Why You Should Consider Replacing Halogen Lamps With LED

By Elvira Kavanagh

You can hardly have failed to spot recently that whereas once halogen lamps were the most common form of spot lights, now LED (light emitting diode) based lights are making steady inroads. This is particularly the case for GU10 type lights that are used for mains voltage rather than the 12v MR16 type.

LED spot lights are clearly aimed at taking over in the market dominated for years by halogen lamps and we’ll see what is driving this in a moment. But on a side note, be aware that the best priced and most powerful LEDs are invariably sold online rather than in bricks and mortar stores.

Well, halogen lamps certainly deliver a really pleasant, clean looking light, however they are also among the least efficient kinds of light bulb ever devised. Barely one tenth of the electricity they consume gets turned into actual light. Most of the energy ends up dissipated as unwanted 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 electricity than it ought to, almost all of which ends up as waste heat. Coupled with ongoing replacement costs this makes them a very expensive proposition.

Just take a fairly standard size kitchen by way of example; this could have say 20 recessed or track mounted 50W halogens spots burning through 1000 watts per hour. Scale that up across your whole home or office and prettyquickly you’re looking at serious money.

By replacing each of these with LED GU10 lamps that deliver the same amount of light but consuming six watts per lamp, you could instead light the same space using just one hundred and twenty watts. Assuming an energy cost of twelve cents per kilowatt hour and daily use of just five hours, that lowers the annual bill for lighting the kitchen from two hundred and nineteen dollars to just twenty six!

At the level of the individual light bulb the amounts involved seem almost insignificant – 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 approximately a tenfold difference and as we have seen, even when scaled up to just a single room this amounts to considerable savings.

So why are LED light bulbs so much cheaper to run? Well, LED lamps emit photons (light) pretty much 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 enjoyed this article then follow these links to learn more about LED or halogen and also Edison 6w LED GU10.

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Topics: Home and Family | Comments Off

Tags: energy saving, GU10 LED review, halogen lamp, home, Home and Family, LED GU10, LED review, LED spot lights, LED spotlight, light bulb review, light bulbs, Lighting, low energy, saving money, spot lights

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