 in power every 3 months or so. So, a $10 100W-equivalent LED will pay for itself in under 5 months ( at 5x the efficiency, the LED will use $2 or electricity per month. In 5 months it will have cost $10 + (5 * 60¢) = $13, versus $15 in electricity alone for the incandescent lamp).
The fixtures themselves are also a kludge resulting from the use of incandescents. I have a desk lamp that was designed for an incandescent bulb, and I almost always keep it pointed straight up, illuminating the ceiling. The direct light from the bulb is too intense to be comfortable, but by reflecting it off the white ceiling, I get a mostly-uniform glow for the whole room. But I could get the same effect by covering the entire ceiling with an array of low-power-density LEDs. This isn’t practical for incandescents, because a single bright bulb is a lot cheaper and more efficient than a large number of small dim bulbs, but it is for LEDs.
Set the system up intelligently, and you could selectively turn off some fraction of the LEDs for a lower light level, or even show dynamic changing patterns. You probably wouldn’t want to show full-on movies on your ceiling (though you could), but you might want to make it look like a blue sky with puffy white clouds, or produce an effect like ripples on the top of a pond, or filter it as through blowing leaves of trees.
The motion switch on the main room lights for my kitchen and dining room requires a 40W minimum load to run otherwise the switch does not fully engage and the lights flicker. I have (2) 4-bulb ceiling fixtures on it. One fixture is and must always be all incandescent for the load. The other room with the other fixture has always had CFLs. As they fail they are being replaced by LEDs.
Our High School “Tech Services Club” (i.e. Nerd-O-Rama) had a project to build a pizza-warmer oven for use at fall football games. We used incandescents as the heating elements. That’s way before LEDs but they wouldn’t have been of any use.
So, if there are any other applications the depend on the heat of incandescents, LED’s won’t work.
it depends on how you compare them. Most consumer LED bulbs are marked with their “equivalent” incandescent wattage. meaning, a “60 watt equivalent” LED bulb puts out about the same lumens as an actual 60 watt incandescent bulb. LEDs have higher “luminous efficacy,” meaning much more of the power they consume is converted to light rather than heat. an actual 60 watt LED bulb would be incredibly bright.
again, both LED and CFL bulbs are marketed as “watts equivalent” to an incandescent of equal lumen output.
they are; it’s how A-frame LED bulbs are made. They need multiple LEDs to both achieve the target lumen output and to make them sufficiently omnidirectional to mimic the light pattern of an incandescent. The problem with packing too many in there becomes one of heat management; LEDs waste less of their consumed power to heat, but are themselves rather delicate and need the heat they do generated moved away from them. thus LED bulbs tend to have substantial heatsinks; and the limit to how many LEDs you put in there is how much heat your heatsink can conduct away from them.