Should I switch to LED?

I’m just going to toss something out there I have been thinking about lately. I was recently looking for ways to save money and was reading up on LED lighting for my home. This got me thinking. If the lights go out, having these low energy bulbs would give me the ability to run more of them off of my generator.

A normal (incandescent) light bulb that produces 1600 lumens uses 100 Watts. That same bulb in an LED uses 20 Watts. If I have 10 lights on, I am using 1000 watts per hour. By switching to its LED equivalent, I am sitting at a cool 200 watts. That’s an 80% reduction! That means I can run more on my 5000 watt generator at any given time.

Something else I found interesting is that these lights last 15 to 20 years. An incandescent has a 1 year life expectancy. Hum?? This seems like a no brainier. Then I look at the price per light…ouch!
The cost of a normal 100 watt light bulb is around $.90 cents. An LED starts at about $10.00 and goes up from there. That’s a 1011% increase. I say again, ouch!

I guess long term this is a good option for saving money and it does make sense to use these when I am running generator. But this option does have a high upfront cost.

I think a will be doing this transition slowly over time and hopefully the price of LEDs will be going down in price and I can get enough of them before the SHTF on us.

If anyone has any ideas on this feel free to add your insight to the comments.  After all, learning from each other is what this is all about.  And as always, if nothing happens, great! But if it does…at least I’m ready!

Until next time,

JDK II