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LEDs are becoming all the rage, but is this a fad that will fade. Not a chance! Imagine you had the choice to replace 30 light bulbs in your house and you have to choose between three types of bulbs:

• Bulb #1, on average, lasts for 50,000 hours, uses 6-8 watts (but has the intensity of a 60 watt bulb), and costs $32.87/yr to operate.
• Bulb #2, on average, lasts 1,200 hours, uses 60 watts (has the intensity of a 60 watt bulb), and costs $328.59/yr to operate.
• Bulb #3, on average, lasts 8,000 hours, uses 12-15 watts (but has the intensity of a 60 watt bulb), and costs $76.65/yr to operate.

So which would you pick? Obviously bulb #1, right? What if we were to tell you that bulb #1 has even more advantages over the bulb #2 & 3? Well, as you might have guessed, bulb #1 is LED. Bulb #2 is incandescent, and bulb #3 is CFL. LED bulbs are already desirable, but it gets even better; the price per bulb is going down. Take a look at http://www.designrecycleinc.com/led%20comp%20chart.html to see all the advantages. For even more information, check out http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/02/10/the-light-bulb-showdown-leds-vs-cfls-vs-incandescent-bulbs-whats-the-best-deal-now-and-in-the-future/.

We recommend replacing your existing lighting, especially outdoor lighting such as path-lights and porch-lights, with LEDs. And don’t worry, you don’t have to replace your landscape lighting system to do it. We can acquire and install these new LEDs for you using your existing fixures!

Here’s a quick scoop on how much the City of Carpinteria saved when they replaced all the light bulbs in their street lights with LEDs. They went from paying over $15,000 per year PER LIGHT, to just over $3,000. That’s a savings of over $11,000 per year per bulb! Now that’s a decision that is definitely paying off! If you want to read more about the Carpinteria project, visit: http://www.landscapeonline.com/research/article/16297