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If you're trying to exchange a 100W light bulb, you'll discover several LED choices at prices that aren't nearly as unreasonable as they were just a year or two ago. The current crop, including the Philips 100W Equal LED, hovers proper around the $20 value point. Initially priced at $25, Philips' LED has since been marked down a few bucks to $22, which is still slightly costlier than what you will see from rivals like GE and Cree. Philips justifies that by claiming an additional eighty lumens' worth of brightness over these two, together with superior dimming capabilities. Nevertheless, our checks didn't reveal any noticeable difference in either brightness or dimmability. That, along with the fact that Philips affords half the guarantee that you'll get with GE or Cree, makes this bulb troublesome to advocate. Philips' 100W Equal LED shares the identical, flat-topped build of its smaller siblings within the 60W and 40W classes, however units itself apart with a unique design that splits the bulb into three sections separated by deep channels.
This helps keep the heat buildup at bay, one thing that will get particularly essential when LEDs start placing out this a lot mild. Even with the emphasis on thermal management, the bulb gets hot to the touch after just a couple of minutes of use, which is not unusual for a 100W alternative LED. As such, Philips recommends not utilizing it in an enclosed fixture -- in case you do, you will danger shortening the bulb's lifespan. That lifespan is rated at 25,000 hours, the same as the other 100W substitute LEDs I examined, with the exception of Utilitech. That lifespan comes out to 22.8 years if the bulb is used for a median of 3 hours per day. Philips warrants the bulb for the first 5 of these years, while GE and Cree both offer ten-12 months warranties. 25,000 hours is the longevity benchmark for Vitality Star certification -- the Philips 100W Equivalent earned certification over the summer time, as did the GE LED I examined. Cree's bulb isn't certified yet, but it meets the criteria -- Cree's staff tells me they anticipate it to be certified within the close to future.
Philips claims a mild output of 1,680 lumens at a golden hued 2,seven hundred K from a energy draw of 19 watts. That makes it good for about 88 lumens per watt -- an impressive quantity, however not as spectacular as GE and Utilitech, which both handle to place out a hundred lumens per watt. Those 1680 lumens are a slight step up from what you'll get with GE, Cree, or any of the opposite bulbs we examined. With brightness being considered one of the primary things you want from your house EcoLight home lighting, that number would appear to offer Philips an edge, albeit a minor one. However, the engineers at Energy Star take a look at bulbs out for themselves, posting the full specs for each LED they certify online. On Philips' itemizing, Energy Star rates the bulb at 1,620 lumens -- not 1,680. Whereas an additional 80 lumens is just barely sufficient to make a noticeable difference, an extra 20 lumens is basically insignificant. We wished to know which quantity had it proper.
From a simple eye check, the sunshine put out from the Philips 100W Equivalent LED would not differ much from its nearest opponents, the Cree and GE 100W replacements. Facet by facet, the three have almost identical glows, all of them boasting equally warm tones. That is not stunning, given that every one three are rated with the same 2,700 Ok color temperature. When examined, each erred low, on the yellowy side. Remember, although, that Philips claims to place out 1,680 lumens to Cree and GE's 1,600. That is a reasonably minuscule distinction, but it's one that needs to be noticeable if you're wanting intently for it. The problem is that I could not notice it. Testing bulb brightness will get a bit tricky. Along with measuring colour temperature and coloration rendering scores, EcoLight home lighting our spectrometer can take luminosity readings from a given light -- but those readings are easily skewed by things like viewing angle and distance. To get numbers you may rely on, you need something called an integrating sphere.