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LED lights are extremely expensive. While regular light bulbs are 3 for $1, a single LED lamp will cost $20-$40.
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And for now, it looks like a lot of commercially-produced LED bulbs have a ways to go before they can catch up to fluorescent. Some of the cheap ones are even worse than incandescent.
Department of Energy link.
From their testing, some of the issues encountered (encountered in some, but not all units tested):
- Pathetic power factors.
- Substantially exaggerated output claims, and therefore exaggerated efficiency claims.
- Efficiencies that tested lower than incandescent or halogen.
- High failure rates (such as 2 out of 10 units dying within the first 2000 hours of testing).
- Very poor luminance maintenance, due to bad thermal design, or overdriven LEDs.
- Tested specs for one unit vs another of the exact same model can vary by quite a bit, somewhere around ±20% in some cases.
And, when compared to something like a 4ft fluorescent tube with a good ballast, it's still tough to find an LED lighting fixture that can beat it in terms of lumens/watt.
Cree does have some LEDs that can do 100 lm/W, and I think they've got some experimental ones that are just over 200 lm/W. But any of the LED fixtures I've seen seem to prefer standard (cheap) T1-3/4 LEDs, and not the latest-and-greatest high-brightness components.
For lighting, my solution for the livingroom of my apartment, which also lacks any sort of permanent lighting, was a few floor lamps with 65-85W CFLs. (That's actual consumption, not equivalent incandescent light output. The equivalent light output is somewhere over 300W each. )
Standard floor lamps with harp-style hardware for the lampshades, some harp extenders to accommodate the huge CFL, and they're ready to go.