Gadgetory

so the thing about lightbulbs is that we use them more than just about anything in our homes it's the first thing you do when you wake up is turn it on and then you turn it off before you go to bed but at the same time you don't think about them that much so when one burns out and we have to replace it we can get overwhelmed in the lighting aisle and end up buying a bulb that doesn't make our home feel right now there are LED bulbs CFL bulbs incandescent bulbs halogen bulbs and they're all different in terms of the way they turn electricity into light old-school incandescent just heat up a tungsten filament and they glow halogen bulbs do the same thing but with a little bit of extra gas that makes it a bit more efficient CFL bulbs or fluorescents they use fluorescent gases that admit light when electricity comes into play and then LEDs are little tiny diodes that give off light in a very efficient way you put them inside of a bulb and you can really cut down on your power usage so while you're shopping for bulbs you just want to think about how you want your home to feel and look do you want bright light that's gonna help you read do you want light that's gonna ease you to sleep at night and be kind of gentle do you want bright daylight white tones to help you focus during the day those are all different things you can get them if you know how to look for them you can really customize the way your home feels so the key to brightness is to remember to look for lumens lumens are a unit of measure when it comes to light that tells you how bright a bulb is so if it has more lumens it's a brighter bulb and what you're gonna want to remember is that the terms are really changing we don't really talk about these bulbs in terms of wattages anymore instead we talk about lumens with brightness so if a bulb says it's a 60 watt replacement that doesn't mean it's necessarily bright enough it just means it's intended to replace an old-school 60 watt incandescent so the most important number to keep in mind as you're shopping is 800 that's the amount of lumens that you're gonna want if you just want a standard common light bulb 60 watt incandescent back in the day would put out about 800 or 850 lumens of light so if you get a bulb that's got at least that number you're gonna be pretty happy with the light that you get the other numbers to keep in mind if you want a brighter level of light like a 75 watt or 100 watt would be 1100 lumens and 1600 lumens respectively if you want something like an accent light like a 40 watt bulb for a side table lamp 450 lumens is a good number to look for the other really important thing to remember is that light bulb packaging now has lighting facts on it just like the nutrition facts on food that you buy those are so important to look at they'll tell you the amount of lumens they'll tell you the color temperature they'll tell you how long the bulb will last they'll tell you how much energy it'll use all of that information should be right there on the packaging make sure you check it out color temperature gives you a sense of the tint of the light you know light bulbs don't just look pure white they often look a little yellow here if they're hotter they look more like bluish light it's really just the white light spectrum represented by the Kelvin scale the common yellowy light bulb you're probably thinking of is 2700 K if you go higher it's gonna get whiter and then more bluish you can save a lot of money by upgrading all the bulbs in your home to LED if you're still using incandescent an incandescent is gonna add on average about 7 bucks a year to your energy bill if you use it for 3 hours a day by comparison an LED that puts out the same amount of light well maybe add less than a dollar in some cases so you're saving about five or six dollars per bulb on average if you're just talking about standard bulbs like that the problem with dimming is that you have so many different kinds of light bulbs and so many different kinds of dimmer switches and dimming hardware and other X factors like voltage irregularities that it's tough to guarantee that a given bulb is going to dim really well on your dimmer switch if you're really concerned that dimming my recommendation is to upgrade to smart bulbs because with smart bulbs you've got dubbing mechanisms that are standardized inside each of those bulbs you don't have a lot of the problems that you get with common dimmer switches and modern bulbs with electro magnetic interference you know what to think about any of that if you don't want to take that step though you're gonna want to make sure you look for bulbs at a say they're dimmable and be promised long warranties and give you some reassurance that if it doesn't work out if the bulb flickers and it doesn't work with your dimmer switch you can take it back and try something else aside from that dimming advantage smart bulbs offer a lot of convenient features and kind of nifty ways to control them using voice or using your phone and they can offer just an upgrade in the way you interact with your light and considering like I said that you use your light bulb so much I think that makes a lot of sense and prices have come down on some of the best top-of-the-line smart bulbs that it's not that unreasonable to make that switch at the end of the day these new light bulbs last for years and years and years so it's worth ensuring that you get the right ones know the numbers and that won't be as hard as you think