By Radiant Lighting | 21 Jul 2022 | 0 Comments
At Radiant Lighting, our goal is to offer you an education in lighting and lighting design through these articles. We want to tackle technical queries as well as common misconceptions. In today’s article, we’re aiming to show you that wattage is not actually that important when buying an LED.
Who, Watt, Why
Manufacturers of incandescent or halogen bulbs used to put a wattage number on the packaging and as consumers, we would know that a 100W light is going to be brighter than a 40W. Fast forward to 2022 and there are so many types of lights with different efficiencies that providing just a wattage number, is actually quite redundant. You can’t know the difference in brightness you can expect from 50W halogen bulb compared to a 12W LED. All you can know is that the 50W will require more power.
A light’s brightness is not determined by watts, it’s determined by the lumens (or lumen output).
What is a lumen
Lumen output is the specific measurement for how much light a bulb emits where wattage measures the amount of electrical power. For example, a light with high lumens will appear bright and illuminate a large area whereas a bulb with low lumen output will only light up a small space and seem quite dull.
A simple representation of this is if you had a cake with 1 birthday candle or a cake with 100 candles. The single candle would have a very low lumen output whereas the cake with 100 candles will produce significantly more light and thus have a higher lumen output.
The higher the lumens, the more light it can produce, but a high lumen output does not have to mean it uses more watts (power).
Efficacy
The best way to know you’re purchasing a high quality, energy efficient LED fitting is to look at its luminous efficacy. Luminous efficacy is a measure of how well a light source produces light and it gives us a lumens per watt value.
Compare that to the Faze Edge 110, which has an output of 1320 lumens and a luminous efficacy of 86 lm/w. That is ten times more efficient and will result in long-term energy savings.
In summary, when choosing your light, the lumens or lumen output should be your number one priority and then closely followed by luminous efficacy. We provide these measurements on our lights to ensure you purchase the correct light for your space.
Do you have any specific questions you would like us to write about? If so, get in touch with us here. If you have any general questions about the products we have at Radiant Lighting, we would love to hear from you.
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