Shopping for CFL or LED bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs can be confusing. Do you want bright white, warm white, or one of the other white colors? Forget the names. There’s a more precise way to know what you’re getting and it’s called the temperature of the color. Color temperatures are measured in kelvins. A standard incandescent bulb is between 2700 and 3300K. So if you want a CFL or LED bulb that matches that color, look for the color temperature on the box. Some of the bulbs are much whiter, and to my eye they’re very unpleasant.
LED bulbs have been around for a few years but they’ve been cost prohibitive. They’re better than CFL and incandescent in pretty much every way. They use less power, warm up instantly, produce less heat, are dimmable, and last forever (or ~25,000 hours, whichever comes first.) You can find good LED bulbs for $10-15 each at your local store so there’s still a pretty big premium.
On Earth Day, my employer teamed up with PSE to off us a four pack of LED bulbs for $10. It seemed like a good way to test the waters with LED bulbs. I put one of them in the lamp in our living room and three of them in our outdoor lighting since those are the lights that are on the most in our house. It’s really an anticlimactic event. I excitedly screwed in the bulbs, they work, and we rarely think about them.
But it got me to wondering, are they finally getting cheap enough that I should be replacing all my bulbs with LEDs as the old bulbs die out? What’s the break even point? It’s time for some math!
With our fancy GPS-based outdoor light timer, I know that my lights are on specifically between sunset and sunrise every day, even as those times shift. I looked up a full table of rise and set times for Seattle and then calculated how long the sun is up. That in itself was interesting. It turns out that in Seattle over the course of a year, the sun is up 51% of the time. But for our purposes, we just need to know that the sun is down for 4290.75 hours in a year.
Here are how 60 watt equivalent bulb costs would play out over the course of 10 years. Note that I’m prorating the cost of the bulbs that are used so the cost of the remaining lifetime of the last bulb is not included in the total cost.
I didn’t know what to expect when I started those calculations, and I’m impressed that the LED bulb came out ahead! It takes many years for the LED to overtake the CFL, but eventually it at least breaks even. Also note that I was basing the LED numbers on this bulb. Different bulbs have different power requirements, but this is a respectable model/brand.
So from all this we can conclude that at the current prices, CFL and LEDs are just about a break even on cost at least with the models and prices I used in my calculations. In terms of actual use, the LEDs come out ahead because they don’t have the same warmup period as the CFL bulbs and they are dimmable. And the cost tradeoff will vary depending on what you’re comparing. The other caveat is that I don’t know if these bulbs are rated for the temperature swings associated with outdoor use so it will be interesting to see how long they last.
Don’t go running around the house throwing away CFL bulbs since that’s a waste of money, but as they die, you can replace them with LEDs and know that you’ll get your money back over time assuming the LED bulbs live as long as the makers claim. If you want to see it for yourself, check out one of the many online bulb price calculators. We have a stockpile of various sized CFL and incandescent candelabra bulbs, but as those run out I think we’ll be switching to LED.
For those of you who were fans of Three Sheets and Drinking Made Easy, there’s good news: Zane Lamprey is attempting to launch a new show! It will be in the same vein as the previous shows. He travels around the world, enjoys local alcohol, learns a bit about the culture, and has fun doing it. He’s a got a good formula and it’s been frustrating to see him have such a hard time getting a network to support him.
We’re all familiar with CBS, ABC and NBC, but the new “TV channels” are shaping up to be Amazon, Netflix and YouTube. All three companies are purchasing exclusive content for their sites. And these are some pretty big deals with names like Kevin Spacey, Bill Murray, and John Goodman. When you stop and think about it, if you have a Roku box or some other way to watch these sites on your TV, there’s very little difference between watching a show on Amazon or watching a show on NBC. House of Cards was released recently on Netflix and got great reviews. There are a lot more shows in the pipe including a new season for Arrested Development which I’m thrilled about.
We’re getting closer and closer to meeting our son, and we want to document his arrival with some photographs. Tyla found a bunch of great newborn photographers in our area, but for the prices felt much too high for photographers ones she liked. Obviously they can charge that much because they are fantastic at what they do and it’s very difficult to photograph newborns, but we’ve decided to take on that challenge ourselves. HeatherW does this for a living and I can see her shaking her head! Yeah it’s crazy, and yeah, it won’t come out as good as if we had a pro, but here’s how we’re tackling the challenge.
In an 
With a munchkin arriving soon, I figured it would be a good idea to have the guns behind some kind of a lock. I don’t have anything special enough to worry about theft, so I went with a fairly inexpensive cabinet from 
Back in 2001 and 2002, there was a great show on Comedy Central called Let’s Bowl. It was a combination of Judge Judy, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, and a bowling alley. The idea was that two people would arrive looking to settle some small disagreement. Whoever won the bowling match would win the argument. During the match, two hilarious commentators provide play by play. There were numerous funny segments throughout the show, special prizes for strikes in specific points of the game, and each player gets to use a surprise air horn once during the game to throw off their opponent. If it all sounds crazy, it is. But it worked, and I loved it! Unfortunately, I must have been one of a few viewers because it only lasted two seasons. Ever since then, I’ve searched the web looking for DVDs of the show or some way to watch it again. Late one night last week, I found
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