There is a great quantity of evidence pointing to the energy savings of LED bulbs but in contrast they do have a particularly high price tag. Another factor in their benefit is long life and high reliability so how do you evaluate whether they are worth purchasing? If you want to get a correct perspective on the commercials you need to work out the total cost of ownership and use of LED Bulbs and compare this to established incandescent light bulbs.
Total cost of ownership evaluation.
In order to perform this calculation it is prudent firstly, to add the purchase cost for the LED bulb to the working cost for this bulb. Now as LED bulbs will ordinarily last 30 times longer than a traditional light bulb then you then need to add the operating costs and 30 conventional light bulbs.
Candle shaped 3watt LED example.
A cost of 15 pence for every kWhour of electricity used has been assumed for these calculations.
The price of a 3 watt LED candle is approx. £15. The electricity fees over the life span of the LED bulb works out at £13.50. This leaves a total lifetime expense of £28.50.
This LED candle light bulb gives approximately the analogous lumens light output to a 25 watt traditional light bulb. A everyday bulb will have a lifetime of anywhere around1000 hours.
At 30 pence for each candle bulb then the cost of 30 equates to £24. To operate the candle light bulb for 30k hours costs £112.50. For 30000 hours this indicates that the traditional light bulb would have a total operating cost of £136.50.
The answer is a saving of a massive £108 by means of the purchase of the 3w LED candle bulb over the life of the bulb. This means that through the purchase of the LED candle bulb a huge saving of £108 is accrued over it’s lifespan.
I’m sure you will agree that this demonstates the astounding savings you get through using LED bulbs!
MR16 LED comparison for a 3 watt lamp.
The calculation for the 3 watt MR16 uses a similar logic so I will not go through each and every step. As the logic for the assessment for the 3 watt MR16 is identical I will not detail the entire calculation. The major consideration here is that the MR16 LED’s can be selected either as a 48 LED lamp or with high power LED’s. Here we need to accommodate for the difference in purchase expenditure with the 48 LED version costing mostly £10 and the high power version costing usually £15. The high powered LED’s will illuminate with a single or triple beam whereas the 48 LED lamps have 48 different light sources.
The price of the MR16′s is assumed to be 80 pence as with the candles which means that the lifetime savings are;
A saving of £113 is attained through the use of the 48 LED MR16 during its lifetime.
You can easily save £108 through the use of the high powered MR16 LED over their life.
Again the savings are monstrous and only vary by 4.5% across the different variants of LED bulbs.