No it’s not a new crime solving sleuth and his sidekick it’s the way we talk about the more mundane light bulb or lamp if you prefer, but hey light bulbs or lamps we know what we’re talking about don’t we…
Watts
Firstly we need to clear something up: We often refer to watts as a way to describe how bright a light bulb is, but in actual fact; watts is the amount of power the lamp uses to produce light for 1 hour.
So why do we use watts to explain the brightness of a lamp?
Well this goes back to times when light bulbs were very simple and straight forward. We all knew how bright a 40w, 60w or even a 100w light bulb was so that’s what we asked for when we went shopping for them and in fact that’s how they were labelled.
Nowadays it’s not so easy because to know how bright a lamp is just from the amount of power it consumes and this is because new technology has lead to lamps that are much more economical to run, using much less power yet giving out the same light levels as the older, now almost extinct, tungsten filament lamps.
This is where LUMENS come in to the story.
We don’t really need to know the technical stuff about how lumens are measured, but feel free to work it out from this diagram if you want..!
Yeah I didn’t think so….
All we need to know is; that lumens are the amount of light visible to the human eye that comes from a light source and the higher the number the brighter the light.
So now we know what were looking for where do we look and how many lumens do you need?
The where is easy; packaging for lamps from reputable manufacturers will always be marked with the lumen (Lm) output for the lamp along with other details like the power consumption in watts (W). We list our lamps with both the lumens and wattage in the main title description.
You can shop for lamps here.
So now we need to know how many lumens we’re looking for; as a very rough guide 1w of old school tungsten filament light bulb is very roughly 10 lumens (60w is about 600 lumens (60(w) x 10(Lm)=600Lm)
As you can see: a standard old school 60w light bulb gives us about 620 lumens and with a new LED light bulb we only need about a 6w – it really is as simple as that.
Well actually it’s kind of not that simple – because now we also have to consider the colour of the light that we want from our new modern light bulbs.
When light bulbs were simple they were all just warm white, now we get a choice; usually warm white, white and daylight and this does affect the lumens a little. Any lamps we sell which have a colour choice will have a drop down menu where you can select what you prefer.
We’ll delve in to light colour in another blog so be sure to sign up for notifications for when these come out.
If you’re still confused about the whole lumens verses watts you can comment below or contact us for any help and advise.
Let us know if you have found this information helpful or if there are any other subjects that you would like us to cover in future blogs.