[masraum]

Originally Posted by zakthor

"Good looking" bulbs with "good light".

Well... I have been rat holing on "good light" for a bit over a year.

I replaced some leaky recessed light halogens with this cheapo amazon led things. Was amazing how much warmer the room became but the light color made me ill. Sort of a greenish blah. Even though the light was bright and the lights were actually 2700k the stuff in room looked horrid.

Turns out CRI is a weighted average of how a small number of color patches render. The manufacturers tuned their led so those patches looked great - essentially hacked the test so high scoring bulbs can still look awful.

Is seriously distressing to fill a room with crappy LED, makes a dark winter so depressing.

https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rendering-index

Long story short I've been ordering light samples from different makers and pretty much the best I've found are SORAA vivid. I've got a bunch ordered for the kitchen in 3000k and the light is lovely to our eyes. You've got to see them to believe it though.

https://www.soraa.com/assets/cloud/product_specs/par30s/00837/lm79.pdf

Rest of house we stick with 2700 and love the warmth, especially winter afternoons when sun sets at 4:30pm.

LED make sense for areas where your lights are mostly on.

For fixtures with odd shaped bulbs you'll look at I think its better to just go with incandescent - you probably aren't using those lights all the time?

In this specific situation, these are going to be the main kitchen lights, so they need to look good and put out good light and be efficient. Honestly, in the grand scheme of things, incandescents in the kitchen probably wouldn't affect our bill that much compared to HVAC costs. But I'd still like to do what I can.