L.E.D. Astray

Sigh. I should know by now that home improvement projects are rarely as simple as they seem. In my ongoing quest to reduce my family's carbon footprint, I thought the simplest place to start would be to switch over my home's lighting to energy efficient bulbs. Since our house has a whopping 24 65-watt floodlights installed on tracks or in ceiling cans in our kitchen, living room and bedroom, switching those out, I figured, should make a huge difference. Besides, a few of them had just burned out and I dread climbing the 20-foot ladder to switch them out once a year. LED's advertised 50K to 60K hour lifespan means I could install 'em and forget 'em. Nice.

Also, from my adventure racing days, I knew a thing or two about the benefits of LED lights. My original headlamp – a Petzl Duo – requires 4 AA batteries and burned through them in a hurry. On a ten-day expedition race, I had to carry a brick of 12 extra batteries in my pack just to ensure I could make it through to the end. In contrast, my wife's newer LED headlamp has been running on the same single AAA battery for a couple of years, and still gives off plenty of light. Sure, it's not as bright as my Duo, but that's a big savings in batteries, energy and weight.

I started my research by plugging some numbers into a savings calculator at the enLux Website. According to their calculations, swapping all my incandescent floods to obscenely expensive $90 LED floods won't pay off for ten friggin' years. On the bright side, over their remaining 25 years of life we could save a total of nearly $5000.

In other words, switching my flood lights out all at once would cost me over two grand today, and it'd take a decade before I'd break even and start saving money. Sheesh. This pill is getting pretty hard to swallow.

Beyond the obscene price tag, of course, is the small matter of how LED lights would look in our house. Could I live with it? Would I notice? More importantly, would my wife? While I haven't yet had a chance to see the enLux lights in action – they claim they give off a "warm, white light" – I was able to try out a CC Vivid PAR 30 LED floodlight , and a CC Vivid + 36 LED Light Bulb for the weekend, just to get a taste of how they'd compare to our current lighting.

Rather than sugar coat it, I'll just report what happened, as it happened: I screwed the 36 LED light bulb into a fixture over our master bathroom sink, called my wife in, and switched it on. She immediately recoiled. "Oh no. No way," she said. "That thing makes me look dead."

While I wouldn't go that far – she looked as beautiful as ever to me – I saw her point. The light was dim and far, far bluer than I expected. Damn.

Strike one. No amount of savings or environmental correctness was going to counteract THAT reaction.

Next, I swapped out the flood light in our hallway w/ the LED flood. Once again, I called my wife over. "You've gotta be kidding," she said. "It makes our house look like a space station."

As usual, she was right. That dim blue glow, which marketing literature had praised as being "easy on the eyes" and "offering unique clarity and greater depth perception" was, in fact, making our warm, cozy mountain home feel like an ice cold, sterile space station. Or igloo. Not exactly what you're after when it's 20 degrees and snowing outside.

Strike two.

I returned the incandescent lights to their sockets and headed back at the drawing board, where I'm trying to figure out what's next. While these lights might make sense as always-on outside safety lights, they'll never, ever find a place inside our home.

Guess I'll check out the enLux flood to see if it's any better, and I'll try some compact fluorescent bulbs (although those won't work in a flood light installation) next.

Next: Compact Fluorescents Light Up My Life