I am sorry you have had bad experiences with LED bulbs with dimmers. Those are the halogens in the house that I have not replaced (the ones on a dimmer switch) but they are only on a very few hours/ day. Also a 300w halogen uplighter (when it's on, it uses roughly as much energy as all the other lightbulbs in the house, combined).bertilak wrote:I have yet to finds LED bulb that dims as nicely as good old-fashioned incandescents, nor do they last as long as advertised.
A couple of years back the LEDs labeled "dimable" did respond to the slider on the dimmer but what they did was switch at the halfway point from full-on to full-off. Lowes gave me a full refund.
Newer ones are better but require a special dimmer. I installed one at $27 and it does work fairly well, but it never gets anywhere near as dim as an incandescent. I have a LOT of dimmers in my house so am still using incandescent everywhere but the one place I put in that $27 dimmer.
You can still find 60 watt incandescents even though they are no longer allowed. There are loopholes for specialty bulbs. I like the ones designated for harsh environments, like vibrations. They do cost more than in the old days.
But things seem to change almost weekly. I am running low so need to go and figure out (all over again) what to buy. It used to be so easy and cheap to get light bulbs. Now you need to live with whatever you get for $5-$20 per bulb or make it a major research project every year or so.
Yeah, and forget that "lasts 22 years" promise on the box. I find they generally fail in about a year, maybe a bit longer. Blows a big hole in the "saves money in the long run" theory! I think the small print on the box says that the 22 years is based on a pretty short duty cycle of only a few hours a day.
Halogen's also work reasonably well and are available "legally" but are also expensive.
I can confirm however, at least with the Philips bulbs and 50HZ 220v AC, that the bulbs last a long time. Other than one I have dropped, I have only had to replace one bulb in about 40, over 3 years (note when I started this thread).
My electricity consumption dropped about 20% when I did this, and I have been unable to identify another explanation why that happened (I was using around 60 kwhr/ week, now use around 50/ kwhr although more in winter).