Am I the only person so dumb that I can’t buy a light bulb anymore without a good 15 minutes of pacing back and forth down the aisle at Walmart, Google searches and head scratching?
The old joke could be changed to say, “How many newspaper editors does it take to find a light bulb?” rather than change one.
Surely I’m not the only one who has struggled with this predicament.
In the past you had 40 watt, 60 watt, 75 watt, all incandescent. The lower the wattage, the less light, heat and power usage. Simple enough.
Now you can’t hardly find an old-fashioned incandescent. Instead you’ve got LEDs and CFLs and halogens in an array of sizes. It takes up a full wall at the store.
Refusing to allow myself to be conquered by the confusion, I set out on a mission to educate myself — and change the lighting in my office. It has had a yellow color that reminded me of the sort of room an old hospital in a former Soviet nation would wheel a hopeless patient into to live out their final days. It needed a change both in level of light and color of light.
My first trip to the store resulted in a four-pack of non-dimmable, 60 watt equivalent, warm white LED bulbs. Allow me a moment to explain each of those descriptors.
“Non-dimmable” - As opposed to “dimmable,” of course. The non-dimmable are cheaper, so you want to make sure and get those if you’re not using a dimmable light switch. However, in my experience if you use a non-dimmable bulb on a dimmable switch it can causes flickering and other problems. So just know which one you need before going in.
“60-watt equivalent” - Watt is a measure of power, that is, how much electricity is used. But after using 60-watt incandescents for so many years, people began to associate wattage with how much light is emitted. An LED uses much less wattage than an incandescent to produce the same amount of light, but manufacturers use the equivalent number because that’s the terms people understand.
“Warm white” - This has to do with the color temperature, typically measured in kelvins (K). About 2700K is warm or “yellowish,” while 5000K is cool or “blueish.” What you want depends in part on both the atmosphere and your personal preference. Warm light is more associated with homes, while cool light is used in more professional settings. Unfortunately, my personal preference is somewhere between the 2700K and 5000K colors that are typically available. What to do? Just mix them in your light fixture. For example, my office ceiling fan has room for four bulbs. The initial four 2700K bulb left it too yellow, so I replaced two of them with 5000K, 100-watt equivalent bulbs. That was the mix I was looking for.
“LED” - Short for light emitting diode. Forget the science behind that and just know that it’s a good thing. LEDs last forever — we’re talking a decade or so — and use very little power. The drawback that up until a couple of years ago they were inordinately expensive, but the price has dropped drastically in a short span. Don’t mess with anything else. Just buy an LED and don’t worry about changing a bulb — or worrying about what kind to buy — for a long time.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. He can be reached at (601) 736-2611 or by email at csmith@ columbianprogress.com
