What wattage flood lamp is acceptable (LED)?

[steppinthrax]

So I'm planning to replace all the flood lamps on my house with LED. I'm also going to install some new lamps on two corners of the house where lamps were never installed (between the house and garage). I want to go with LED, want to know what wattage is bright enough but not too bright. I want enough light but not enough to cause a disturbance. The flood lamps are roughly 30 - 40 feet high, the fixtures have two lamps.

Also any real advantage of the motion activated one's. I kind of see them going off every few seconds. LOL

 

[Ruptga]

Your existing bulbs will have a wattage and probably a lumen rating printed on them, go find it. If they have a lumen rating you're done, find a replacement that is at least that bright. Otherwise google the conversion for incandescent watts to lumens and proceed to the previous sentence. Wattage != brightness.

 

[dullard]

Ruptga is correct, wattage is a terrible metric for lightbulbs. It may have worked when there was only one kind of bulb. But it just doesn't work as the key metric any more. Wattage is important to your pocketbook, and to be sure you don't overheat a light (highly unlikely with LED), and that is about it.

Lumens are what people should care about first, wattage second. I just put on a flood lamp on my garage last week and went with about 3000 lumens. It is a bit dim for what I wanted (seeing the garden 20 to 50 feet from the garage now that the sun sets by the time I'm home for work), but the next step up in lumens was WAY too expensive. I would say that 3000 lumens is easily enough to disturb the neighbors and I won't use that light for more than a few minutes here or there just after the sun sets. 1500 to 2000 lumens is probably better for your purposes (probably closer to 2000). That would be roughly the same as 2 to 3 regular 60 W incandescent lightbulbs. Enough to give general lighting but not enough to be blinding to the neighbors. But like ruptga said, look at your existing lighting and decide if you want more or less light.

I detest the motion activated flood lights. The neighbor behind my house has one and all night long it flashes on/off onto my house every few minutes (I think it does that as their dog and/or squirrels run around). Luckily there are no bedrooms in use on that side of the house. Motion sensors were more useful when running incandescent bulbs was quite expensive. But now with LED, it is much less useful (unless you think a sudden flash will scare away a thief).

 

[John Connor]

(unless you think a sudden flash will scare away a thief).

Does for me since when the flood light goes on it illuminates the dummy Foscam looking camera. My motion light doesn't go off all the time either. It's set perfect and only goes off when you are about 5' into the driveway. It also stays off during the day.