LED Bulb Payback: 42 Bulbs, $268/Year, 14 Months

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Our house had 42 light fixtures across two stories: 26 incandescent A19s, 8 halogen MR16s, 6 BR30 floodlights, and two ancient CFL twisters in the laundry closet. Over six weekends we swapped every single one. Total cost: $312. Year-one electricity reduction on the lighting circuits: 1,506 kWh. At our blended rate that’s $268 saved in twelve months. Payback: 14 months.

This is the full receipt log, the three bulbs we returned, and the one dimming gotcha that cost us an afternoon.

What we replaced and what we bought

The two brands that survived eight months without a single failure:

• GE Reveal A19 for the public rooms — high CRI 90+ makes skin tones not look green. Search Amazon
• Cree TW-series BR30 for the kitchen recessed cans. Even tone across 8 cans. Amazon

What we returned

Three bulb sets came back to the store:

1. A cheap eBay multipack rated “60W equivalent” that actually measured 470 lumens. The “equivalent” claim was not real. If a brand will not publish lumens prominently, do not buy.
2. A smart bulb four-pack we thought we wanted. They drew 0.4W at idle each — 0.4 × 4 × 24 × 365 / 1000 = ~14 kWh/year of pure standby. Not worth the convenience for us.
3. A vintage filament Edison-style LED for the dining pendant. The CRI was 75 and food looked sad. Returned within the week.

The dimming gotcha

Half our wall switches were old TRIAC dimmers from 2008. They worked fine on incandescents but caused flicker and audible buzzing on the LEDs. Two options:

• Replace the dimmer with a modern LED-rated unit. We used Lutron Caseta on the heavily used rooms (Amazon).
• Lock the bulbs at full bright and use a non-dimming switch elsewhere.

Lutron Caseta works flawlessly with the GE Reveal and Cree TW bulbs in our test. The buzzing went away within ten minutes of swap.

CCT (color temperature) — the choice you will live with longest

We landed at 2700K in public rooms, 3000K in bathrooms, 3500K in closets and laundry, 4000K nowhere except the garage. Anything 5000K and above made our cream walls look hospital-blue. Pick a CCT and stick with it across one room — mixing 2700K and 3000K in the same ceiling is the kind of small wrong thing that bothers you forever.

Year-one measured savings

On our two main lighting subpanels we measured 1,506 kWh saved over twelve months versus the prior twelve-month baseline. That number is conservative because we replaced the bulbs in batches and the baseline counted six months of mixed-old-and-new.

Blended at our average $0.178/kWh, savings landed at $268. At $312 spent on bulbs and three Caseta dimmers, payback was 14 months. Every month after is roughly $22 in the bank.

What about heat?

A 60W incandescent gives off about 56W as heat. Forty bulbs swapping at 52W heat-savings each, averaged over use hours, slightly raised the heating load in winter and slightly reduced the cooling load in summer. We modeled it: net effect on HVAC bills was around -$11/year. The lighting savings absolutely dominate.

Tools

• Emporia Vue 3 to clamp the lighting circuits (Amazon).
• Lutron Caseta starter kit (Amazon).

Closing math

• Spent: $312.
• Saved year one: $268.
• Payback: 14 months.
• Year-two savings (rates climbed): $284.
• Year-five projected lifetime savings on this batch alone: ~$1,440.

The LED swap is the obvious starter project for any home energy retrofit. It is fast, cheap, and the kilowatt-hour reduction shows up the very next billing cycle.

Related

• The 11-system audit
• Smart power strips — real measured savings
• Smart thermostats — 7 tested, 3 worked

The lumens-per-watt benchmark we use now

Every LED purchase after this audit is screened against a single number: lumens per watt (lm/W). Anything below 90 lm/W gets returned. Anything above 110 lm/W is a buy. Most 2026 bulbs in the GE Reveal and Cree TW line come in around 95–105 lm/W with CRI ≥ 90.

A quick reference for what to expect:

The CRI 90+ premium costs you about 10–15% of efficacy. For public rooms it is worth it; for closets and the garage, CRI 80 at higher lm/W is the right choice.

CRI and R9 — the color quality details

Most LEDs publish CRI (Color Rendering Index), but the lesser-known R9 value (red saturation) is what makes skin tones, wood floors, and tomato sauce look natural.

• CRI 80, R9 around 10 — common cheap LED. Skin tones go waxy.
• CRI 90, R9 around 50 — GE Reveal class. Looks natural.
• CRI 95, R9 around 80 — pro lighting class. Looks excellent. Costs 2–3× a regular CRI-90 bulb.

For our public rooms we landed at CRI 90 / R9 ~50 and the difference vs the old incandescents was negligible to the eye. The CRI 95 was nice but not worth the premium for residential.

Smart bulb vs smart switch — the right answer

We tried both. The verdict: smart switch beats smart bulb for almost every residential case.

Unless you have a specific need for color or per-bulb CCT changes, a smart switch (Lutron Caseta, Leviton Decora Smart, etc.) is the right pick. The idle-power total across a ten-fixture room is lower with one smart switch than with ten smart bulbs.

The “burn-in” myth

LEDs do not require burn-in. Some boutique blogs claim 100 hours of break-in is needed. False. Modern LEDs are at full output the moment they energize and decay slightly (5–10%) over their first 1,000 hours, then slowly to L70 (70% of original output) at end of life.

What is real: the warranty period is the meaningful failure number. A 5-year warranty implies the manufacturer thinks median life is well beyond that. We had one early failure in our forty-two-bulb retrofit — GE warrantied it within four days.

Bulbs we’d skip in 2026

• Filament-style LEDs over 5W. They run hot, heat-stress the silicon, and have higher early-failure rates. Use them only for visible-bulb fixtures where appearance matters.
• Any “color changing” bulb you do not specifically want to color-change. Bulbs that can do RGB are always worse at white CCT than dedicated white bulbs.
• Sub-$2 bulbs. The lumens are usually overstated. The lifespan is usually understated.

Heat dissipation matters more than people think

LEDs do not run cool. The diodes run cool, but the driver and the heatsink in the base run warm. Recessed cans with limited airflow can trap heat and shorten driver life dramatically.

Two rules:

• For enclosed fixtures (sealed dome ceiling lights, fully-enclosed pendants), buy bulbs explicitly rated for enclosed-fixture use. Lifespan in non-rated bulbs drops by 40–60%.
• For recessed cans without IC-rated trim, leave the trim a little loose to allow heat to vent. Or upgrade to a dedicated LED retrofit kit (Amazon) that integrates the driver into the housing.

The next thing we will try

LED tape lighting under the kitchen cabinets. The plan is 16W of warm 2700K tape replacing the existing 4× 18W halogen pucks. Modeled savings: 56 kWh/year on heavy-use lights. We will report numbers after twelve months.