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Comparing LED and CFL lightbulbs

In May of 2008 I purchased my first LED lightbulb, a Westinghouse Nanolux 1W White LED. I thought it might be interesting to see how the LED bulb compared to some CFL in terms of brightness and energy use.

Methodology

To compare the light emitted by each bulb without a meter seemed pointless, but I did not have a meter. What I did have was a digital camera and a tripod. So I set up the tripod, set the camera to manual, set the exposure to something not too dark, not too bright, and the took a picture of each bulb once it was fully illuminated (CFLs sometimes have a 'warm-up period' before they hit maximum brightness). To measure electricity usage I plugged in my trusty Kill-A-Watt (the best thing you can buy if you're trying to cut down your electricity usage) and then plugged a very basic light in, swapped in each bulb and measured the electricity usage.

Results

Below you can see the photos taken of each bulb.

The least bright is the LED bulb, followed by two CFL bulbs, a GE 10 Watt (40 Watt equivalent) Energy Smart Soft White Spiral and a Feit Electric 18-Watt Compact Fluorescent Mini Twist Bulb (75-Watt Incandescent Equivalent), Daylight. As it turned out, the comparison isn't really fair - the LED bulb is pulling 0.03 amps, one quarter of the 0.12 amps the GE CFL is pulling. The Feit CFL is pulling 0.20 amps, which is almost twice the electricity of the GE CFL.

So for the moment, a very inconclusive result. I clearly need to buy a bigger LED bulb. I do begin to suspect that the claims of efficiency of LEDs over CFLs are, at least in 2008, not true. But higher efficiency LEDs are always coming down the pipe and the mercury problem with CFLs isn't going away.