Energy saving LED lights

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We’ve updated the Who’s It section with several new guides to help readers navigate the confusing light bulb labels and find the one they really need.
Energy-efficient LED bulbs are the new standard in mainstream light bulbs, with the best ones looking and feeling like long-lasting incandescent bulbs. The worst things not only look bad, they give you a headache and then quickly tire you out and leave you in the dark. We’ve used dozens of different LED bulbs over the years, but Feit Electric’s standard soft white, fluorescent, and bright white bulbs stand out as the most beautiful, reliable, and infinitely dimmable LED bulbs.
Feit Electric lamps offer great color quality at an affordable price and work with a variety of dimmers. They are also easy to find in stores and come with a five-year warranty.
The Feit fluorescent lamp produces a cool white light suitable for a kitchen or office, and in our tests it stood out from the competition, offering better color accuracy and more uniform dimming capabilities.
These bulbs become redder and warmer when dimmed, making them ideal for those who want to create a sophisticated ambience of dim mood lighting without relying on Wi-Fi.
Feit Electric lamps offer great color quality at an affordable price and work with a variety of dimmers. They are also easy to find in stores and come with a five-year warranty.
The Feit fluorescent lamp produces a cool white light suitable for a kitchen or office, and in our tests it stood out from the competition, offering better color accuracy and more uniform dimming capabilities.
Everything in your home will look great under the upgraded 60W dimmable A19 LED replacement bulbs, which provide high color accuracy and give fruits and decorations a natural, lifelike look. The soft white and daylight versions performed equally well in all of our tests, offering the best dimming range we’ve seen from an LED bulb, with no buzzing, flickering or stuttering at lower light levels. These Feit bulbs typically cost around $3 per bulb, depending on the quantity you buy, and they also come with a five-year warranty, providing an affordable way to light your home.
These bulbs become redder and warmer when dimmed, making them ideal for those who want to create a sophisticated ambience of dim mood lighting without relying on Wi-Fi.
If you miss the radiant warmth of incandescent bulbs with a soft dimming effect, then the Philips Ultra HD 60W Dimmable A19 LED Replacement Bulb with a soft white light with a warm effect is your best option. These LED bulbs are designed to emit more waves of red light as dimming levels decrease, mimicking the simulated environment of a heated filament without the need for Wi-Fi or complex app setup. But if you want to bask in the nostalgic glow, you’ll have to pay a small fee—these bulbs cost about $3.50 each.
When people think of conventional home lighting, most people are accustomed to the color quality (and warmth) of 20th century incandescent bulbs. But today’s plethora of LED light bulbs can make your home look just as good while using about a quarter of the energy and lasting 25 times longer, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Modern LED bulbs are typically made of plastic, so they’re more durable than incandescent bulbs and don’t produce as much heat as incandescent bulbs, so there’s less chance of accidental lamp burns. . Overall, this is a win, which is good because as of August 2023, most incandescent light bulbs have been phased out of production and retail distribution in the United States.
But not all LED bulbs are created equal. Some of them flicker or flicker at an alarming rate, or the brightness drops dramatically every time you try to dim them. Others make the room appear washed out and gray, as if you are living in a low-quality illusion of reality. Some LED bulbs make a humming or humming sound when lighting up a room. If you’ve already been burned by a bad LED bulb, we’re here to help. A better, brighter future is possible.
If you’re wondering which LED bulbs to buy, we can help with that too. LED bulbs come in a variety of shapes, sizes and even colors, and the amount of technical information included on the packaging is staggering. Here are some tips to help you sort through your shelves and find what you need:
Another thing to note: If you’re new to using LED light bulbs, you may want to first make sure your fixtures and switches are compatible. This is especially true if your home is old. While we always test our picks on a variety of dimmers, we’ve found that the specific LED-compatible dimmer does make a difference in how the lamp performs, although the results also depend on the quality of the LED lamp itself. If you know the make and model, you can check to see if your light fixture is compatible (this 1000Bulbs.com blog post has some helpful tips) or purchase a dimmer (we like Lutron’s in-wall and bulb options).
If you’re interested in smart LED light bulbs that offer more customizable controls from your phone or smart speaker, we also have a separate guide for that category.
These smart devices can change the ambiance and comfort of any room just by opening an app and screwing in a light bulb.
A good quality LED bulb has all the characteristics of a traditional incandescent bulb (minus the heat and glass shards). You should be able to dim it across its entire arc of brightness without any sudden lulls, and it shouldn’t flicker or buzz out of the corner of your eye or make your room look like a scene from the Uncanny Valley.
But after years of testing dozens of light bulbs, we can tell you first-hand that this can be a challenging task. Even though all the high-quality LED bulbs are available today, no single bulb is suitable for every situation. So we set out to find an LED bulb that could serve as a versatile replacement for basic home lighting.
The list and packaging of LED lamps contain extensive technical information. There’s a good reason for this, but for the average buyer the number of them can be more confusing than helpful. Here are the preliminary details and characteristics we looked for when looking for an LED lamp to test:
After narrowing down the list, we’ve rounded up the best LED bulbs and tested them both in the lab and in the real world. We take light bulbs home, use them in a variety of lamps and fixtures, and record the overall life experiences of each light bulb—for example, whether they flicker or buzz after being on for too long, or how they change. Various decorative methods appear in the room. We also set the bulbs on several different dimmers and captured time-lapse video of each bulb dimming and brightening, revealing any flickers, spikes, plateaus, or other uneven lighting movements in the dimming arc.
Feit Electric lamps offer great color quality at an affordable price and work with a variety of dimmers. They are also easy to find in stores and come with a five-year warranty.
The Feit fluorescent lamp produces a cool white light suitable for a kitchen or office, and in our tests it stood out from the competition, offering better color accuracy and more uniform dimming capabilities.
Feit Electric’s advanced 60W dimmable A19 LED replacement bulb performs better in soft white (2700K) and daylight (5000K) than any other bulb in our tests, with a high color rendering index (CRI) and stunningly impressive range dimming, no skipping or flickering and no headaches. They are widely available at reasonable prices and have one of the longest warranties we’ve ever seen on an LED bulb.
They produce rich, lifelike light with a color rendering index (CRI) of over 90. Simply put, Feit makes some of the most beautiful LED bulbs we’ve ever tested. They can make the colors in your home so vibrant that you’ll feel like you’re in HD-quality reality, or like you’ve carefully increased the contrast of your eye’s camera filter. Feit fluorescent lights give our fruit bowls a fresh, clean look without being too blue or burnt out. Even the tiny buds on our broccoli florets are clearly defined, and the graffitied white stripes of eggplant stand out against its purplish-red skin. Feit’s soft white bulbs work similar wonders on our products, making lemons and apples look like slightly golden versions of themselves.
They also have the best dimming range we’ve ever seen in an LED bulb. When you dim the Feit bulbs, they respond just as you would expect from an incandescent bulb. There is no buzzing, flickering or sudden changes in brightness like low-quality LED lamps, just a smooth, gradually dimming arc. Jim Shapiro, Feit’s director of engineering and quality, told us that Feit considered the dimming arc from the very beginning of the design process and considers it an important feature of any LED lamp. The company also tests the dimming arc of each individual Feit LED bulb on the production line as a quality assurance step before the bulbs leave the factory. This attention to detail made a noticeable difference in our testing and overall life experience with the lamp.
They are surprisingly affordable and have one of the best warranties. You can usually find a pack of four Faith bulbs for about $13, or about $3.25 each. Overall, this is pretty average for an LED bulb, and the cost per bulb continues to go down as you buy more. The price gets even higher when you factor in Feit’s five-year warranty. You can save about 50 cents on some cheaper bulbs, but most bulbs only have a three or even one year warranty, so you’ll likely have to buy new bulbs every year and a half or so, which means more money; and more waste, but worse lighting quality.
They are also more efficient than many other LED bulbs and more compliant with local energy laws. LED bulbs typically use very little energy to produce large amounts of bright light. But Feit’s LED bulbs are among the most efficient available, using less than 9 watts of energy and meeting Energy Star ratings. They also comply with local energy laws, including California Title 20. You can find cheaper bulbs from brands like Amazon Basics and GE, but most don’t meet all state and federal efficiency expectations.
Whether you need a larger or smaller bulb, or even a different color temperature, Feit has you covered. While we’re using a 60W, 800-lumen bulb as our standard point of comparison, we understand that you may need a bulb brighter or dimmer than this. Feit lamps are also available in 100W equivalent/1600 lumens, 75W equivalent/1100 lumens and 40W equivalent/450 lumens versions, each offering the same color quality, dimmability and warranty. If you can’t decide between soft white or daylight, Feit bulbs are also available in a slightly more neutral 3000K bright white. If you prefer clear Edison-style bulbs with the faux filament visible inside, Feit also makes LED bulbs with soft white thread.
These bulbs become redder and warmer when dimmed, making them ideal for those who want to create a sophisticated ambience of dim mood lighting without relying on Wi-Fi.
Incandescent bulbs tend to produce a warmer, more amber hue of light at lower brightness levels, while most modern LED bulbs dim more linearly, so their color temperature remains the same even as light levels change. The Philips Ultra Clear 60W Dimmable LED Replacement Bulb A19 emits warm light and provides the best of both worlds.
They are designed to imitate the emission of old glass light bulbs. In other words, a warm bulb starts out with a standard “soft white” color temperature of 2700K and automatically turns redder as the brightness is reduced. In comparison, most other LED bulbs tend to provide the same color temperature at different brightness levels. There’s nothing wrong with this consistency, but it doesn’t create the warm candle-like ambience you get when you dim a Philips light bulb.
You can find many smart light bulbs that allow you to customize their colors and dimming modes, and you can probably create a similar effect with them. But these Philips bulbs do it without any connections. If you want to set your mood with carefully dimmed lighting and don’t want to deal with the hassle of apps and Wi-Fi, these bulbs are what you need.
They’re much cheaper than smart bulbs and only slightly more expensive than our top picks. Each bulb typically costs about $3.50, which is about 25 cents more than a Feit Electric bulb and half the price of a Philips smart bulb. These bulbs also perform as well as our best models, offering the same smooth dimming arc, Energy Star rating and impressive color accuracy (CRI rating of 90).
They come with a three-year warranty. This warranty is not as long as the five-year warranty Feit offers on its lamps (and the five-year warranty Philips offers on its smart lamps). But it’s certainly better than the standard one-year warranty on cheaper LED bulbs.
The Philips A19 60W Dimmable LED Fluorescent Replacement Bulb is similar to our recommended warm light bulb, but has a lower color temperature (5000K). While they perform reasonably well overall, they don’t offer any unique or standout features, such as warm dimming capabilities, like their counterparts.
The A19 Refresh HD Daylight LED 60W Replacement Bulbs and the Relax HD Soft White LED A19 60W Replacement Bulbs have “enhanced color” performance and are generally the same or more expensive than our top picks. But both types performed well in our tests. We also noticed that some of the dimmers we used had sudden brightness spikes at the top of the dimming arc and plateaus at lower levels.
The EcoSmart 60W Dimmable Soft White LED Replacement Bulb and Daylight Dimmable LED Bulb are cheaper than our top pick, but that’s evidenced by its washed-out color palette and dizzying dimming arc. The replacement A19 EcoSmart 60W Edison-style LED bulbs (soft white) and white filament LED bulbs (daylight) provided slightly better color quality but were still stable when dimmed in our tests.
We have rejected the Amazon Basics 60W Dimmable A19 Equivalent LED Bulb (Soft White) and Dimmable LED Bulb (Daylight) because they have low CRI ratings and are not Title 20 or Energy Star rated.
Likewise, we have eliminated the GE Soft White 60W Universal LED Replacement Bulb, the GE Daylight 60W A19 Universal LED Replacement Bulb, and its 40W Soft White Bulbs and 40W Fluorescent Bulbs because the GE CRI was lower than ours. sample and were not included in our sample. Darkened during testing.
We also tested some special lamps with unusual features, like color-changing capabilities or built-in speakers (yes, that’s true). None of them stand out enough to be worth choosing, but some may find their features valuable. The most interesting ones we came across in this group were the Feit Electric 60W IntelliBulb Color Choice A800/CCT/LEDI Replacement, the Feit Electric 60W A19 Dimmable White LED Accessory Replacement Bulb, and the GE LED+ Color 60W Replacement Bulb. all of which offer the ability to switch between different color temperatures in a single bulb. They’re all good, but none of them stand out.
Likewise, the Feit Electric A19 Circadian LED A800 should automatically adjust color temperature throughout the day. But it’s noticeably less bright than other bulbs we’ve tested, and we found the circadian function to be more annoying than helpful.
Both the Feit Electric 60W LED Speaker Replacement Bulb and the GE 60W LED+ Speaker Replacement Bulb are about as good as you’d expect from an LED bulb with a built-in Bluetooth speaker, meaning the light and quality are excellent. The sound is great.
The Feit Electric A19 OM60 60W Replacement Air Purifier Bulb has a built-in negative ion diffusion system that the EPA says is “relatively ineffective at removing large particles” and may actually have some minor side effects if not used in moderation. However, you will find that there is no significant air purification happening here, although the light bulb itself is fine.
Jeff Goral, Senior Lighting Designer, Lighting Design Alliance, email and phone interview, January 14, 2019.
Amber Beck, public affairs officer and representative for the California Energy Commission, telephone interview, December 21, 2018.
Tom Dunn is a Wirecutter staff writer covering heating, cooling and other home improvement topics. Sometimes his curiosity gets the better of him, like when he plugged a space heater and a Marshall guitar amp into the same extension cord. Pro tip: Don’t do this.
Anna Perling is a former Wirecutter staff writer covering kitchen appliances. During her time at Wirecutter, she covered a variety of topics, including sports bras, board games and light bulbs. She has previously written food and lifestyle articles for Saveur and Kinfolk magazines. Anna is a Girls Write Now mentor and a member of the Online Journalism Association.
These smart devices can change the ambiance and comfort of any room just by opening an app and screwing in a light bulb.
Smart dimmers work like regular switches, but allow you to easily schedule lighting, automate work with other devices and control remotely.