Understanding the Differences Between Low Energy & LED Light Bulbs

Confused by LEDs and Lumens?

I’ll try and pass on my easiest way to understand how the low energy and LED market is and what the lumen has to do with it!

We have customers coming in every day and quite honestly they do not have a clue as to the new bulbs, in fact I’d say they are scared of them because they don’t know which to choose.

So here we go, LED does not stand for low energy or low voltage it stands for Light Emitting Diode, enough said that’s all you need on that front.

The lighting Gods decided that the most effective way to compare light bulbs was to say how many LUMENS a bulb emits, aka how bright it is, so all bulbs now have a lumen category and number detailed on the box so the higher the number the brighter the bulb, don’t get this confused with wattage though, a lumen is not a watt.

The wattage is the power that the bulb will use and reflect on your household energy bill, the lumen will tell you ow much light you get from the bulb.

In old school terms I roughly use this calculation, if a bulb has an output of 400 lumens it will be a similar amount of light to the old 40w bulb, give or take a couple of watts. So a 1000 lumens should be equivalent to a 100w bulb.

This is way you should always look at the lumens and not the wattage in the first instance as different manufacturers will bring out new modern bulbs that produce more light for less power and its constantly changing.

Always check your fitting to see what is the maximum amount of wattage you can run through it? Then look if it is dimmable and then decide how much light you want, once you’ve done this the rest should be easy you pick a bulb that can be dimmable, that does not exceed the wattage and gives you enough light.

Don’t forget the bulbs may have different colour options, warm white or a daylight (more blue) finally the shape and size of the bulb with the right base cap are the last options, all of the old base caps are now made in an LED version and the shapes available are endless so all you need to think is if you will see the bulb and will it fit in the fitting, job done!