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03Lightningrocks wrote:

WildBill wrote:...."Abraham"......
True. It reminds me of trying to something for nothing. You get 70W for the price of 20W [but the bulb costs more!]

I have learned the hard way that temperature is possibly more important than lumens. At one point my living room looked like my reptile terrarium. I had to purchase new bulbs in the correct color range!

Color temperature is in degrees Kelvin such as 5000K. That would be a very blue white (probably close to daylight) Incandescent is around 3000K, which is a nice warm white. Incandescent produces a full spectrum of color without spikes in color. It has a smooth curve heavy on the red. Fluorescent, Metal halide, Sodium and LED produce color spikes. Fluorescent has spikes in the green and purple areas. That's why things don't look as pretty under fluorescent. LED is not as bad, but it usually only has a color rendering index of around 80% where incandescent is much higher.

LED is getting better all the time. The color rendition index and the efficiency are improving every year. But for beauty incandescent still holds the prize. Warm white LED's 2800K can look pink. To me 3000k to 3200k is where you want to be unless its for a work environment where your trying to keep people awake.

But you need to experiment with the color temperature to see where you like it. Comparing it to incandescent side by side is one way. That is if you have any incandescent left in your arsenal.

Anyone sticking with their incandescent bulb flashlights? Yes the market does take care of it self without the need for new laws.

Fluorescent is only a little worse on energy usage than LED, however LED color is much better. The only disadvantage to LED that I have found is that the bulb cost drops over time. Thus a LED bulb now is cheaper than one you bought last year. Thus you may be able to save more money by waiting to the best buy point to purchase the "lifetime" bulb.

Thus rather than spending unbelieveable amounts of money to replace all the lights in my house with LED, I am using up the fluorescent bulbs I have on hand, before switching to LED. Other bulbs are being replaced with LED as needed.

My 100 watt incandescent bulbs are being saved for my get out bag.

I stocked up on 100 watters some time ago. If discovered and seized by government agents, It would probably be described as an arsenal by the media. 60 and 40 watters are useless when you really need light. Yeah I know you can use two small ones. The new fangled bulbs don't impress me. They are dirty and yeah the specs, say they produce the same output as the slower bulbs, I just don't see it in real world usage.