The claimed extra longevity of LED bulbs has not materialized for me.
They seem to fail at roughly the same frequency that incandescent bulbs did in my home, which makes them about 10x to 15x more expensive.
I have many Philips LED lamps bought some 10 to 15 years ago, which were put in Edison sockets for incandescent lamps, and none of them has become defective during all these years.
However, even at that time, it was not their cheapest model, but one that was claimed to be long-life and I believe that later they have discontinued that model in favor of cheaper lamps.
I have no idea which vendor of LED lamps might sell good LED lamps today, because I never had to search for replacements. I assume that good LED lamps must still be available, but one must not impulse buy them, but one must check carefully the specifications of the lamps and the credibility of the vendor, before making a purchase decision.
The actual temperature of the sun is over 5000k (yes, the k in lightbulb temperature corresponds to the Kelvin scale of temperature) but after being scattered by our atmosphere it appears cooler. And where did all that extra light go? It was scattered around, making the sky blue!
When the sky is covered by clouds, which mix the direct Sun light and the sky light, you get a color much closer to the true color of the Sun.
As it is, I compromise.
I also do not like the bluish cheap 6500 K lamps.
I consider optimum the 4000 K lamps. This appear white with only a very-slightly yellowish hue, which allows the perception of the natural colors of most objects, but it still provides a warmer sensation than a strictly neutral white color (i.e. one around 5500 K).
I have also been using for more than a decade 13 W LED lamps that produce the same luminous flux as the 100-W incandescent lamps or the 23-W compact fluorescent lamps used in the past.
However, the requirements for an outdoor night lamp are very different. Low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency and lifetime as LED lamps, so those are not arguments for replacing them. The only thing that matters is whether you prefer yellow light or white light in a night environment. I definitely prefer yellow light, for reasons already mentioned by others, i.e. much less interference with night vision, sky light, nocturnal animals, or with my street-directed windows at home.
If energy efficiency would really matter, one could produce monochromatic amber LED lamps with efficiencies at least double over the current white LED lamps.
Yeah I know. I love it in my house.
On the industrial side, sodium vs LED is a much closer comparison generally than LED vs incandescent. LEDs kinda suck for high bay applications.
In the US people use roughly 10 000 kwh per year.
Say we have a 40 watt bulb, say it burns on average 5 hours per day or 200 wh. In 365 days that would be 72 kwh which at 16 cents per kwh is $11.52 or 0.73% of the annual power consumption.
Say one uses 5 light bulbs. Something around $57.60. Say leds use only 25% of the power = $14.40 for $43.2 saved.
Well over 10 cents per day.
What are you going to spend your 10 cents on? lol
There’s no standards and people are clueless and confused. There are awesome LEDs, but more often you see have harsh, terrible light.
Besides, we can have LEDs in better spectrums for under 1/5th the costs of incandescents. We just hired stingy motherfuckers and don't care about the repercussions of our decisions.
My whole house is neutral white LEDs except the bathrooms where we go to cool white to make it easier to clean and be sure it's clean (even if it's not spotless, there's a huge psychological benefit to not feeling like dim light is masking even more grime).
Oddly enough I'm otherwise pretty light sensitive - my current office at work has been a nightmare of trying to manage glare from badly places overheads and windows.
Going from 500w for my living room to 80w also helps a lot (and way more light and a lot less heat).
That does not make them the best choice for outdoor night lighting.
The replacement of the outdoor lighting appears to have been motivated in most cases by the desire to divert taxpayer funds towards the private companies selling such lamps, instead of by any technical reasons.
