Recently I was having lunch with a friend when one of the overhead lights in her kitchen went out, she then began to complain about the life cycle of the average light bulb and about how much she hated having to lug a ladder into her kitchen to change them. Of course I casually took the opportunity to suggest “Why not just use LED lighting? The bulbs will last a lot longer and they’re easier on your electric bill.”  My friend proceeded to grab a rather small looking LED bulb from a junk drawer to show me that she’d tried LED and that “the darn thing isn’t bright enough.”   I had to laugh, as she was trying to use a bulb best suited for a table lamp where she clearly needed a PAR bulb. Once I explained how LED lights work differently and that she would need to find the right type of bulb, we were off to her local lighting store to see what LED bulbs they had that would work.

While we were shopping my friend had a lot of questions ranging from “What is an LED exactly?”, “How does this save me money when it’s more expensive?”, and “How do I know which LED bulb is the right one?”

First I explained to my friend how the old incandescent bulbs worked; that the light was produced from heating a filament and that most of the energy was lost in the form of heat and not light. She then pointed out how she’d burned her hand trying to change a bulb in her kitchen. I pulled up the Knowledge Base on our website to show her this article and began to explain how an LED light works. We discussed how LED’s are solid-state lighting devices that contain a semiconductor diode packaged in a clear epoxy or silicon gel.

To explain how LED lighting could save my friend money, I pointed out how her current light bulb life was roughly 2,000 hours, and that based on the warranty an LED replacement would give her fifteen times that. I went on to tell her that this would not only save money on buying replacement bulbs, but that the LED light would use less electricity resulting in a lower electric bill. The difference between spending $10 fifteen times, versus spending $40 once definitely sold her on the idea of switching over.

I was a bit shocked when my friend went to grab a box without looking as I tried to answer her question as to what LED bulb she should get. When I asked how she had picked the light bulb out she replied “It looks like it’s the same shape as my other bulbs.”  We very quickly discussed the differences between the lights, watt equivalency, and color temperature as I picked out the correct light for her kitchen and put back the outdoor floodlight she almost purchased. In the end we purchased three 75-Watt Equivalent Indoor/Outdoor LED Flood Light Bulbs (3000K Warm White light). My friend had a last minute grumble over the price, until we broke down the hundreds of dollars she was saving by not buying such a high frequency of replacements, and that she wouldn’t be climbing that ladder the replace them nearly as often.