My Little Yellow Friend

This week we replaced our light bulbs. Yippee!

We have a lot of ceiling-mounted chandeliers, both upstairs and downstairs, and they take a lot of little bulbs. There's always one burned out somewhere. It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: as soon as you replace one, another burns out, and so on. We keep a big stock of spare light bulbs in a closet, but it's getting expensive. And it's a nuisance, since replacing a bulb always means getting up on a ladder.

So we finally joined the modern age and replaced most of the little chandelier bulbs with LEDs. You can get LED bulbs in all shapes and sizes now, as well as in different "color temperatures." Early LEDs, like early fluorescent lights, used to give off a funny harsh white light. They weren't as warm and natural-looking as traditional incandescent bulbs. But now you can get LEDs any way you like.

We love 'em. They use only a tiny fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs: about 4 watts, compared to 40W or 60W for old-style bulbs. So that cuts our lighting bill by 90%. And the LEDs don't get warm, so they don't heat up the room anymore. That's a big deal when you've got a chandelier in every room and six or more bulbs per chandelier. It's especially noticeable downstairs when we have guests in the house. The LED lights keep the room from getting too warm. Best of all, they last forever, so we won't have to climb a ladder every week to replace them.

They're not even very expensive. About $8 to $10 apiece when you buy them in bulk. So we took an inventory of our various light fixtures and bought new LED bulbs for just about all of them at once. We even changed some of the outside lights.

We made a special case for the big chandelier that hangs in our entryway. We wanted particularly "warm" bulbs there, so we picked an LED light that came in warmer color temperature (2100K, if you're keeping track at home), versus the more neutral 2600K color. They're great, but they're noticeably yellow/orange compared to everything else. It was a bit of a surprise when we first flipped the switch, but we kind of like it. You might say we've warmed up to it.