Last week I purchased an LED light to replace the first of many, many incandescent 65 watt bulbs in my home (primarily ceiling can lights).
LEDs are a marvel. Although the lights are expensive—I paid $20 for this one where the incandescents were around $3 each— the LED will use about 10% of the electricity and last for years, perhaps for my lifetime.
When I screwed in the first light my wife, Diane, recommended that I draw a diagram of the house and note when I replace each, with the model and price. With that map we’ll be able to rate the performance of the bulbs, and perhaps even note when we see a difference in energy costs.
Simple. Easy. And remarkably useful. Except for the drawing part. I’m useless at such tasks. But I’ll figure it out.
I find my thought processes already changed by making this map and thinking about how I’ll install new LEDs and when.
Start something new and make a recording. Note it in your daily journal. Sketch out a map. Create a new spreadsheet. Keep it up and the habit becomes natural. Follow this process and you yourself will be altered.
And the resulting information, the record, is amazingly useful.
That’s all I have to say. Simplicity itself.
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Randy MurrayConverting To LED Lighting: Method Without The Madness by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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I’ve had someone recommend I write the date of install on LED lights for the same basic idea. One thing you might note: if you have insulation above the recessed light and you simply install a BR30 LED or something like that, you may well get a shorter life span from the LED than expected. Reason is heat. In an insulated ceiling, you’ll generally want to pull out the current trim and replace with an LED downlight, which includes a bulb and trim. This costs a little more than the LED bulb alone, but should last longer because it addresses the heat issue.