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+--- Thread: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? (/showthread.php?tid=110505)
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LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - rjmacs - 01-19-2011
I've had halogen floor lamps, torchiere style, for years. I like the way they light the room upward, across the ceiling. I have no overhead lighting, so this is a good alternative for me. The lamps inevitably short out or fail long before the bulbs go, though, and at this point i'm down to one.
We've made good strides with LED lighting in the last couple years; i'm even starting to see bulbs in some stores lately. I'd like to replace my old halogen lamps with LED ones, but they just aren't to be found (at least not remotely affordably). Am i just too early on this bandwagon? Are there other concerns? A secret stash or seller i'm missing?
Help me, before it gets too dark in here! I've got a lot of reading to do, and just can't afford to spend $150 on a lamp right now. :eek2:
Edit: P.S. I'm also taking suggestions for non-LED, decent quality, cheap torchiere lamps. I prefer a metal flare (wrong word, i suspect) at the top to plastic.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - Mike Johnson - 01-19-2011
It all comes down to lumens, and lumens per watt if you're trying to cut your energy bill.
Philips 12 watt dimmable LED "bulb": 800 lumens
a 60 watt incandescent: 900 lumens
300 watt halogen: 6000 lumens
So if you wanted about 6000 lumens, you might need 7 of those 12 watt LED bulbs. They're $40 apiece, by the way. $40 for a bulb that's less bright than a 60 watt incandescent is a bit hard to swallow. Wait five years, maybe?
If you look at the lumens per watt you'll notice that halogens are not much more efficient than incandescent. They do last longer, and they're smaller and can fit more easily in a stylish fixture.
There are CFL torchiere lamps but they're out of you price range unless you can pick one up secondhand.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - N-OS X-tasy! - 01-19-2011
We use a CFL bulb in the torchiere lamp in my son's room. Works like a charm.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - cbelt3 - 01-19-2011
Agreed on the light output from an LED bulb. They just don't put out the light.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - timg - 01-19-2011
We used to have a halogen lamp like that, then the circuit that controlled it burnt out.
At the time, you could get CFL bulbs that put out the light equivalent of a 200 watt incandescent, so I took a regular old ceiling fixture with 2 sockets, fit it on the top of the lamp and installed 2 CFLs. Similar light output, but no dimming available.
It's worked fine for quite a while (it's been that way so long, I actually forgot when the halogen died!).
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - Filliam H. Muffman - 01-19-2011
It will be a couple of years before manufacturers can design a reasonably priced lamp with surface mounted chips that can replace a 200 W or greater halogen.
Last weeks episode of This Old House featured a LED lamp to replace 60 W floods over a kitchen island. My guess is that it was $50.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - ztirffritz - 01-20-2011
I'm waiting for the paradigm shift on lighting. I LOVE LED lights, but everyone keeps trying to reproduce incandescent bulbs with them. That just doesn't work well like that. Instead, we could make entire panels in the ceiling that light up, or run a string of LEDs around a room, hidden behind molding, or embed them in dryall so that the ceiling simply emits lite. There are so many options, but no one has really explored them. Regular bulbs required a fixture and the fixture, by its nature must be visible to function as a light source. LEDs though, can be molded into the surface or hidden in various ways to make light come at you from different angles that weren't possible before. I imagine that it would look odd to some people because they are so accustomed to point source lighting (ie candles and light bulbs). I think that it would be interesting to have a ceiling that just glows.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - davester - 01-20-2011
Mike Johnson wrote: $40 for a bulb that's less bright than a 60 watt incandescent is a bit hard to swallow. Wait five years, maybe?
$40 is a bargain for a 60 watt equivalent LED now. No reason to wait 5 years. The main cost of buying a light bulb is the electricity it costs to run it over its lifetime, which is about 100 times the upfront cost for an incandescent. LEDs have now reached the point where they have lower lifetime costs than incandescents. The lifetime cost of running a 60 watt equivalent 12 watt LED is typically about $60, which is less than the cost of running (and replacement costs for) the 10 incandescents you'll burn up during that time, which would be around $90. The decent LEDs out there (Cree, Philips, etc) have 5 and 6 year warranties too.
You're are however correct that there aren't LEDs yet that can meet the output of a high-power (i.e. 300 watt) halogen,
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - Racer X - 01-20-2011
N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
We use a CFL bulb in the torchiere lamp in my son's room. Works like a charm.
Same here. Mine are 3 way standard socket torchiere lamps. I just use a 23-27 watt CF. fairly bright. You can get up to 150 watt equiv. bulbs fairly easily.
Re: LED Floor Lamps? Torchiere style? What's the deal? - davester - 01-20-2011
Racer X wrote:
[quote=N-OS X-tasy!]
We use a CFL bulb in the torchiere lamp in my son's room. Works like a charm.
Same here. Mine are 3 way standard socket torchiere lamps. I just use a 23-27 watt CF. fairly bright. You can get up to 150 watt equiv. bulbs fairly easily.
I have a 42 watt CFL (150 watt equiv) in a torchiere. The only downsides are that it is bulky (but I have a big antique torchiere so not a problem) and it is non-dimmable. It replaced a 100-200-300 watt mogul bulb and is plenty bright.