High quality efficient home lighting using LEDs, HIRs and Halogens

Every year with Christmas lights I evaluate replacing my incandescents with LEDs. The warm white LED lights continually seem closer each year to mimicking the traditional incandescent Christmas lights. Personally, I'm an all white lights kind of guy. Anyone have some convincing favorites of LED lights in the small bulb format that could nearly pass for incandescents?

 

Very good write up. I think its time i change some lights out in my house haha

 

I bought some GE color changing (2 LEDs per light) from Costco this year and the light lights are getting closer to 4000k.

 

4000k still is a bit high for my personal liking. I saw some nice looking warm white ones at McLendons hardware today that they had on display which did a very nice job of mimicking the incandescent lights. But they were $22 for a 50 bulb strand of the miniature bulbs. Ouch.

Although in putting lights on the tree today, half the strands had sections out, even though they all worked when put into storage. I was explaining to my 7yr/old that we have to find the first bulb not lit and try replacing it and repeat as necessary to see if we can fix the strand. Not sure if any expression could convey WTF more than the one I received. Need less to say this will likely be the last year of incandescents on the tree, but still looking to upgrade the outside lights to LEDs in the low 3000k range.

 

I bet they get to 3000k next year.

I was surprised at the GE stings to be as warm as they were, I am by no means qualified to say what color temp they actually are, but compared to know 5000k and 4000k plus sitting close to actual incandescent strings I can tell you they are getting better.

 

Speaking of tree lights, gotta have the important tree accessory to represent all the off road camping trips in the Taco with the RTT.

 

Lost another 35w GU10 HIR in the kitchen and I’m out of HIR spares. I swapped in a spare 50w halogen for now. Going to have to pull the trigger on the HD LED swap soon.

 

Subbed. Might as well get some research in prior to our purchase.

 

Just replaced all my bulbs in the house based off this thread. The lighting is so much smoother. The contractor who built the house just threw in Westinghouse commercial 60w bulbs halogen bulbs everywhere. Until led Christmas lights can give off this warm color I gotta stick with these.

 

Nice! I ended up deferring the LED Christmas lights to next year as well, TBD.

 

This is as close as we could find. Philips “warm white” led bulbs.

 

I had to buy new lights this year due to running out of old incandescent replacement bulbs and finally having enough with the whole "one bulb burns out and breaks the circuit to all the other bulbs in series" thing. I did a bit of quick research and decided to get lights from here:

https://www.holiday-light-express.com/

I went with warm white LED SMD C7 bulb strings as my wife absolutely hates the color of first generation LED christmas lights. I think the warm white light temperature looks pretty good, close enough that it is hard to tell a difference between them and incandescents unless you are anal retentive about such. Quality of the bulbs looks very good and I think they are commercial grade in construction, so while they are not cheap, they should hopefully hold up longer than all the chinese junk from big box stores, Amazon, etc.

For comparison to incandscents, I took some photos with a Pixel 3 phone shown below. The LED C7s are strung under the eaves, and the incandescents are the smaller light strings strung around the porch swing and front door nooks (note the house paint color is white inside the nooks, and a yellowish brown outside the nooks, so don't get thrown off by that). While it is difficult to tell from the photo, the incandescent light strings are slightly lower in temperature, but you do have to look for it to see it, it doesn't stick out like night and day between the two. Overall, I'm happy with the color temperature, and figure as the polycarbonate diode enclosures yellow with age, the color should get better.

 

An interesting video @Saffa shared with me covering Philips Dubai lamps:

https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4

 

Going to read this in detail tonight. Pretty sure I end up with a takeaway or two.

Oh yeah, I run Cree LR6 6” down lights i my home at 2700k. Tried 3500 in the kitchen and laundry but hated it so I stuffed it in the rental property.

In the garage I have 8 enclosures, 4 are Costco LED panels which I think are quite nice and 4 are 4xT8 w Philips daylight LED tubes.

 

same here. everytime im at my parents the garage lighting bugs me. we have those single pin flourescents, 8' long. time to upgrade even though it only gets used for storage. this thread may motivate me

 

Ok, read it all first pass. I’ll pick up some GE relax 360 to try. I have some Feit from Costco which I like very much, didn’t expect them to be so pleasant.

As I mentioned before, most of my house is 6” recessed cans. I stuffed Cree LR6 in all of them at 2700k. I have 5 in my kitchen, one above the sink on a dedicated switch and 4 on a 3 way switch for when it gets dark while you are doing dishes I guess? Or if you forgot to turn on the lights before starting them before sunrise?

In the garage where I’m doing lots of crimping I’ve got heaps of daylight bulbs in fluorescent fixtures slowly migrating to the Costco led work light 1x4 panels. They are great but mounting them is a mild pain as I have drywall and no boxes since the fluorescent fixtures had ample space in them for the connections. I do hate the fact that half my garage lighting is using ballasts to led tubes and half is led panels but I didn’t want to burn all the money in the world replacing everything. I do one panel every few months or so. I recently added one above the workbench but it’s facing sideways right now. Need to angle it but that means re-framing and drywall which is annoying.

my living room is the biggest challenge. Ceiling has nothing right now and slopes from 8’ to maybe 16 or 18’ where it ends with a bank of 3x3 windows on a wall facing the stairs. We have two floor lamps right now which don’t give adequate light for playing on the rug and it’s the only playroom we have. Windows and doors on that side are north facing with tiny back patio and tall hedge due to neighbors being super close. The best light bleeds into this room from the rest of the home during daytime but at dusk and dawn it’s a cave feel. I’d like to figure something out but I’d really rather slap a 4th bedroom on top first and make the ceiling flat.

oh, also, my Cree LR6’s are running strong 10 years later. I had some failures within a year or two and many were warranty replaced. Hoping for 25 lifespan. Love 2700k and the efficiency. They are flawless performers in the kitchen and dining room where I need them the most (10’ ceilings helps there).

 

I hard pass on anything over 3000k for interior home duty. I know 5000k is supposed to be acceptable in select tasks environments like laundry, but I find it repulsive.

I saw GE Relax released an updated version of their bulbs using strand filaments vs the traditional emitters. I have not yet tried the newer version but plan to do so. The Feit HD bulbs from Costco are quite decent, but they lack the true omni-directional design of more modern LED lamps, as they still have the opaque base. I use them in my garage, but there all the lights are pointing down from the ceiling, so the opaque base facing the ceiling isn't an issue. In a horizontal mount application like an interior ceiling light, or an upward facing mount location expecting downlight such as a table lamp, that wouldn't be the case, as the opaque base makes the bulb directionalized.

Sacrilege to drop a vaulted ceiling. I'll have to post my new favorite floor lamp for the living room that does an outstanding job of diffused light distribution. I personally am not a fan of lamps that create hot spots of light, and instead enjoy lamps that can fill a room with a very natural diffused light. I've added a few lamps to the house of the later type and put the GE relax 40w equivalent bulbs in them, then in the evenings turn off all the higher power 'task' lights and just use the lower power diffused lights. It really transforms the living space to something warm and peaceful in a way that lights used during the daytime could not provide.

 

Totally aligned on the floor lamp. I’ll be on the lookout for your latest favorites. Our problem is that specific room is used as playroom and for media and family time so we would ideally have both “chill the f out” lighting and “ok you can play indoors” lighting. Most of the play time is bright enough from daylight so we’ve been mostly ok. The bulbs in our lamps are dimmable TP-Link mostly so we can dim or change color via Kasa app or Alexa. They are likely crap on CRI.

Dropping the ceiling to gain a room above it would be a trade off. With 1700 sq feet for nanny, 2 young boys, two adults working from home and a dog we use every sq inch every day. Wife’s work setup is currently in a very tight corner of the master after moving out of the garage. A fourth bedroom at 300 sq feet designed for the boys to sleep and play in would rule. The city is not friendly though to expanding within the footprint even though it would only fill in a corner which wouldn’t block anyone’s view.

If we got that done, we would have 10’ there and could do any sort of lighting we wanted. It’d be fun to pre wire for various options.

oh and all 4 vanity lights have bulbs pointed up I believe. Hence the relax 360 sounds very interesting. Especially if they are new and improved from before.

 

So am I but there is not a single light in my house that isn't an LED granted early LED's sucked but newer ones are quiet.

 

@daveeasa sent me some ~10yr old Cree ceiling lamps to see how they compare to modern LED lamps. My first thought was there is no way the CRI rating would be decent, but he had managed to find HD (90+ CRI) rated LEDs for his house back then. I was curious, because in that era R9 output to get a reasonable CRI rating was a real challenge. These were some pretty nice Cree products at the time. Reading up on them more, Cree had solved the R9 issue by having a dedicated R9 emitters, such that one set of emitters would emit the majority of the spectrum and the R9 emitters would fill in for the red light where traditional LEDs of the era fell short. A cleaver solution to the technology limitations of the era.

So I took these 10 year old units for a quick spin.


My improvised test platform. The heat sinks on these 12w lights is substantial, massively overkill, which should help them have a very long service life.


Impressively these 2700k 90 CRI lamps come in at a very impressive 94 CRI, considering these are from roughly 2011.


As usual the devil is in the details. The CRI ratings look great numerically, but the spectrum distribution doesn't. You want a somewhat linear slope in your spectrum distribution to match an incandescent light, which is challenging for an LED. Below is the spectrum comparison between the 10yr old Cree 2700k HD LEDs and my favorite GE Relax HD series LEDs.



Obviously it isn't a fair comparison to run a modern product against a 10yr old one, but interesting academically. You can see the limitations of the two different color emitter technique used by Cree at the time, while it does produce all the required wavelengths to get a good CRI value, distribution is very uneven. The R9 emitters producing ~620nm are very narrow in output spectrum and do not blend well with the emitters producing the rest of the spectrum producing an undesirable high amplitude spike.

For comparison, here is what a Par20 halogen light looks like in spectrum, with perfect 100 CRI. Anything beyond 700nm is IR and wasted heat, so that isn't necessary for an LED replacement and shows why halogens are so inefficient by comparison.



Now an LED doesn't need to exactly match this profile, but you do want to replicate this near linear gradient for high quality light as much as possible, excluding anything past 700mn. So comparing the spectrums, you can see the GE bulbs do a much better job of providing a uniform profile vs the older Cree bulbs using the separate designated R9 emitter approach. No surprise of course, it was a clever solution to the technology shortcomings of the day, but technology continues to progress. GE has released a newer version of the Relax series that I haven't yet tested, so the current model may be even better than this data suggests.