DIY Home Improvement Guide

The Two Qualities to Look for In LED Lights

For outdoor landscape lighting that is energy efficient, bright, and gives you high quality light, you simply cannot beat LED lights.  Instead of using standard filaments, LEDs use semiconductors to emit photons that produce the light we see.  They last almost fifty times longer than incandescent bulbs and almost five times longer than compact florescent ones.  On top of this they are even forty percent more energy efficient.  Are you ready to take the plunge and install some LED landscape lighting on your property?  If so, here are two things that you need to look for when purchasing the bulbs.

The first thing to look for when buying LED lights is the Lumen output.  Lumens are simply a unit of measurement that measures the brightness of light that a certain bulb or light fixture emits.  It’s a more exact measurement than the previous measurement of candle feet.  Knowing the amount of lumens that a particular light emits will let you make sure that it produces the amount of light that you want for the job its intended to do.  As a comparison, a traditions sixty watt light bulb outputs about eight hundred and fifty lumens.  If you find LEDs rated for less than this, you can be sure that it puts out less light than a Edison bulb, but if you find one that outputs much more lumens, it will be significantly brighter.

The next quality that you need to look at for LED lights is the color temperature of the bulb.  Instead of actually saying what color of light at a particular LED emits, its packaging will instead say what the temperature of the light is in the Kelvin scale.  The higher the light temperature, especially lights over five thousand Kelvin, produce a much cooler color resembling a blue.  On the opposite site of the spectrum, are LEDs between 2700 and 3000 Kelvin, which emit a yellower, warmer color.  As a benchmark, incandescent bulbs have a Kelvin of 2700, while compact florescent bulbs have a Kelvin rating of around five thousand.