I've wanted to get to the point where I only had LEDs in my house, but I've been limited by four problems (1) the under-cabinet bulbs in my kitchen and (2) the landscape lights in my backyard (3) I had found fluorescent replacement lights to be very common or inexpensive and (4) I had halogen-based light fixtures. Slowly, I'm getting past all of these barriers and making progress toward only LED lighting in my house.
Here's how my solutions to the four issues has gone. By the numbers, see below.
(1) I recently found some good candelabra base corn-cob LEDs on Amazon. They are bright and I've ordered another 5 after the first 10 have worked out. Now, I just need to figure out get the bread box lit in the corner.
Under-cabinet lighting! (see the dim area in the corner that used to be the bread box).
Hard to tell they are corn cob from this view, but quite easy to see in the reflection with your naked eye.
(2) I found a good T10 replacement that was svelte enough to fit into Cast Wall lighting fixtures that abound in my backyard. Unfortunately, it was super expensive ($20). Just recently, I found a package of 20 LED bulbs on Amazon for $50. Given that I needed 19, this was perfect. And $380 wasn't a particularly attractive purchase price. My wall lights had been installed when the backyard was redone in 2012, but most of the bulbs have burnt out by now. (I had originally thought that the wiring was bad, but it turned out to be the simpler problem of just burnt out bulbs). LEDs should basically last forever and limit my need to do awkward replacements. And they are 2.6 watts instead of 40 watts. So now I'm contemplating adding some more lights with all of those spare watts that I have on my transformer.
Bright indirect landscape lighting. Only beware that many of the LEDs of the T10 size are really designed to work via DC. If you run them in an AC circuit (as is my landscaping lights) there will be a 60 hz flicker. This isn't too annoying for indirect lighting
(3) Fluorescent replacements are readily available and quite good. I bought four two foot units and six four foot units. Both are well-rated on Amazon. Most of the bad feedback is stupidity on the part of the customers. Just be sure that you are ready to do some (very simple) rewiring of the units. I pulled out and threw away the ballast on all of the units that I replaced. See pictures and descriptions below.
Very well-lit upstairs hallway
I removed the diffusers on the 4' units - they are being used in an indirect application already, so I figured it would just dim the light. I also stapled Aluminum foil on the sides of the trench they are sitting in to help reflect light.
The 2' LED bulbs lighting up the (very messy) loft
By removing two screws, you can easily remove the diffuser on the 4' bulbs that I installed.
I don't know where the external diffuser is for this light in my laundry room, so I left the integrated diffusers on these 4' LED bulbs.
(4) I had some Ikea wall sconces and a bathroom light that used halogen bulbs (for which there is no ready LED replacement). I ended up replacing the Ikea sconces because a past renter had broken the glass piece on it. I replaced it with a $40 LED only fixture that I expect to last the lift of the house. The one remaining bathroom fixture will be replaced over the next week with a light fixture that can take LED bulbs.
Old, Ikea halogen-based wall sconce
The new unit on - hard to get a sense of the relative color temperature between this picture and the last, but the LED is closer to daylight (preferred by me).
Further notes on LEDs:
- I've had bad experiences with LEDs five years ago from low light output (lumens) or flakey electronics that die reasonably early (days).
- Light output has gotten uniformly better. Just keep an eye on color temperature and make sure you are getting what you want. On Amazon, color temperature and lumens are always available. If you are skeptical of light output, check out how many watts it's using. Compare to other bulbs who claim the same lumens. Nobody has super fancy proprietary LED technology right now, if it seems to good to be true, it is.
- With respect to the early end-of-life on cheap LEDs, I now always do a 24 hour test of the bulbs. This is nothing complicated, just keep the LEDs on for 24 hours. All of my recent bulbs have passed the test with flying colors.
- I still have six 4' and two 2' fluorescents in closets around the house. And two 8' units in the garage. Most will be harder to rewire due to the restricted working area, but not too much of a problem. They don't get used much, so there isn't a hurry, but I would like to see them go at some point.
- I still have CFLs in my garage and furnace room sitting in porcelain light fixtures. I think that there are about 8 total. I'd like to replace them with high output corn cob LEDs at some point, but I'm not finding any compelling options at the moment. At that point, I will reach full LED saturation (excluding inaccessible bulbs, such as in my oven).
