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The future of lighting, both domestically and commercially, is LEDs. More and more people are ditching their old incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

One of the main reasons for this is the sheer amount of money you save when you start using LED bulbs.

The Science Behind It

The claims are that LEDs use 90% less energy compared to halogens, lasting 2 times longer than fluorescent bulbs and 20 times longer than incandescent lights.

How do LEDs achieve this though? It all stems from how energy efficient they are.

LEDs use a much higher percentage of their energy to actually provide light than other kinds of lighting. The problem incandescent bulbs have is the amount of energy that escapes via heat wastage.

The numbers are pretty staggering. Incandescent bulbs lose up to 80% of their energy to heat, leaving just 20% to actually illuminate your room.

Now consider that LEDs only lose around 10% of their energy to heat – so that’s 90% left to provide light. This is a tenfold improvement in efficiency, and a side benefit of this is that LEDs operate at much cooler temperatures, making them safer to use.

This increase in efficiency has a very direct impact on your electricity bills – they come for far less.

There is also a second, more indirect way this saves you money too. We’ve already mentioned how LEDs operate at cooler temperatures. This means that there is less heat passing through the internal components, reducing the wear and tear over time.

This is what gives LEDs their unbelievable lifespans – with most LEDs lasting up to 50,000 hours, and thus reducing your replacement costs. So in the time that a single LED bulb lasts, you’ll get through up to 20 halogen lights!

Let's Talk Money

Let’s see how this applies to a single product; our Dimmable 6W B22 Omni-LED Clear Globe. The key features of this bulb are that it uses 6W of energy, shines with a maximum of 650 lumens, and has an estimated lifespan of up to 30,000 hours.

Crucially, it is designed to replace a 60W halogen – so it uses 10 times less energy.

Let’s use these figures to calculate just how much you would save on this one bulb alone.

For arguments sake, we’ll say that you have an average daily use of 8 hours. This equates to 56 hours per week, and thus 2912 hours per year.

Multiplying this figure by the respective wattage of each bulb gives us the yearly consumption. For a 60W halogen, this becomes 174.72kWh. Our 6W B22 LED gives us 17.472kWh.

The average price of electricity in the UK is around 14.05p per kWh. The rest of the maths is simple – we’re now going to multiply this price by the yearly consumption of our bulbs, and see what the savings are!

The 60W halogen costs you £24.55 per year to run for 8 hours per day, whereas the 6W LED costs a meagre £2.44 for the whole year.

Whilst a £22.11 saving doesn’t sound like much across a whole year, imagine if you replaced all your old halogen lights with low energy LEDs? The savings would be in the hundreds!

You should also bear in mind that this is only over the space of a year – over the course of say 15 years, you’ll save even more from the fact that you don’t have to replace your bulbs every year when they stop working.

Since coming onto the market, LEDs have been the best on the market for saving money and reducing your carbon footprint. Now that the technology has evolved and become a lot more affordable, there’s no reason to not make the switch to LED lighting throughout your entire home.