LED Nightlight bulbs

I saw some LED nightlight bulbs in Home Depot the other day for a good price and decided to test them. A review at Product Review: LED Night Light Replacement Bulb LED Lights At Home was helpful and my observations below are similar.

Application: Replace 4W/7W bulbs in recessed wall mount plates. These are nightlights that are on about 8 hours every night. Essentially they are safety lights on the stairs. As bulbs burned out we've replaced them with 4W rather than the 7W, but the LED's should eliminate almost all of the energy use in this application. In the review above, the image of the wall mount plate comparison is identical to what I see.

LED Bulb: These are Feit Electric "Eternalite" LED's in a 2-pack @ ~$5. They claim 50,000 hour life on the packaging and 25 cents/year operating cost at 12 hours/day. The color is "cool white", but with LED's this translates into "glacier blue" (my description.) The configuration is three LED's, enclosed in an approximation of the C7 bulb shape (a bit broader, but about the same length.) There is no diffuser so the light is very directional/uneven.

Pros: Minimal power use for the application. Extremely long life should save money on replacement. At $2.50/each the price is reasonable.

Cons: Very directional. Lower effective light output than even a 4W bulb (perhaps 2W equivalent.) The light is best described as pale blue. No documentation of power consumption.

Savings: Savings would depend on reduced replacment cost and power consumption (not provided.) Feit does not list it on their website or packaging. Another website gives a 0.8 W spec that appears to be back calculated as a 90% reduction of 7W, but based on the light output and the multiplier for an LED (as well as the human eye's ability to detect bluer light) I suspect the power usage is about half that, 0.4W and about 2W equivalent lighting. EDIT: I have now measured this with the Kill-a-watt and doing some hand calcs for sub-1W readings yields ~0.8 W, just like that website gave.

I assume 8 hrs/night, 365 nights/yr = 2920 hr/yr. Local rate is about $0.10/kWh. Replacement C7 bulbs run about $0.50 each and might last a year at this usage rate.

Power use would be 11.7 kWh/yr for a 4W, 20.4 kWh/yr for a 7W, 2.3 kWh/yr for the LED bulb.

If the LED's last 10 years a conservative estimate of the savings in operating & replacement costs would be
4W: (11.7 - 2.3) * (0.1) * 10 + 0.50 * 10 = $14.4
7W: (20.4 - 2.3) * (0.1) * 10 + 0.50 * 10 = $23.1

Bottomline, as long as the lighting is sufficient, it is not difficult to justify the LED bulb's cost.

 

I did the LED Christmas lights this year too, but in colored varieties. I liked the ones with the ice crystal looking diffusers best. I wasn't sure if I would like the Christmas LED's but was pleased with the end result. (A coworker warned about the plain white LED bulbs being blindingly bright--so bright that the kids were turning away from the tree as they hung ornaments.)

 

Edited for actual measured consumption of this bulb, ~0.8 W,

 

We've got a few sensor plug-ins for the kids' baths. They look just like the following Amerelle's (but the light is typical LED blue, not yellow)Amerelle Directional, Automatic LED Nite Lite - 71052 at The Home Depot

They seem to be pulling about 0.8 watts each when lit.

 

They are probably not as bright. As with the other LED's that I reviewed to start the thread, they have a directional aspect unlike incandescents. There are 4W and 7W C7 incandescents standard for nightlights, I would rate these as about half as bright as the 4W (effectively, because of the projection.) I haven't popped one open to check, but from the wattage I suspect they are three LED's with that diffuser plastic in front, but I'm not well versed in LED's. The kids seem to be comfortable with them now and we are no longer replacing burnt out bulbs on a regular basis.

We've had three for about a year with no failures. It is possible that they've updated the LED's for a less blue light in the meantime...but I suspect that someone merely color "corrected" the image to give it the appearance of a golden hue. Web image color representation is random, often nothing like the given product's actual color.