For a number of years, many of us in the green space have been referring to compact fluorescent light bulbs (or CFLs) as a “transitional technology”: yes, they’re much more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs, but the light emitting diode (or LED) is even more efficient. Plus, LEDs don’t have the downside of containing tiny amounts of mercury. Price has kept this transition from taking place: while LEDs have been a long-term cost saver for quite some time, the idea of spending $50 or more on a light bulb just sat wrong with many people.
Still, many others get it, so demand for these super-efficient bulbs has driven the price of LED technology down. Zachary Shahan at Cleantechnica got a chance to review a new LED that’s also broken through an important pricing barrier: the Philips SlimStyle LED is now selling for just under $10 on Home Depot’s website (they’ll be available in-store at that price on March 1st).
Here’s Zach’s review. Let us know if you’ve had a chance to try out the SlimStyle, and what you thought.
I was recently offered a Philips SlimStyle LED for review. $0 is a pretty good price for an LED, so I took it. I have to admit that this is the first LED Iβm using as a βnormal light bulb.β All the others we have are CFLs. After about one weekβ¦
Steve
It will definitely be interesting to see whether people are ready to adopt a new look to their light bulbs in order to make LED lighting affordable in the home. I’ve heard so many people reject new light bulbs just because of the style. Nice that Philips tried something new and yet still tried to retain the feel of the traditional A19 bulb.
Survival Gardener AKA David the Good
Anything that gets people away from CFLs sounds good to me. We transitioned about half our house lighting to LEDs this last year. The rest is incandescent.
I look forward to trying these out.
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg
Just interested, David – what LED bulbs are you using? What are your impressions?