no more hits, but some LEDs

Tuesday, 19 April 2011

Replacing 12V MR16 halogen light bulbs with LED lamps

I have replaced the three standard low voltage 20W MR16 (GU5.3) light bulbs I had in the kitchen with LED lamps to save energy. Here is the data of LED lamps:
LED number and type: 20 x 3-Chip SMD
light colour: warm white
luminous flux: 300lm
electrical power: 3.6W
beam angle: 120°
CRI: ~70

Here is one of the new lamps:



I bought the LED lamps over the Internet. At about €9 per piece they are not cheap, but with an energy saving potential of nearly 50W (~83%) for the lamp system the saved energy will make up for the price. The new lamps work without problems with the old 60W transformer (output: 12V AC) and they reach their maximum brightness instantly.
Here are some pictures:

with standard 20W halogen light bulbs
with LED lamps



under halogen light
under LED light

The photo pairs have been taken with the camera in manual mode to use the same camera settings (exposure time, aperture, ISO number, etc.).
I reckoned that the original halogen lamps had a wide beam angle, so I bought LED replacements with the widest angle I could get. As it turned out, this was too much. The LED lamps spread their light over a much larger area. This explains the darker image under LED light (bottom row). All in all though, the LED lamps seem to emit a larger amount of light because of the area they cover. A side effect of this is that the area outside the window is now better illuminated:


The light of the LED lamps is not quite equivalent to that of the incandescent halogen lamps and seems to have a greenish yellow hue. This shows that lamps with a higher CRI than 70 are desirable. But after all, the light of the new lamps is acceptable and they seem to be a good buy.

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