Why You Shouldn't Wait To Switch Your LED Light Bulbs

Are you that person that looks up at your ceiling lights and sees a mish mash combination of old style energy saving bulbs and old style incandescent filaments and a spattering of new LED light bulbs?  Perhaps you don't have any LED light bulbs yet and you are waiting for the old lights to blow before you switch them over to the new LEDs.

Well if you can't be bothered to read the rest, to cut a long story short, switch everything now.

Why should I do that, it will cost me money and you are obviously going to say that because you sell LED light bulbs?

All the above is true but I have been selling light bulbs, not just LEDs, for years and I'm super passionate about getting the most out of your lights, trust me I'm a hoot at dinner parties, and I know what I'm talking about.

So lets get into the nitty gritty.  Lets imagine that you have a living room in your home, your living room is the most exciting room in the house where most of the action happens, you eat your breakfast here while watching the news.  You have a tea break on a weekend here, while reading the news.  You have dinner on your knees while catching up on all the Love Island or Strictly Come Dancing or Eastenders etc.  Your children/grandchildren play happily in this room.  All of the above really needs light for this magic to happen and while you read this and you are either in this room or imagining your own room you take a look at the lights.

Look we are all guilty of this so don't be ashamed but you have fittings filled with the old style lightbulbs and you are just playing the waiting game for them to blow before you switch.

That all seems fine until you work out how much you spent on electricity while waiting for this magical moment of failing old lightbulbs to happen.

Lets breakdown this quick googled image as our example:

This is a pretty small living room clearly in a converted mill/apartment block which can represent our cosy living room.

In the picture there are 3 lights.

Light 1:

This particular ceiling light is a lovely dual chandelier with what looks to be 6 candle bulbs in each one.  From looking at each of the lamps, they look to be most likely old style 25W candle lamps.

This would be (apart from your windows) the main source of light and will most likely be on when you enter the room even while their is light outside (mainly due to the standard 'Walk into a room turn some lights on problem a lot of us have').  So it is safe to assume these will be on for a conservative 8 hours per day every day.

The electricity that these lamps will be consuming is going to be £122.64 per year.

How to work this out:

12 bulbs, 25 watts each, 8 hours per day, 365 days per year.

12 x 25 x 8 x 365 = 876000

This is the number of watt hours you are using every year, but electricity is charged in 'kilowatt hours' so we need to convert that simply by dividing your number by 1000 (kilo).

876000 / 1000 = 876

You might know this kilowatt hours by the term 'units of electricity' that the companies use to charge you.  So you have used with this fitting 876 units of electricity.  The average cost per unit is about £0.14 so you simply have to multiply this together.

876 x £0.14 = £122.64 per year.

It is a lot of money especially if you use it for more than 8 hours a day.

An extra cost (if you have a lot of old style bulbs saved up) is that in one year you should expect to change your old light bulbs almost 3 times a year if you are using it for 8 hours a day.

8 hours for 365 days = 2920 hours of light bulb use

Each older light bulb only lasts for 1000 hours so that is almost 3 light bulbs you could theoretically changing.

How much would the LED equivalent cost to run you ask?  Well the LED equivalent is only 3W so I do exactly the same maths above but swap in 3 for the 25 and that works out to be a measely £14.72.

So if you swapped all your light bulbs to LED in this fitting alone, you would save £107.92 in a year.

I still hear you reading this saying but I have to buy the LEDs first and that is a cost.  You would be right in saying that, but here is the thing, to buy 12 of the LEDs from us here, it would cost you a total of £32.89 including delivery.

So in conclusion for this fitting alone you would still be saving £75.03 in the first year of changing to LED.  Your LEDs would be paying for themselves within roughly the first 4 months of use.  We conclude that you need to rip out your old light bulbs immediately and switch to LED, can you afford not to?

Light 2:

So lets quickly work out lights 2 and 3 in this room and do a quick total saving for the room.

In my experience this type of table lamp would have 2 x 40w candles dangling down inside. You wouldn't automatically switch this one on when you enter the room and would probably have this on for at max 3 hours a day.

This works out using the formulas in the previous example of a cost per year of £12.26.  Not a huge amount but switch it up to an LED and it would cost you £1.84.

If you were to buy 2 of these LED candles  for this table lamp it would cost you including delivery from us £7.47, which works out to be £9.31 total cost and this is still a £2.95 saving.

Light 3

This is a typical desk/table lamp and in this room would probably be used for ambient lighting more than the other table lamp but not as much as the ceiling lamp so lets consider this to be on for 5 hours a day.  It would most likely contain one 60W light bulb as that is the most common in this type of fitting.

This is a cost in electricity of £15.33.  The equivalent from us would be £5.48 including delivery (this is also assuming you purchased each of these LED separately in 3 different orders) and that would cost you £2.30 to run.  A total saving of £7.55 to change this to LED today.

So there we have it, we have swapped all our lights to LED today and we have saved a whopping £85.53 in this room alone in the first year of use and that is after buying all our LEDs as well.  I hope you enjoyed the read and if you have any questions then please don't hesitate to leave a comment below, as always, keep saving.

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