Bright ideas: LED light bulbs
Look around the room you’re sitting in now – how many lights are on? Just the main one, or are there a couple of standing and table lamps scattered around? Is this the only room in the house that’s lit, or did you leave the kitchen light on? Or maybe the one in the bathroom?
Each of those bulbs is a vacuum sucking money out of your house. In times like this, that is something that you can’t afford. With LED light bulbs, including GU10 light bulbs, you can staunch the flow.
In a typical three bedroom home you can spend over £200 a year just keeping the place lit up. As the cost of energy rises, and the financial situation forces us all to tighten our belts, the standard halogen bulb will go the way of the gas lantern.
When you imagine an energy saving bulb, you're probably thinking of a Compact Fluorescent Lamp, or CFL, an ugly glass pretzel-looking thing. With a lifespan of 8,000 hours and projected costs of £3.72 a year (based on six hours of use a day) a CFL bulb can offer you definite savings, but they are really quite ugly.
Fortunately the market for energy saving light bulbs has come forward a long way since then. LED light bulbs don’t look that different from the traditional bulb you see floating over a cartoon character’s head, but in money saving terms they leave even CFL bulbs in the dust.
At first buying LED bulbs might seem like the very antithesis of money-saving. At £15 an LED bulb seems like a major investment compared to their £1.50 halogen cousins. But how many times are you going to have to replace that halogen bulb? Once a year? With a projected life span of 40,000 hours, LED bulbs are likely to need replacing only one every 30 years. That’s 50 pence that you’re spending a year on bulbs, a saving of two thirds before we even start to look at the save you make in energy costs.
Let’s look at this in terms of a straight head-to-head competition. The kitchen is one of the most brightly lit rooms in the house, it is, after all, a room where you really need to be able to see what you’re doing. To keep it lit, let’s say you’re using three GU10 bulbs six hours a day. We’ve already pointed out the savings you’ll make over the lifespan of an LED bulb. During the 1,000 hours of service you get out of a 150 watt GU10 halogen bulb it will cost you £12.75.
The 9 watt GU10 LED bulb will set you back only £1.97 over the same period, £30.60 over its entire 40,000 hour span. |
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