Imagine this scenario: You are walking down the aisle of your local super store, looking for a quality LED light bulb for your living room. Suddenly, an LED bulb catches your fancy but it has the following words printed on its label: “100-watt equal.” Since your light fixture is rated to accept 60 watts, you are not sure whether a 100-watt equal LED bulb will work with it. What should you do? Should you pick this bulb or move on?
Well... if you like it, go ahead and put it in your shopping basket because a 100-watt equal LED bulb can be safely used with a fixture rated to accept 60 watts. As a matter of fact, you can even pick a 125-watt equal bulb if you want.
Surprised?
Don’t be. That is because when the label reads 100-watt equal, it in no way means that the LED bulb consumes 100-watt of electricity. Instead, it means that the amount of light emitted by this bulb is comparable to the light emitted by an incandescent bulb that consumes 100 watt of electricity.
When a light socket comes with a warning like “don’t go over 60 watts,” it is referring to the perils of high amount energy that incandescent bulbs produce. You see, incandescent bulbs not only consume a lot of energy, they also waste a lot of it. Or, to put it more correctly, they consume so much energy because they waste a larger part of what they use.
So, if you are using an incandescent bulb, you should not breach the 60 watt limit. If you do, your socket may get damaged or your bulb may stop working.
But with LED light bulb, things are different. They waste very little energy, and as such you can safely insert a 100-watt equal LED light bulb into such a socket.
This brings us to another pertinent question: Why are LED light bulbs more energy efficient compared to incandescent bulbs?
Incandescent bulbs emit a much wider spectrum of radiation compared to LED light bulbs, and because of this, they consume far more energy. Besides emitting visible light, they also emit infrared light, UV light, and other non-visible radiation. On the other hand, LED light bulbs only emit radiation which is visible to the naked eye.
When shopping for an LED light bulb, focus more on lumens than watts. Lumens is the right measure of the total amount of light visible to the human eye that a light source produces. To give you an idea and 800 Lumen LED bulb produces the same amount of light as a 60-watt incandescent bulb.
Another thing you should keep in mind while purchasing LED light bulbs is their CRI rating. CRI stands colour rendering index and it measures how colours look under an artificial light source when compared to sunlight. The higher the CRI rating, the better. This index is measured on the scale of 0 to 100, and you should always aim for CRI 90 rating. Anything below that and you will be compromising on the light quality. You will be pleased to know that at LiquidLEDs, we only sell LED light bulbs that have a CRI rating of 90 or higher.
The type of LED light bulbs you install in your home can have a big effect on the way the indoor space looks. This is attributed to colour rendering index (CRI). Bulbs with a higher CRI rating (90 and above) produce a far more accurate colour rendering of objects around them compared to bulbs at the lower end of the CRI scale. In layman’s terms, bulbs that have a high CRI rating make your indoor space clear and bright. The objects around them look similar to how they appear in natural light. Also, lower CRI rated bulbs may cause eye strain or mild headache on prolonged exposure. Therefore, always settle for LED bulbs with CRI rating of 90 and above.