Replacing Low Voltage Halogen Spots With LED MR16 Light Bulbs

You might have noticed recently that in many DIY and hardware stores the sections dedicated to lighting have started offering spot lights based on light emitting diodes (LED). Typically there are two types available - mains powered GU10 format lamps and the low voltage MR16 type.

These are very much intended as replacements for regular halogen lamps (though the ones sold in stores tend to be more expensive and less powerful than those you can easily source on the web). So what's going on here?

Halogen lamps certainly give a really pleasant, 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.

As you can figure out, if only ten percent of the electricity ends up being turned into light then essentially incandescent lighting (which includes halogen) uses ten times more energy than it ought to, almost all of which ends up as waste heat. Coupled with ongoing replacement costs this makes them a pretty expensive proposition.

Take by way of example a reasonably normal kitchen; this could quite easily contain twenty or more halogen lamps - each consuming 50 watts. In other words, a total of 1000 watts for just that room. Now try to imagine what the figure is likely to be for the whole house or your place of work.

Assuming usage of 5 hours per day and average electricity costs of 12 cents per kilowatt hour, the annual bill for lighting this example kitchen amounts to 219 dollars. Yet fitting MR16 LED light bulbs instead means you can still deliver the same amount of light, but with each bulb using only 6 watts. That lowers the cost right down to 26 dollars.

At the level of the individual light bulb the sums involved seem almost trivial - 0.07 of a cent to run an LED for one hour compared to 0.6 of a cent for a halogen lamp. Yet we are still looking at roughly a tenfold difference and as we have seen, even when scaled up to just a single room this comes to sizable savings.

So what is the reason that LED light bulbs are considerably cheaper to run? LED lamps emit photons (light) essentially in direct proportion to the energy put into them. Incandescent light bulbs however function by heating something up (typically an inert gas or metal filament) to the point that it actually glows, thus giving off light. However, most of the energy has been used to heat the bulb to the necessary temperature, and the light is therefore almost an accidental byproduct.


If you're interested in trying out money saving high quality LED lighting then the best place to find out more about MR16 LED bulbs review and LED replacements for halogen is online!