Why aren't LEDs popular?

I know LED lights are expensive - but if they save so much energy, shouldn't everyone be buying them? Why aren't LEDs popular?

Answer from Green Energy Efficient Homes

It's much more difficult for the average person to understand life cycle costs than it is for them to understand up front costs. LED lights have lower life cycle costs - total cost of purchase and use throughout a long period of time, say ten years - than either fluorescent or incandescent lights. You pay much more up front than for other lights but then you pay next to nothing for the electricity to run them. The trouble is people don't think to calculate lifetime costs, they think of the cash that is leaving their wallet when they buy the lights.

Another problem with LED lights is they're not as easy to find as other types that have been in mass production for much longer. Every year there are more available, and more and more stores carry them, and prices keep coming down, but still you can find incandescent or fluorescent lights much more easily.

Quality is an issue too - many of these lights claim to last 100,000 hours but can burn out much earlier. We saw that with compact fluorescent lights in their early days - and in the first few years that China started mass producing them - claims of 10,000 hour lifetimes, and they would burn out in a few hundred. I expect this will improve over time but it is still an issue now.

The final challenge for LED lights is that the light they produce is very directed - unlike an incandescent or fluorescent light bulb that sends its light in every direction. Because they send their light in a very directed fashion, it's very easy for manufacturers to claim a higher brightness than they should, since lumens (the typical measure of light intensity) is measured at a particular spot below the light. While the lumens of an incandescent and an LED light may appear the same in the square inch straight below the two lights, the incandescent light will cast a much broader light, so people who buy an LED light that claims to be the equivalent of a 100 watt incandescent bulb are often very disappointed with the amount of light they get - it might only look like a 50 watt bulb when you factor in the whole area that is being lit.

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