As with any device relying on tiny, delicate electrical components, things can go wrong. If an LED says it'll last 25,000 hours, it's really saying that it will take the bulb 25,000 hours to fade down to 70 percent brightness. This point, known as "L70," is the current standard in LED longevity. Using those figures, they can calculate the point at which the light will have faded to 70 percent of its original brightness - the point where you'll start to notice that things aren't quite as bright as they used to be. In the LM80 test, engineers run the bulb for 9 months straight in order to get an accurate read of the light's rate of decay. The test that the IES uses to determine a bulb's longevity is known as the LM80, and it calculates how long it will take for an LED to fade enough for you to notice it. Instead, they undergo "lumen depreciation," which just means that they gradually grow dimmer and dimmer over a very long period of time. Let's go ahead and dig a little deeper into those longevity claims.įirst, it's important to understand that LED lights typically don't "burn out," the way that incandescents do. Yes, really - at least, according to Energy Star and the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), the independent organization that created the testing procedures manufacturers use to rate LED lights. This Insteon LED promises to last for a whopping 52,000 hours. With some options now as cheap as $3 per bulb, that 10W LED would pay for itself in energy savings within a few months, then keep on saving you money for years if not decades to come. Compare that with the year or so you typically get out of an incandescent, and you can begin to see why so many people find these bulbs appealing. LEDs are also rated to last for tens of thousands of hours, which can translate to decades of use. Multiply that by the total number of bulbs in your home, and you're looking at the potential for some pretty significant long-term savings, especially if you live in area with above-average energy rates. That's more than the cost of replacing it with a basic LED like the one described above. Under those same parameters, a traditional 60-watt incandescent bulb that puts out the same 800 lumens will cost about $7.20 per year. Well, fear not, because we've got you covered with a handy guide that's chock-full of all the information you'll need to make sure that your next light bulb is the right bulb.įor instance, a single 10-watt LED that puts out 800 lumens of light (lumens are units of brightness for a light source - more on that in just a bit) will add about $1.20 per year to your power bill if used for 3 hours a day at an average energy rate of 11 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). New lights that promise to last 20 years and save you hundreds of dollars might sound good in theory, but how do you know which one is the right one for you? How do you know the bulb you're buying is going to be bright enough? What about color temperature? Color. With all of the new options out there (not to mention the disappearance of some important old ones), finding the perfect bulb can seem pretty daunting. In other words, the age of the LED is here, and you only need travel so far as your local lighting aisle to see the change. Congressional budget waffling briefly seemed to put the new standards on hold, but it was largely too late - the industry had already moved on, and wasn't interested in reversing course. The rising standards have already long rendered 100W and 75W incandescents obsolete, and in 2014, their 60W and 40W cousins met the same fate.
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