I bought 2 cases of PAR20 50 Semi-spot about 20 years ago.
I like halogen. Still haven’t used all of them.
For the price of an LED, I can run these PARs for the rest of my life.
In fact, I thing I have enough bulbs/tubes to last 20-30 years. Which, frankly is longer than I will.
For all those who rushed out an bought CFL’s: don’t we feel silly now?
Not at all, probably saved 40 bucks over the last 5 years. Why on earth would you feel silly?
Not really. They saved me money over their lifetime.
CFL. I bought a shit load of them dirt cheap at CostCo like 3 years ago. Used them to replace all the incandescents as those burned out. Still have most of them sitting in a closet, waiting for the first round to die. Only had one burn out so far.
An unholy mixture of CFLs of various vintage, incandescents and one solitary LED I bought last week. Currently I think CFLs are the most common but I plan to go all LEDs on the remaining incandescents.
I’ve never had to change a CFL so far, and many of the bulbs were here when we moved in 4 years ago.
Aside from bulbs that are almost never on like the fridge or oven, LED.
I have only one real complaint–I can’t find a decent replacement for MR16 halogens. They usually have a partially aluminized reflector that gives them significant backscatter, which is pleasing for some lighting situations. I have not yet found an LED model that replicates this. They could just have a small number of rear-pointing LEDs to achieve the same effect if the geometry of the reflector didn’t work out.
Thanks for all of the responses. I guess I’ll go ahead and swap out my remaining incandescents.
To partially hijack my own thread, has anyone tried the LED tube lights that replace the 4 foot fluorescents?
Mostly CFL’s. I replaced with them a few years ago. When they burn out (rarely) I’ll replace them with the spare CFL’s I have, until they are gone. But will then switch to LED’s.
I have LEDs mostly as strip lights under counters.
Still have incandescents in only a few places:
Interesting. The last review I read had Cree at the bottom as far as dimming. IIRC (I can’t find the review right now) they said Cree bulbs were noisy when dimmed. I’ll give a closer look to the ones you linked to.
ETA - Ah, wait! $8.00 each, multiplied by 5 per ceiling fan multiplied by 7 fans = $280. I think I’ll wait until the price comes down a bit.
Your ceiling fan lights dim? That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?
Aside from the appliance bulbs and the fluorescent tubes above the workbench which I haven’t gotten around to replacing yet, everything else is LED. The electricity savings between the 4 75w floods in the front and the 10 40w halogen track lights in the kitchen made swapping the rest a no brainer. Plus, I HATE the light coming off CFLs, absolutely loathe them.
depends how it’s wired. If the fan motor and light fixture are separately fed, you can put a dimmer on the lights. the kitchen ceiling fan at my folks’ house is set up that way. the bedroom ones were not.
I have two (family room, Mbd) ceiling boxes with three wires:
White neutral
Red and Black (don’t remember which is which) one is always hot, the other is from a switch box.
Run the ‘constant hot’ to the motor, the ‘switched hot’ to the lamp on the fan.
Use whatever to control the fan (pull chain) and put a dimmer on the lamp switch.
Of course, there are now cheap remote controls for fans. They require only a constant hot and a neutral - the remotes have speed selection and a dimmer for the lamp.
I may get around to putting a fan in the LR which has only a switched hot. I can wire the switch leads together to get a constant hot.
And YES I KNOW some will want a switched hot for the remote. So leave the switch alone.
Apartment resident - Many years ago I switched all of my incandescents to halogens. My apartment was remodeled last year and they put in a nice looking overhead light in the kitchen which has two 30w flourescent tubes in it. Barely enough to see what’s going on. I installed two undercounter worklights (one halogen and the other one similar, but don’t remember what it is called) one over the sink and one over the prep area.
I was never conned into those twisty flourescent bulbs primarily because of the color of the light, and the same with the early LEDs. I wanted sunlight not moonlight. The fluorescents must also be disposed of properly because they contain mercury, buy i doubt few are which will eventually lead up to another environmental crisis, thanks to the US Congress.
Bob
No, all of my fans came with a remote control(I think most do today). The remote has high, medium, and low settings for fan speed, but allows the lights to be dimmed via a rheostat mounted in the fan housing.
Actually, I added a fan/light combo to a room that had no previous overhead lighting and just use the remote - I didn’t install a switch. It works fine.
I’ve always hated CFLs - their buzzing noises, their pallid, soulless light, hate 'em. There’s also something weird about the wiring in my apartment - incandescent bulbs burn out way, way faster than they should. After a year or so of dealing with lights that burned out in only a couple of months, I got fed up and bought enough LEDs to replace every light in the place. So far, all of them are still working. Also, they’re efficient, environmentally-friendly, and don’t generate excess heat in the summer when I’m trying to keep the place cool. Hooray for LEDs!
At this point maybe 75% LED; 15% Fluorescent; and 10% incandescent
About 40% incandescent, 45% CFL, and 15% LED. In general, I’ll replace an incandescent with an CFL of equivalent brightness unless I need instant full switch-on brightness in that fixture. I’ll replace a CFL with the same CFL until they’re gone, and then LED.
For enclosed fixtures, though, I’ll skip CFLs entirely; they suffer horribly and die quickly if heat can’t escape. I’ll actually go full LED in those cases, and just put functioning bulbs pulled out of those fixtures back into the reserves.
I even went so far as (experimentally) replacing 48" dual-tube fluorescents in the garage with wired-in LED drop in replacements. That means that the fixture is converted to LED-only now; you disconnect the ballast from the power and wire the LED tube lights directly into the 120v circuit. But it’s great, other then the nuisance of the fixture conversion process, and I’ll do that with all of the fluorescent fixtures in the garage.
I very much doubt it’s actually a rheostat. That would be a resistance dimmer, which means that the control would have to be quite big, and would get very hot when the light is dimmed. Also, it would be a terrible waste of electricity – all the energy not used by the light would be used by the rheostat, and turned into heat.
It is actually an electronic control, that does the same function as a rheostat in that it dims the light.
From most to least–