Looking for best price on led bulbs

[overdalimit]

Looking for cheap dimmable soft white 60 watt equiv LED bulbs for the house...any ideas? heard one guy say out east he found them for like 3 bucks a bulb.

[delcecchi]

Looking for cheap dimmable soft white 60 watt equiv LED bulbs for the house...any ideas? heard one guy say out east he found them for like 3 bucks a bulb.

Check your electric company for rebates. Make sure energy star logo on package. (some places subsidize retail rather than offer rebates)

We get half the retail price as rebate from RPU

[JOHNBIGDOG]

You buy a cheep electronic device, you get a cheep device.

I quite a few Fiet LED lamps, and am happy with them, (all 5000K color temp) and then I purchased a couple Sylvania bulbs. Paid a little more but they seem to scatter the light better, and start up is much quicker.

check MAn Ards?

Pay attention to lumen output.

[Down Deep]

JohnBigDog make a good point that all light bulbs are not created equal. I've had some experience in this area while working on a major lighting and electrical project for a large building our company owns. Lighting is an engineered product designed for specific tasks. If you are looking for some bulbs to just scatter light in non-critical areas then go cheap. If you are lighting for a specific purpose like a kitchen where you will need light in specific areas and be adjustable, then start reading the labels and get the product designed for that purpose. These will cost more.

I did learn that LED's are not the most cost efficient lighting options for many applications. If your looking for lighting where the bulb is on for short periods like in a bedroom or bath CFL's or incandescence bulbs is a better option because of the cost of the bulb vs the time to pay for it with energy savings. If you want to light for effect or have areas that need to be lit for extended periods, then LED is a better choice.

[delcecchi]

Problem with CFLs is they take time to get to full brightness and they don't hold up with frequent on-off cycles, at least that has been my experience. I am planning on trying LED bulbs in a couple places that get the on-off thing.

Also "dimmable" cfls really don't dim. I have hopes that LED's will actually dim.

[overdalimit]

I am installing them in the great room of our lake place (REA) I have 6 fixtures on one dimmer with 3 bulbs per fixture. With 60 watt bulbs that is just shy of 1100 watts. I am running these lights on one 900 watt dimmer which gets hot. It was always my intention to put LED's throughout the cabin but was shocked to see the price so I temporarily put in incandecents until I could find a deal on the LED bulbs. Looking for the soft white, dimmable 60 watt equiv. LED bulbs. Since I need 20 of these alone you can see the $$ adding up. I also need 16 of the 40 watt candelabra LED dimmable bulbs...more $$.

[BartmanMN]

I think you need to replace the dimmer switch as well with one that is compatible with LED.

[overdalimit]

900 watt is largest LED compatable Dimmer I can find. It is a brand new switch. All dimmers have been purchased with LED's in mind. I know I have too much wattage for the switch with the conventional bulbs. I am looking for a source for cheap LED bulbs. By cheap I am looking for under $5 a bulb...

Once I have switched out the bulbs I will only be pushing like 175 watts through the 900 watt switch.

[aanderud]

Be sure that the bulbs you get are compatible with the dimmers you have (or get compatible dimmers at the same time). Otherwise you might get a buzzing sound from the bulbs, the dimmer switch, or both. Part of the problem is that some switches aren't designed to work with too-low of a current draw -- so, if it's normally driving two bulbs of 60 watts each, that's 120 watts. Replace with two LED bulbs and you're down around 20 watts. That lower level of current sometimes messes with the electronics in the dimmer switch and causes a buzz. If you bought "LED compatible" dimmers you probably (hopefully) won't have this problem, but still they may have compatibility issues. Not sure. Just check the bulb manufacturer's recommendations I suppose.

Here's a list of dimmers that cree says works with their bulbs. Other LED bulb vendors may have similar lists.

http://www.creebulb.com/Content/downloads/product_info/cree_dimmer_compatibility.pdf

In the PDF they say they manufactured their bulbs to work with standard incandescent dimmers, but it's apparent that it's not universally true because I have "dimmable" Cree LED bulbs in our master bathroom (8 of them, 4 above each sink) and the buzzing that comes from both the bulbs and the dimmer switch itself when at low-brightness is totally annoying. I found that putting only 4 LEDs (above one sink) and leaving 4 incandescent bulbs above the other, to increase the current draw on the switch, made it better -- but not completely fixed. I'll be replacing the switch at some point with one that's on the cree compatibility list (simply running it at max brightness for now).

Also regarding your comments on cost -- even at $5 per bulb, they will pay for themselves over incandescent over time. Figure you're paying $4.50 more than an incandescent bulb, which is about 40 kilowatt hours, roughly. At 50 watts of savings per bulb, that's roughly 800 hours. If the light is on 2 hours a day that's just over a year to pay back, after which you'll save 4 bucks a year. Hopefully the bulb lasts 10 years and you come out way ahead on that sucker. Adjust the payback period accordingly based on daily usage.

Note that they won't pay for themselves versus CFLs, however, since CFLs have gotten so cheap and uses little power (like the LED). So, you have to decide whether the added cost offsets the pain of CFLs -- the CFLs burning out 10x earlier than they should, the mercury in the CFL bulbs, the flickering of CFL, or the dim startup of a CFL. To me, going to LED was worth it. I invested literally hundreds of dollars (I bought 100+ bulbs) in my house to upgrade to LED, and while I won't see the payback on day one, it'll come eventually. I just can't stand CFL bulbs.

[Down Deep]

Try IKEA. They have about every type of LED there is.

[fishyspringer]

We have been putting in the Cree LED bulbs from Home Depot at our cabin as the renovation progresses. We have been happy with them. They have good color and they even work in the cold.

[overdalimit]

Thanks for the suggestions!

[chasineyes]

Why do you care about the price? I thought the whole point of LED and CFL's etc.. were to help save the environment...

[aanderud]

Why do you care about the price? I thought the whole point of LED and CFL's etc.. were to help save the environment...

Ha! I actually went with the LEDs for two reasons, neither of which were environmental. I do like convenience, and I really love money!

a) Convenience: I got sick of changing incandescent bulbs all over the house all the time. With 100+ bulbs it seems like every month I was changing one or more in some room or another. And I'm short, so I need to get a ladder to do this in almost all cases. I'm REALLY lazy, and digging that ladder out to change a bulb was never on the top of my list, so I'd wait for 2-3 to go out and then hit them all. Sorta silly to live in the dark due to laziness, so I needed something longer lasting. Since I hate CFL, that left LED as the only option.

Money savings: I didn't buy the bulbs when they first hit the market at 50 or 30 bucks or whatever. I waited until they were 5 bucks (7 for the flood light variety). Sure I just spent 10x as much on the bulb, but then it lasts 20x as long (average incandescent bulb lasts like 1000 hours, versus 20000+ for LED). I fully expect to never have to replace a bulb in the next 10 years. So, I'm coming out ahead in capital outlay in the long run. Operating cost savings are icing on the cake. I can save 3+ bucks a year (on average) per bulb. My power bill went down literally about 30 bucks a month when I changed the bulbs out. Could I have achieved some of that savings by simply being uber-diligent about turning off all the lights all the time in all the rooms I'm not in? Maybe, but then again I'm not in it to save the environment, I'm in it for convenience, and for me it's convenient to leave lights on sometimes

[delcecchi]

CFL were supposed to last almost forever also. They forgot to mention that was only if they were only turned on and off occasionally. In an application where they get switched frequently, not so much on the lifetime.

(holy cow 100+ of bulbs?)(that are not in lamps?)

[aanderud]

CFL were supposed to last almost forever also. They forgot to mention that was only if they were only turned on and off occasionally. In an application where they get switched frequently, not so much on the lifetime.

(holy cow 100+ of bulbs?)(that are not in lamps?)

Yeah, these have a 10 year warranty and they're from a well-respected LED company (Cree), and I got them at home depot. I'm fairly sure I'll be OK if I need to use the warranty, but on the other hand for some reason I trust that I won't need to use it as much as I would on a 100 CFLs, just due to the simplicity of converting 110 AC to 5v DC or whatever these guys want on their emitter. Hopefully I'm not mistaken. Time will tell, as I'm only 9 months into the experiment.

I thought 100+ sounded high but I also thought that when buying them. Without counting I just picked up 30 and figured that would get me halfway there or so, but it just barely put a dent in things. Then before buying the remaining bunch, I actually counted and said "HOLY COW", there are more bulbs in a house than you think. The lady at the checkout counter literally laughed out loud when i walked through there with 70+ bulbs There are 48 on the main floor, 27 in the basement, and 30 on the 2nd floor. The main floor count sounds high but it includes like 15 lights outdoors as well -- 7 in the garage, 5 in my front yard (3 on the front of the garage and 2 by front door), 1 on the garage side door, 1 on the deck in the back yard, and 2 shining down in the yard off the back yard porch. Of those 105 bulbs, only 3 in the main floor are in lamps and 3 on the upper level are in lamps. A few others are reachable without ladders, but still the majority of them are annoying to replace.

Now, to be fair I wouldn't have had to replace every stinking bulb -- some are hardly used. But I have this compulsive obsessive thing that happens on occasion and I just didn't feel right replacing like 80 of the 105 bulbs, so I went all out and did them all. Some 15-25 of those bulbs won't pay for themselves before I'm retired and out of this house, methinks. But assuming the others last as long as they should, I'll be way ahead of the game.

[JOHNBIGDOG]

My expirienced with the Fiet brand and dimmers, you may get some "lazy" bulbs.

I purchased two just to see how they worked, found out they did, then purchased three additional. When they were all in one fixture two did not start up immediately. I verified that my dimmer was LED compatible. This was actually a surprise to me since the dimmer was installed prior to the LED becoming main strem. I returned the two bulbs to the store and then all five bulbs worked in unison from full intensity down to the minimum intensity.