Thanks for the education. I thought, by buying the $10 bulbs from the brand name rather than the $3 bulbs from Chang-Hui Electric Cooperative #37, that I *was *buying the quality product.
Obviously I thought wrong. I do have an open mind on these things, or I wouldn’t have spent $20 on an experiment to fix something that really doesn’t seem very broken. I will be trying again, if for no other reason than my supply of 100+W incandescents is getting slim. And no, I didn’t lay in any kind of extra supply when the ban came out. Luddite is a bit unfair; my complaint is against low quality and an apparent race to the bottom.
There’s a lot of irony in selling an electronic product whose economic benefit is entirely in the distant out-years while at the same time expecting that same product to improve radically so that generations sold very soon will be vastly superior.
IOW, how many people have thrown away crappy looking CFLs before they saved any money to buy slightly less-crappy looking early LEDs that they’ll also throw away before they save any money only to replace them with better looking, even more expensive LEDs, which have an even longer time to payback …
In all other areas of consumer electronics we say “ignore durability in what’s really a consumer durable product, it’ll be obsolete before next year.” But in this one area we’re expected to embrace a 10 year life span on an inherently disposable / consumable product undergoing rapid technological improvement. Color me entertained & mildly bemused by the incongruity.
The fact you of all people have an active thread here on a very similar theme, expensive front loading washers, wherein you take the opposite side of the argument, simply adds to the entertainment value. In a good way.
Even the Cree TW bulbs don’t match the color rendering of an incandescent. And they have that heatsink that block light from going down towards the base.
Even the Cree TW bulbs have horrible dimming performance.
Even if energy utilization isn’t among them, incandescents still have strong point. When there’s an LED bulb that’s as good as incandescents I’ll use them indoors. I’m still waiting. I’ve tried a lot (and use them outdoors where I don’t care about dimming or light quality). The best of them are the Cree TW (best color performance, especially on reds, traditionally an LED weak point), and Philips (tint of light indistinguishable from incandescent, the tint of the Crees seem slightly “off”.
To answer the question, I believe that motion sensors and whatnot tend to be generously rated. My Insteon dimmers that every light in my house runs on supposedly use 2 watts each, but someone measured and they actually use somewhat less than that. If you feel one that isn’t on there’s no warmth whatsoever, like you would expect if they consumed 2 watts.
I’ve been pretty happy with the ikea 1000 lumin leds, and I’m picky about my light. I find CLFs intolerable. Where the leds suck is dimming. They just don’t get low enough. I think the light quality us good, if not quite as good as incandescent.
Sell them to Easy-bake oven owners desperate for replacement parts?
For the OP, the probably obvious sensible thing is to put motion-sensors only in particular spots where lights are often accidently left on and would not be quickly turned off again (e.g. basement).
I’m being rational. Front loading washers, if they even do have a payback, requires you to wait years and there seems to be a significant risk of major repairs eating up any savings. The cost of running the washer can’t be more than a 5-10 cents in electricity and water, with 1 load a day, that’s $30 a year - a $600 repair every few years, as you can see, dominates the equation. Even if the washer were so efficient that it is free to operate, if you needed a $600 repair every decade, it would cost more than a 10 cent a wash machine… Those mechanical dial, front loading maytags and similar trashy machines are available for *so *little money, costing just a few hundred even brand new, that they very well may end up being cheaper than LG/Samsung front loaders that are $600+ minimum.
The economic benefit from LED bulbs and CFLS is quicker.
60 watts, 3 hours a day. Bulb is $2.50. Actual power consumed is 8.5 watts. 154 watt hours saved per day. Payback in 5 months.
If the bulb is more heavily used, such as 12 or 24 hours a day (I have several lights I use like that), the payback period drops to 2-4 weeks.
To the contrary, your actually do have a problem if you are using 100 watt incandescents in the more heavily used fixtures in your house and you stay up late/sometimes leave the light on. The more expensive bulbs that have decent color rendering cost more like $5-$15 and up, all things being equal, at the same store, the high CRI bulbs cost more. There just happen to be specific brands that are cheap and available for cutthroat prices on the internet. They are all made in China.
Err, for nitpickers of the post above : I meant to type “$36.5 dollars a year”, since that’s the cost if you wash 1 load a day in a machine that costs 10 cents a load to operate. If the machine needs $600 worth of fixing per decade, that compares unfavorably to the operating costs of a mere $365 for a decade.
And, I should say, marginal operating costs. A front loader isn’t free to operate, just cheaper. It probably saves you more like 5 cents a load or less, and most of the savings are probably money saved on soap.
I found an appliance repair website that shows how to do some of these repairs, and they aren’t easy - there’s a lot of stuff in a Korean made front-loader, and a lot of disassembly steps to change certain parts.
That $600 figure is based on paying someone $200 to fix it 3 times. It’s probably an overestimate, but even if it were half that, you would not come out ahead.
