What are the current economics of LED vs CFL for house lighting? LEDs used to be extremely expensive, but are declining in cost.
I don’t have any hard numbers, but in my experience CFLs have wildly inconsistent lifetimes. I’ve had CFLs last only 6 months. I’ve also witnessed CFLs fail in a manner which produced flame and black smoke. I’ve not yet seen an LED bulb do that, and I’ve been 99% LED for over a year. Also, CFLs like most fluorescent lamps do not like being turned on and off, LEDs don’t care.
IMO the time to buy is now, while there’s still a profit incentive to make decent products.
Failures like that means that the manufacturer was so cheap they decided not to use a fuse (I have seen CFLs that just used a resistor as a crude fuse); I’m pretty sure that LED bulbs can fail the same way if they omit a fuse (and the ballast circuitry is pretty similar, a SMPS of some kind, although LED bulbs use a more sophisticated circuit with current and voltage regulation). Of course, maybe that’s because they are still relatively expensive and such critical parts aren’t omitted (using a resistor as a fuse is allowed if it is a UL/CE certified flameproof type). I have had 3 CFL failures so far, one in about 6 months due to a faulty capacitor (which failed with a big pop and some smoke); the other two failed after some years due to a broken filament with no damage to the circuitry (only one had a real fuse, the one that popped didn’t even have a resistor; the input filter choke burned out instead).
Currently, CFLs and LEDs are neck-and-neck in the Lumens/Watt race. LEDs are ever so slightly ahead, and will easily double CFL efficiency in the next few years, but right now, the premium price for LEDs means that CFLs are a better bang for the buck.
As for longevity, LED lamps don’t have enough history behind them to say whether they really will last longer than CFLs. In theory, they could last many tens of thousands of hours, but I suspect that the electronics will fail long before that. I’ve installed a few LED lamps, and I’ve made sure to write the date of installation on them, so I can see how long they actually last.
In my area, Costco and Walgreen have CFLs for $1.19 for 6 bulbs right now (23 watts). I think the local power district is subsidizing them. LEDs are $10 apiece at Costco.
The main issue to me is that the light quality from LED (at least, from a high-quality, high-CRI LED) is better than any CFL I’ve seen (and I’ve tried a lot to find something acceptable). Worth the cost to me, and even more so if they actually do last as long as claimed (though like beowulff, I’m pretty skeptical).
That’s not an equivalent comparison either. A 23 watt CFL is about 100 watts incandescent. I don’t think you’re getting a 100 watt equivalent LED for $10.
I LOVE LED flashlights but I don’t think they’re where I want them to be for household use as a direct replacement. Just like CFL’s you’re paying for electronics with each bulb. At this point in time if I went with LED I’d go with a system that uses a single voltage converter that handles a series of lights. What I’d really like to do is put in a couple of solar panels JUST for lighting and them put 12 volt LED’s in every room as a separate system.
With the current prices of LED’s it’s just too expensive to risk the cost against the savings. I’ve had enough CFL’s fail on me before their time but they’re subsidized by the power company. I don’t care if a 23 cent bulb fails.
I find LEDs are starting to get cheaper than the alternatives, especially if you get them on eBay.
I just bought 10 LED bulbs for £10.99 including postage, to replace the 10W halogen bulbs (G4 fitting) in my under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen, The halogens are always blowing, get very hot and cost £3 for two.
I also bought LED spotlight bulbs to replace the halogen spotlights in the ceiling. 4W LEDs replace the 35W halogens, and the cost was much the same: 10 bulbs for £22.
I haven’t yet replaced the traditional-style lightbulbs, which were incandescent bulbs and are now CFLs, as you want about 1600 lumens to replace a 100W traditional bulb, and LEDs aren’t quite there yet unless you spend a lot. You can get a 10W LED that puts out as much light as a 60W bulb for about £6 though.
Then of course you have to factor in that you are only using about 10-20% as much electricity, so you save money in the long term, as long as the bulbs last as long as they claim.
CFLs are pretty variable - I’ve had expensive “lasts 20,000 hours” bulbs fail within three or four months.
If LEDs aren’t going to get any better that’s not a good sign.
I use LEDs for for outdoor security lights and colder places like inside my garage. I’ll probably get more LEDs once the price comes down and the color is a little better.
I have LED lights for bicycle riding including one that puts out 600 lumens. Very impressive compared to the little incandescent bulbs of a few years ago.
Last year we replaced all our indoor incandescent bulbs, 72 in total, with CFLs. We are at 13 months now and have 3 failures, although two were pretty early on and IMO defective.
The savings has been mild, at about 8% across the board but that pays for itself. The real problem with CFL is that you cannot just turn them off and on as one would normally do with standard bulbs. The cycle time is recommended to be 15 minutes which most children do not have a habit of following 
LEDs solve the problem and now as the OP stated, the prices are dropping but they are still a significant premium over CFLs. We still have about a dozen CFLs left, but after they expire we will replace - slowly this time - any bulbs with LEDs.
Still not sure about outside lighting…
In strict terms of economics it may be better to buy the CF now and then plan to replace it with LED’s bulbs when the cost of the LED’s come down, but I do feel there is more to the story and perhaps a reason not to buy many LED ‘bulbs’ now. How we use lights may be changing, buying LED ‘bulbs’ that last many years may be functionally obsolete before they are used up.
LED lighting is evolving into a different form then we are used to for lighting and while there will be LED bulb replacements, the best answer may be to the replace the fixture to one made for LED’s, a type where the typical screw in ‘bulbs’ go away along with the concept of a point source of lighting. Once you get rid of the point source of LED lighting you also get rid of the need to cool the LED ‘lightbulb’, which reduces cost.
I recently changed out a lot of halogen spots to LED spots and changed the security light halogen spots to LED. It was quite expensive, particularly when I had to have the dimmer switches changed out to dimmer switches that would not cause the bulbs to flicker horrendously when on anything other than max. That in turn was a waste of cash because on review, we only ever used most of the lights in full on or off, so really did not need dimer switches at all.
Colour wise there are a few options and the warmer lights don’t look too bad, and I like the full bright white ones in the kitchen.
I suspect the cost will come down once we have dedicated power circuits in houses that will run LED lighting , rather than have to have a seperate transformer / invertor in each bulb.
The economics over the Halogen spots was marginal, we would have been better of going for CFL.
That’s a good point and one I hadn’t considered. LEDs make very cool “hidden” lighting solutions possible that you couldn’t do before. Most people, though, aren’t going to want to change ll their light fixtures, so there will still be a very big market for affordable LED replacements for conventional bulbs.
I didn’t say that. I was more talking about buying into the product before the market is flooded with cheap, substandard junk like Mangetout encountered some time back. 'Cos when that happens, people will buy these disgusting pieces of junk because “they’re a few dollars cheaper.”
I saw an LED shaped like a floodlight (conical). It had massive massive metal fins for heat sink. Ouch! Is this thing really more energy-efficient for the same lighting than CFL?
We have CFLs in our house, new in 2007 and as the builder’s incandescents burn out in the more commonly used areas, we have replaced with CFL. They seem brighter, but the conical pot-ceiling lights seem to be particularly miserable as far as lifetime; I have about 4 or 5 sitting in a box (plus 3 or 4 regular CFLs) until I hear of a green disposal opportunity.
One unintended consequence - the savings in Canada are not that great because (a) electricity is cheap(er) in some areas of the country and (b) the heat from incandescents added to the house heating in the winter, now that loss is seen in higher heating bills. Note that for those who more use air conditioning, the opposite is true - they save money on the air conditioning too.
Yes. They have massive heat sinks not because they consume a lot of power, but because they are less tolerant of high temperature.
Indeed. Glass & metal v. plastic. Plastic melts. So, even though more efficient, it still produces some heat which it doesn’t tolerate well.
For that reason, I would never use a high lumen LED bulb to replace a floodlight. In those cases, you want to replace the whole fixture with special LED-designed fixtures so that you can have the LEDs spread out for passive cooling. Or, add more regular fixtures and put in an array of medium lumen LEDs. Which, in the end, makes for better lighting in most situations than one high intensity point which blinds people. And since they’re LEDs, you won’t have to replace them for a decade.
I think I’ve posted about this before, but I’m starting to believe I have magical CFL bulbs. I’m not joking. I bought my condo in 2009, brought my old lamps with me, CFL bulbs included. Since and before that move, I still have never, ever had a CFL burn out. It’s starting to freak me out a bit, to be honest. Several fixtures in my condo take incandescent only; those bulbs burn out in a normal time frame. And yes, my light usage is probably lower than average since I live alone and travel a decent amount for work.
But it’s been at least 4 years now and I have yet to have a single CFL bulb burn out. Still waiting. I haven’t bought a CFL bulb in years, though I’m certainly due.
The ones made to replace regular bulbs seem to get freakishly hot compared to CFL’s.