Today, perhaps, every house and apartment cannot do without light. To provide a room with light, it is enough to get a certain bulb or lamp, and often this is enough. When choosing a lamp, they usually pay attention to the brightness of this lamp itself, which is measured in watts. But this is a unit of measurement in conventional lamps. In LED lamps, brightness is measured in lumens. And several questions arise in this regard:
- What is lumen?
- How does it differ from watts?
- How to choose an LED lamp?
- And many others…
In this article we will try to answer these and other questions.
What is Watt?
When buying an incandescent lamp, the power indicator in watts gives consumers a good idea of the brightness of the lamp. The more watts, the brighter the bulb.
However, this rule does not apply to LED lamps. A 60-watt LED is in no way comparable to a 60-watt incandescent bulb. In fact, a 60-watt LED can actually blind you. LEDs are designed to use less energy and are inherently lower wattage. This means that using watts to describe the brightness of an LED bulb is pointless.
So, lumens...
Measuring lumens is not a new concept developed just for LEDs. It's a metric that has been used for decades to measure the amount of light a bulb (or anything else) puts out. It's just that until recently, it was mostly not listed on the packaging. In 2011, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission began requiring manufacturers of compact fluorescent bulbs, incandescent bulbs, and LED bulbs to use lumens as a measure of the brightness of the bulb.
“While wattage is familiar to consumers and has been displayed on light bulb packaging for decades, watts are a measure of energy use, not brightness,” the FTC said in a statement. “As a result, relying solely on wattage can make it difficult for consumers to compare traditional incandescent bulbs with more efficient bulbs, such as LED bulbs.”
On the packaging, the lumen output is indicated by a number followed by “lm,” short for lumens. The higher the lumen output, the brighter the bulb.
Choosing the Right Bulb
The easiest way to determine which bulb you need is to use an incandescent/LED converter.
Let’s say you typically use a 60-watt incandescent bulb. You’ll probably want to choose an LED bulb that uses between 8 and 12 watts and has a lumen output rating of 800 to get the same amount of light. This conversion table will help you find an LED bulb similar to the one you are using:
As you can see, the power consumption of LEDs depends on the luminous flux. This is because some LED brands have created bulbs that provide more lumens with less power. For maximum energy savings, Svetkomplekt recommends choosing the bulb with the highest lumens, and then choosing the bulb with the lowest power.
