What are the Energy Savings with LED Flood Light bulbs?

We are at a fortunate time when we have various options for light bulbs to use both indoors and outdoors. We recently wrote about a quick energy savings tip using Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs) to replace regular light bulbs. When it comes to flood lights there are four main bulb options available;

* Standard / Regular (Incandescent) light bulbs
* Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulbs
* Halogen Light bulbs
* LED light bulbs


We calculated a simple cost analysis to determine the energy costs of the various bulb types - both the cost to purchase and the cost of energy used. We made the following assumptions in our calculations

* Cost per KWh of electricity = $0.10
* We used the maximum life in hours for our comparison of the bulb types
* We picked the average cost of each bulb type
* We used the manufacturer provided specs for life, wattage and Lumen for each bulb type



LED bulb's tip the scale as the most expensive bulbs in the market. A 660 Lumen (65 Watt equivalent of a regular bulb) cost about $90.00 at the time of this article. It has a stated life span of 50,000 hours, which is a very long time. LED bulbs also have the advantage of using less power.

CFL's are way cheaper than LED bulbs. They have a respectable life span of about 8000 hours and use less power than Halogen or Incandescent bulbs, while providing adequate brightness.

Halogen bulbs are slightly cheaper than CFL's. They use more power than CFL's and have a shorter life span. As such their cost to operate when compared to a similar CFL bulb is higher.

Incandescent bulbs are the cheapest, often costing less than $3.00 per bulb. Their stated life span is a respectable approximately 8700 hours, however they are severely disadvantaged in their cost to operate. In our example, a 65W Incandescent bulb uses 4 time more power than an LED bulb.

As prices drop, LED bulbs will become a more attractive offering particularly because of their longer life and low power usage. Based on current prices, Compact Fluorescent (CFLs) Bulbs are the way to go.