Lumens/watts/temperature in LED lightbulbs to someone who just doesn’t get the phrase ‘Incandescent Equivalent’

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My partner is driving me up a wall with “No one thinks about kelvins, just buy the 40W!” and I’m over here trying to explain why I’m taking time picking bulbs in a certain Kelvin range and figuring out the needed lumens for a room.

Bonus points for a simple diagram or a true (emphasis on 5) explanation I can link to her.

Cheers!

In: Technology

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

“Lumens” are how much *actual output* a lightbulb has: the amount of light shining out of them. “Watts” are how much *power* a lightbulb actually consumes.

The problem is, *when all bulbs were incandescent,* you could just compare power to power, because there weren’t any meaningful differences in efficiency. This is NOT true with LEDs. LED bulbs are dramatically more efficient, that’s kind of the point, and as a result “40W” *does not* mean the same amount of light output from two different LED bulbs. The actual unit that measures light-output is lumens, not watts. Two bulbs that both draw 40W can produce *very* different amounts of light depending on how efficient they are (the more efficient they are, the brighter they will be for a fixed power draw; or, conversely, a more-efficient bulb will draw less power for the same amount of light output.)

Likewise, incandescent bulbs meant for home use were essentially always in exactly the same color temperature range, so of course nobody cared–there weren’t any *choices.* Now, however, we CAN choose the color temperature–and it turns out that color temperature matters for things like helping people sleep better and avoid headaches and fatigue.

Getting the right lightbulb for your needs *can* be worthwhile. Of course, spending a dozen hours getting the *perfect* lightbulb, as opposed to one that is merely *quite good,* may not be an efficient use of time–but looking at least a little is definitely better than just pretending that they’re all the same and grabbing the first thing that comes up.

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