7 Benefits of Using LED Lights

Are you looking at purchasing new lights for your home or business?

There are countless options when it comes to lighting. Your home or office will determine the number of lights that you'll need and, potentially, what type might be best. Get the right lights in your home and you can transform spaces while lowering your bills.

LED lights have become the most popular option for saving money and increasing efficiency these days. Today, we're going to take an in-depth look at LED lights and tell you why they're always going to be the best option for most situations.

If you're wondering if LEDs can handle every application, then keep reading and find out how versatile these lights really are.

1. Energy Efficient Lighting

If you're someone that truly cares about lowering your carbon footprint and using less energy, then LED lighting is the way to go. LED lights use as much as 50% less energy than fluorescent, halogen, or incandescent bulbs, so you'll be paying less to keep the lights on and lower your fossil fuel usage.

Other types of bulbs simply emit light and heat straight out from their source, but with LED bulbs and fixtures, the light is actually directed. This results in less wasted light and energy. If you replace all of your lights with LEDs, you'll see huge savings on your monthly bills.

2. Never Burn Out

LED lights rarely burn out, unlike every other type of lighting. Of course, LED light bulbs will still lose power over time, but you'll just see this as dimming. This makes it easier to tell when you'll need to replace them.

With a good fixture feeding them, LEDs can last over 50,000 hours. Compare this with the average incandescent or fluorescent bulb, which last around 1,000 and 10,000 hours respectively. If you're looking for long-term savings on the lights themselves and energy costs, LEDs are the best option.

3. Good in the Warm or Cold

If you live in a cooler climate, you may have noticed your fluorescent bulbs struggling to give you light in cold conditions. They need more voltage to start in the cold and end up offering weaker light as a result. If you're outfitting a cold garage or a refrigeration unit for a restaurant, you need a better option.

LED lights, on the other hand, actually perform better in the cold than they do in the heat. They're the perfect choice for any outdoor lighting for parking lots, outside of houses, or commercial refrigerators.

4. They Won't Break

LEDs don't typically require any glass enclosures and there aren't any filaments involved, so they're far less likely to break. They're just mounted on a circuit board, similar to your phone or tablet, so while they're vulnerable to direct impact, they're not easy to break like a glass fluorescent or halogen bulb.

Because of their flexible design, they can be used for essentially any application. The original use for LED lights was for indicator lights on circuit boards, so there's no space too small for LED lighting.

With LED strip lights, you can get creative with colors and place them anywhere in your home or office that might need a little excitement. They're safe to work with and easy to install, so you can just order them from Birddog Lighting and place them yourself.

5. No Heat or UV Emissions

Most of the other popular lighting sources actually create more heat than they do light. If you've ever tried to change an incandescent bulb right after it burns out, then you've probably experienced this heat first hand (no pun intended). Almost all of the power going into an incandescent light is converted to infrared heat and UV light instead of visible light. 

LED lights give off an imperceptible amount of heat and virtually no UV light. UV rays, in particular, can be extremely harmful to your skin and cause eye problems. It's also detrimental to works of art, wallpaper, and can cause paint to fade.

6. Flexible Designs for Every Room

With LED lighting, you've got amazing options for anywhere inside or outside your home. Much is made of LED strip lights for outdoor applications, like around the pool or lining your walkways, but they're just as amazing for indoor lighting. 

As we stated earlier, LEDs come in many different colors and styles, so you can always find something to fit the design of any room. They're dimmable (down to around 10%) and actually turn on when you want them to, unlike other bulbs that tend to flicker for a few seconds before being fully lit.

Other bulbs also lose power the more you turn them on or off, which doesn't happen with LEDs. There's no evidence that LED lights lose power simply from being switched on and off.

7. Better Light Quality

The poor quality of light that fluorescent bulbs give off actually makes it difficult to discern colors. These bulbs aren't aimed at giving you visibility to the full spectrum of light. Incandescent bulbs do provide good light quality but at the expense of energy efficiency.

LED lights render colors much better than their predecessors and give you the energy efficiency that you're looking for. Of course, this isn't the aim of every LED strip light or bulb, so you'll have to look at the color rendering index (CRI) number on the package. 

The higher the CRI number, the better quality of light you're getting from a bulb. What type of bulb or strip light you'll need will depend on the application, which you can find out more about on our blog.

Go With LED Lights and Don't Look Back

Now that you understand some of the benefits of LED lights compared with other types of lighting, you can make the best decision for your home or office. It's obvious that LEDs are better for design, efficiency, and the environment, so visit us at Birddog Lighting for all of your LED needs.