I don't think it's quite worth it yet. CFL's are ridiculously cheap, and they use very little power for the amount of light they put out. If you're looking to save money, I hope you're patient. It will take a long time for you to get your 19$ back. I like buying cool things though, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I pick one up for the hell of it.
While the LEDs can technically last 50,000 - 100,000 hours, the bulb as a whole entity may not last that long if the electronics driving the LED are of poor quality.
Such is the case with many cheap CFLs. They may be able to last 10,000 hours, but not if the ballast fries. Not uncommon, unfortunately.. especially if the lights are being used in an enclosed fixture, where cheaper components not rated for the heat let out their magic smoke.
:thumbsup:
Result of using cheap no-name CFLs:
About 50% were dead in less than a year.
I started using Litetronics' Neolite CFLs. 1 out of 8 died in the same timeframe. Still worse than I'd like, but definitely better than generic.
With LED lights, it's still difficult for them to compete with fluorescent in terms of efficiency. Some of the LED lights available even have a tough time matching incandescent or halogen sources. 1) You need a good LED. 2) You need to drive it properly and within spec. 3) Your driver circuit needs to be efficient too. You can start out with an experimental Cree LED that can do 200 lumens/watt, but if you use a cheap source to drive it, you might end up with a net of 30 lumens/watt. And some manufacturers will get a high lumen output by overdriving the LEDs, which causes rapid aging and loss of output.
CALiPER - the Department of Energy is performing their own testing to see how well the labeling on various LED light sources matches up to actual measurements. The results tend to indicate that lumen output and efficacy ratings are inflated, and that some fixtures suffer from much shorter-than-expected lifetimes. From what I've seen, LED lighting has a ways to go before it can compete with fluorescent.
LEDs do
quite well though when a monochromatic source is required. LEDs by default produce a single wavelength; this is far more efficient than using a white light source and then filtering out the unwanted wavelengths.
The most popular method of teasing white light out of LEDs involves using a blue emitter with a phosphor coating, which ends up hurting the primary strength of the LED. The spectrum output of a monochrome LED is quite clean - there's a large spike of energy generated around a single primary wavelength.
With a white LED, there's a spike of blue, and then a big blob of wavelengths in the green-to-red range. The most efficient way of making a white light source out of LEDs, at least as far as our eyes are concerned, would be to have a properly tuned source that produces spikes at the red, green, and blue wavelengths which our eyes are sensitive to. Unfortunately, that RGB lighting method is still more expensive and complex than the blue+phosphor method.
