LED Light Bulbs Can Save You Hundreds a Year

It’s been all over the news: energy prices are going up, just in time for the big winter demand. Politicians talk of freezing prices, automatically switching consumers or getting rid of taxes on energy as a solution. The price comparison sites are pushing for people to compare and switch energy providers. But given that the Big Six energy providers have all put their prices up (some by 10% or more!), there is only so much price freezes and switches can do. In order to really get your energy bills down, you’ll have to do more than get on the lowest tariff possible. You’ll also have to make some changes to how you use energy. Luckily, there is one particularly surprising item that can give you real energy savings: your light bulb. Source

This may seem shocking, especially because the days are getting shorter and we’re going to be using our light bulbs more. But by switching from your regular light bulbs to LED ones, you can save energy, and that means saving money, even if you use them more. Initially, LED light bulbs will cost you more. They can run up to £25 each, which is not a small amount by any stretch of the imagination. But once you’ve got them in place, they start saving you money on your electricity bills immediately, usually paying for themselves in 15 months or fewer. If you replace all the halogen bulbs in your home with LED light bulbs, they can save you hundreds of pounds every year after that point. Best of all, you don’t have to replace them nearly as frequently. Your typical halogen light bulb has an advertised lifetime of about 1000 hours, but LED bulbs have advertised lifetimes of 10,000 hours or even more. But how can they do this? By being super efficient. Old incandescent light bulbs put out 16 lumens (a unit of light emitted) for every watt of energy they used. Halogen lights put out 25 lumens per watt. LED light bulbs put out 45 lumens per watt. That means you’re getting more light for less energy. So what does that mean in the real world? Well, if you have 40 bulbs running for about 2.7 hours a day in your home, you will spend almost £300 per year if they are halogens but less than £30 if they are LEDs. That is a tenth of the price. The author of the Guardian article above worked these figures out here. Still, there are some issues with LED light bulbs. The bog standard ones can be cheap compared to dimmable ones or ones with higher wattages, and ones with MR 16 fittings (which are two thin spikes) can require you to get a new transformer. That would definitely offset the savings for a good, long while. They can also make a room seem cold, especially if you don’t buy one with the right colour temperature. The first LED light bulbs emitted light that looked blue instead of the yellow we expect from light bulbs. Companies have corrected this, and if you make sure to buy ones with a colour temperature of about 2700k, you should get light that is indistinguishable from kind halogen lights give off. That said, if you replace your regular bulbs, with their regular fittings, with LED light bulbs, you really can save hundreds of pounds a year. And even if you only replace a few, you may still see significant savings. Since every penny counts these days, that could make a real difference to your budget.