Watts is the WRONG measure of brightness for RV LED Lights

Hello, Friends of Fitty. Marlan here over at RV52. Yeah. Still drinking my coffee from my Keurig. If you want to find our more, go look at RV52.com/Keurig. K-E-U-R-I-G. Anyway, today, I’m going to talk about how your life has just been completely turned upside down. Not by me, I’m very sorry about the whole thing. But, you know I’ve been talking about RV LED lights and how LEDs are way more efficient. In fact, five times more efficient. Or you can think of it differently, they’re, they require one-fifth as much power for the same amount of light.

So why has that turned your life upside down? Well, for the past, I don’t know, 80 years, you’ve been able to go to the grocery store or the hardware store of wherever, and when somebody says go get a 60 watt bulb, you knew what a 60 watt bulb was. You knew how much light, how bright it was, you knew everything about it, you knew where it fit. Today, you can’t buy a 60 watt bulb in an RV LED light variety. Well, why? If I take 60 and divide that by 5, I get 12. Now I already told you that they’re one fifth as power hungry for the same amount of light, right? So really, 60 watts isn’t how much light it’s giving out, it’s how much power it’s consuming.

So it turns out, with an incandescent, to put out ‘X’ amount of light, it takes 60 watts. To get the same amount of light out of an LED light bulb, assuming we haven’t used the fishing LEDs, the inside of a light bulb, and things like that, it takes 12 watts. So you don’t say go out and buy me a 60 watt lightbulb, you say go out and buy me something like, I’m thinking it’s around 800 lumens lightbulb.

What’s this lumens? Well believe it or not, scientists and engineers actually have a measurement for the amount of light that’s put out. You’re not buying the power consumption of a lightbulb, you’re buying how much light it can generate.

Now, all these years we knew what that was, it’s lumens, but we never used it because we never had to, because 60 watts always produced about the same amount of lumens. But now we’re turning into all these different lighting techniques and technologies, and they put out they same amount of light for a lot of different power consumptions. So you don’t say it in power consumption anymore. We’re going to have to get used to saying lumens.

So if the only thing you get out of this talk, which was really the only thing I meant to tell you in this talk, is if you want to know how much light you need, you have to think in lumens. So when you’re looking at the label in the store, when you’re looking at Amazon, look for how many lumens it produces. Okay? And that’s, that’s going to answer your question.

Happy lumens, from RV52.