Transitioning to LED lights

I know this was touched on in the "Smart Home" thread, but after some initial resistance on my part about the cost, we have begun to transition the bulbs in our 5-year-old home (built about 7 years ago) to LEDs.

My wife has some of the curly-Q bulbs - which I hate hate hate - in some of our lamps and bathroom fixtures, but the house has maybe 20 recessed fixtures that take (in our case) 65-watt floodlights.

They have, after 5 years of steady use, begun to go out. It took a little trial and error, but I have finally found LED versions that are just as "warm" as ones that are burning out. The first 3-pack I bought was $35, but this weekend I went back to Lowe's and found that they'd all been marked down to $19. Sweet!

I'll probably go ahead and stock up enough to replace all of our conventional floodlights in advance.

We also have several exterior fixtures which use those little "teardrop" lights. They tend to burn out every time there's a significant swing in the temperature so we've gone through a lot of them since we moved in.

I did not like the LED versions when I bought a couple of them maybe two years ago - didn't seem bright enough - but I bought one recently for a little lamp in the house that stays on all the time and I'm quite pleased with it. I'm about out of the traditional versions, so I imagine that'll be next.

 

You're right about the newer LED lights being warmer (which is a bit of a misnomer, because "warmer" colored light is actually a lower temperature on the Kelvin scale). The best way to make sure they match the color of your incandescent bulbs is to look at the Kelvin rating on the package and match it up (I think most incandescents run around 2700 Kelvin), that way you aren't stuck purchasing and returning endless bulbs until you find the right color.

Some LED lights now actually let you adjust the temperature (or even color) of the bulbs, but they're typically super expensive (I think a Philips Hue bulb is like $60).

I have the GE Link lights in my house and, color-wise, they look great. Nice warm glow and plenty bright enough. You can dim them on your smartphone and schedule them, etc. They cost around $15 per bulb. However, they do not work well if put on a dimmer switch. The physical dimmer messes with their connectivity. I really like them for my exterior lighting, so I never have to think about turning them on or off. You can set them to turn on at sunset and turn off at sunrise, which is really convenient.