Are your Compact Fluorescent bulbs really helping?

“I got a neato LED battery powered trouble light coming for Christmas.”

That is cool. I bought a hand-cranked LED flashlight for emergencies. Pretty neat...just crank the handle for like a minute and you get 5 mins of decent LED light.

but the law would probably PROHIBIT LED lights until GE and Sylvania buy the patents.

This will only lead to MAIL ORDER LIGHTBULBS.

(want to be congress is exempt)

Yeah, we have a hand crank AM-FM-Weather radio-flashlight as well. In hurricane country you never know.

There are some 110 VAC LED lamps available now, the Chinese direct sale importers have a few, but expensive for now. http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.light%20bulbs is one such site. Quality is unknown and varies greatly.

I don’t care about their “green” aspect. Fact is, I can put them in and not worry about changing them for 5-7 years.

I've had to replace two in the same lamp in the last 6 months. I thought "Hmmm... maybe something is wrong with the lamp causing it to burn out." However at Thanksgiving my mom said she's had the same problem. So I don't buy the hype that they'll last 5 or 7 years...

Seimens (OStar) has developed an LED (6 together actually) that puts out over 1,000 lumens and consume about 7 watts. That’s the equivalent light of a 50W halogen.

Now you're talking!
Are they for sale yet?

We had 8 LEDs put into a veranda we built onto our home - mostly because there was no room for any light that would generate heat, and they are the very small type of recessed lights... but the ones that are currently in there are a joke...

If the light they threw off were a bit more 'warm' looking, they might not be bad, just very dim... but they emit a kind of freaky light that makes people look like zombies.

Lighting is important if you are entertaining, in fact, pickup artists know that if you install pink lightbulbs in your home, everyone looks more 'glamorous'.

The eerie blueish tint that these LEDs throw off makes me and my guests look recently deceased. :-)

So I never, ever use them. Fortunately, we also installed faux candelabras and a wall sconce which more than make up for the crappy LEDs.

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