When buying light bulbs, you have a choice of incandescent bulbs, CFL bulbs, and LED bulbs.
The lowest price bulb is the cheapest, right? Not so fast!
Question: How long does each one last?
Incandescent bulbs will be dead after 1,000 hours. Maybe that seems like a long time, but remember there are 8,760 hours in one year.
CFL bulbs last up to 6,000 hours if they are good quality. That’s six times longer than an incandescent. So you actually need to buy six incandescent bulbs to do the job of one CFL.
LED bulbs last up to 50,000 hours if they are good quality. That’s fifty times longer than an incandescent, meaning you’d need to buy fifty incandescent bulbs to do the same job.
Now, consider the cost of energy to run the bulbs:
An incandescent bulb using 60 watts could be replaced with a 13 watt CFL, or an 8 watt LED bulb.
Once you consider the long lifespan and extreme energy efficiency of LED lights, you’ll find they are easily the cheapest form of lighting! Over the same lifespan of an incandescent bulb, an LED bulb is 85% cheaper!
INCANDESCENT | CFL | LED | |
Lumens: | 800 | 800 | 800 |
Max. Lifespan: (hrs) | 1,000 | 6,000 | 50,000 |
Power Consumption (watts) | 60 | 13-18 | 8-9 |
Initial Bulb Cost (₦) | ~ 240 | ~1,500 | ~2,000 |
Total Cost ₦ / 1000 hrs | ~2,350 | ~ 710 | ~ 360 ✔️ |