Reasons To Replace Halogen Lamps With LED

You may have noticed that recently the lighting shelves in many DIY and hardware stores have started stocking spot lamps based on light emitting diodes (LED). Most usually the mains powered GU10 base rather than the low voltage MR16 type.

The primary use for GU10 LED lamps is in replacing existing halogen spot lights, and we'll see why people want to do this in a moment. It's worth pointing out though that many of the best (brightest and competitively priced) LED light bulbs are not to be found in retail outlets but on the internet instead.

Well, halogen lamps certainly provide a really nice, clean looking light, but they are also among the least efficient forms of light bulb ever devised. Scarcely one tenth of the electricity they use gets converted into actual light. Most of the energy ends up dissipated as waste heat.

You don't need to be a brain surgeon to work out that if halogen and other types of incandescent lighting consume ten times more electricity producing heat than light, then they are not exactly cost effective to run. They also have a dismal record where longevity is concerned and require constant replacement.

Take as an example a fairly typical kitchen; this could easily have 20 or so halogen lamps with each one burning 50 watts. That's a total of 1000 watts for just one room. Now imagine what the figure is likely to be for the entire house or your place of work.

If we assume usage of 5 hours per day and that average electricity costs are 12 cents per kilowatt hour, the annual bill for lighting this kitchen amounts to 219 dollars. Yet fitting GU10 LED light bulbs instead means you can still deliver the same amount of light, but with each bulb using only 6 watts. That cuts the bill right down to 26 dollars.

So although the saving from each individual LED light bulb doesn't appear to come to all that much (0.072 of a cent compared to 0.6 of a cent per kilowatt hour), you can easily see how this scales up. And as you can imagine, pretty quickly you're dealing with really considerable sums of money.

So why are LED light bulbs so much cheaper to run? Well, LED lamps emit photons (light) essentially in direct relation to the electricity put into them. Incandescent light bulbs however all work on the principle of heating something (typically an inert gas or metal filament) until it actually glows, thereby giving off light. However, most of the energy has been used to heat the bulb to that point, and thus the light is almost an accidental by product.


If you found this article interesting then these links provide much more information about both LED spot light and LED spotlight.