We recently converted our homes, offices and industrial warehouse to 100% LED lighting and learned much in the process, while saving a big bunch from electric bills. In brief; Living in Spanish Lookout and switching your whole home (20 bulbs) from incandescent to filament LED lighting, you would save an estimated BZ$2754, or about BZ$230 every month. For the rest of Belize where BEL supplies your energy, the savings would be an estimated BZ$1458 annually, or about $121 per month. And besides the big savings, we were able to customize and improve all the illumination variables with the top quality light bulbs specially imported by Allen Electric with Peters Glass Shop.
The first thing we had to learn about is Lumens and “candela”, which are respectively a measure of the total quantity of visible light emitted by a source and a measure of luminous intensity (analogous to radiant intensity). IKEA, an innovator in affordable home improvement, is doing a lot of LED education to get people to “think Lumens, not Watts”. As our culture still uses the old incandescent light bulbs Watt numbers as reference, then check the attached table as it comes very handy to compare them in Lumens.
With old bulbs it was an issue of economy against comfort to get an area well illuminated, but with the hi-tech LED lights we installed, the difference in electrical consumption between for example a 400 vs. a 800 lumen bulb is trivial; 6.3 watts vs. 10.5.
Other amazing advantage we found was its life span; From 6 months in average for the old ones vs. 22 to 34 years for this top quality LEDs!
Maybe you already found that LEDs dissipate less heat, which means that they waste less energy, but let’s talk about other kind of “temperature”. Light temperature is more about colors which are based on the color given off by heated metal. Because of old incandescent bulbs and candles, what is called warm light is in fact a cooler color temperature… What? The answer comes from a lighting company: “It is important to remember that indoor spaces lit to lower light levels will typically look and feel better under warm lamps, while higher light levels are easier to tolerate using cool lighting. A space which receives an abundance of sunlight may seem more natural when cooler lamps are installed since their light is closer to high colour temperature of natural daylight.”
To close, we will ask: Do you think it’s time to switch to hi quality LED light bulbs? …They are cheap in the short and in the long timeframe, their light quality is excellent, they will probably outlast many of us and they use a fraction of the electricity of old bulbs.
At least our answer is: For own advantage and for the environment, we all better dump the incandescent and the compact fluorescents bulbs now!
Where to find the best ones in Belize? There is a limited amount of them going on sale at Peters Glass Shop in Spanish Lookout, with these options available:
– Standard indoor 110 Volts AC from 3 to 12 Watts, in cool and warm versions.
– High intensity outdoor 30 Watts with motion sensor.
– For solar installations, efficient 12 Volt DC from 0.6 to 72 Watts sets, in cool and warm versions.
– RGB (color changing) full kits.
– And some other great accessories like special transformers, rechargeable waterproof pocket flashlights and more.
