Unless you have a lighting fixture that's really hard to reach, I'd stick with CFL's for now. LED bulbs are just starting to become practical for everyday use. There's bound to be a lot more development over the next 5 years, and the price is almost certain to decline substantially. There are also still color temperature issues with LED's that have already been largely resolved in CFL's. LED's are bound to get better over the next 5 years in that regard as well.

I can't even find any LED lights to switch too!!!

Maybe tarting with where I could find them would be a good idea?

tarting = Starting...

I fear the end of all those compact fluorescent lights from Wal*Mart and everywhere else they are being sold.

This could end up making MTBE look like tap water.

Every one of those things has a small amount of mercury in it and chances are that every one of the Wal*Mart variety will end up in the garbage. Not quite as 'environmentally sound' as the pushers of that choice insist, is it?

50 or a 100 thousand hours are great. If you are >+4STD in the quality control area. But if the bulb fails early you are hosed. This is the tradeoff we learn from 6-Sigma; the cost to push from 5 to 6 sigma can be almost asymptotic for certain processes. And since no one will pay for that the actual failure distribution is far less than 5 or 6 STD, often less than 4, which sounds great until you churn out a billion units of something.

Pinky, the mercury argument is somewhat more complicated then you allude to.

As the article mentioned, using a standard incandescent bulb wastes a great deal of electricity in comparison to the CFL, because of this you're actually pumping more mercury into the atmosphere over the lifetime of a CFL because electricty, at least in the states, is primarily generated by coal.

And that's not even taking into account that CFL's can be recycled and that mercury reused/safely disposed of.

So it seems, whichever way you cut it, unless your energy sources change, then CFL is the better option, even if you're solely basing your purchasing choices on the mercury issue.

This whole "life of the bulb" issue has always bothered me, because quite often, bulbs fail through the light fixture being knocked down, or for some other reason that seems to have nothing to do with the actual "life" of the bulb.

So one question I'd like to see covered is the relative sturdiness of each kind of bulb. If my son knocked over his bedside table in the middle of the night (it's not as stable as it should be), will an LED or CFL be more or less likely to survive the crash in good working order?

Also: the longer a bulb lasts, the greater the chance that it will experience one of those bulb-career-ending events. How many bulbs actually get to live out a normal lifespan? I'd like to see some research on that point.

I would have liked to hear a comparison of the light quality emitted by these bulbs. Even a brief description would have been nice. I can't stand using the light from fluorescents, even the newest generation of them, for any kind of focused tasks in the house. If LEDs are a better solution in terms of the quality of light and the amount of energy used, I'd rather just wait to switch to them, even if they have a greater initial cost. They certainly do a good job in flashlights.

...but I'll have to wait anyway. I hope LED "light bulbs" become available at retail stores (Target, supermarket, local hardware store) over the next few years.

So far, all I have seen is a few night lights and, at the hardware store, a small 2-watt LED fixture designed to light up a kitchen counter (according to the packaging). Seemed quite reasonable at about $13, but... when I took it home and tried it, the light was so ghastly bluish that it made the counter look like a slab at the morgue. Sorry, LED designers, back to the drawing board with you. (When I returned it, I picked up a 0.25 watt night light that works fine and uses 1/16 of the wattage of the incandescent it replaced).

Someday... soon... I hope... I'll be able to buy an LED "bulb" that will screw into a standard light fixture and give some approximation of that warm, diffuse glow we love.

If we had a national energy policy that made any sense, the US gov't would have spent a couple of billion on solving this problem instead of... you know what. LED's have the potential of slashing US electricity demand, but so far that's just a potential.

All the LEDs I've seen were called "white" or "natural" but in reality a shocking pale blue. I was given to understand that it was a limitation of the way they're made. Is there such a thing as an LED which isn't quite so uncomfortable to live with?

I might have answered your question already.

Note, I don't mind the new CFL's at all -- I have them all over the house, and find their light pleasant & natural. Maybe I've just gotten used to them. But imagine: even I find LED's (at least the ones on the market now) too bluish, harsh, and ghastly. Sorry, the ones I've seen are just not ready for prime time yet.

On the positive side: LED's come in a variety of colors, strengths, and styles (unlike CFLs, which vary within a fairly narrow band). So there is hope that someday--soon, I hope--some engineer or designer will get it right.

We decided to light my daughters' playhouse with a couple of strings of cheap (doubly so since they were on sale) LED Christmas lights from Ikea. They produce a nice warm-toned incandescent-like glow, and since they're strung along the entire wall produce an even overall distribution of light. And, since they produce minimal heat and won't need to be changed, we put them behind Lexan panels -- so it's pretty unlikely they'll be broken even under rough play.

Okay, so there's some limitations to this approach for lighting grown-up houses, but it demonstrates to me that the potential is there.