Another LED Bulb
October 08, 2009
– Comments (13)
So I was at the local Kroger and while wandering around, I noticed that they were carrying LED lightbulbs. Now if you remember my post a few months ago, an LED replacement for a 65 watt flood bulb in a canister proved less than satisfactory mostly due to the light being much too blue and directional.
But what caught my eye was an LED bulb that claimed to be a replacement for the 40 watt candelabra base bulb. (This is the skinny bulb base, not the normal one. Also known as the E12 base.) Now I have a bunch of places that use those bulbs, so this was interesting. So I bought one. It is a 2025LEDE12-30K-24 from Lights Of America. It cost $7.99 and is rated for 30,000 hours and uses 1.5 watts. In appearence it looks sorta of like the flame tip 40 watters it is replacing, but the bulb is a little fatter and it has a white blob of plastic above the screw in base that hides the electronics. The bulb part has about 10 LEDs in it.
I tried it in the chandelier first. The bulb is too ugly to stay there, but it seems to work ok. The package says not to put it in a dimmed circuit, but I tried it anyway. The bulb stayed at full output as the incandesents dimmed and then cut out completely. We hardly ever use the dimmer, so this is not that big a deal. The light seemed to be an ok white (much better than the flood) but more directional than I liked as all the LEDs point straight up.
I next tried it in a fixture on the porch that looks sort of like a coach lantern and has two of the 40 watters in it. It looked fine there, but more of the light was aimed up than I really wanted. I decided to leave the bulb there and see how things go. It is outside, but well under the porch roof and it never gets direct water contact.
Bottom line. This is much more satisfactory than the canister flood style bulb. I might buy another one to put in another of the outdoor fixtures. I will probably end up with one LED and one normal bulb in each of the outside fixtures as that seems to give a good balance between light quality and saving energy.
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