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About this tool
Calculate energy, money and bulb-replacement savings from switching a whole home from CFL, halogen or incandescent to LED.
The LED vs CFL Bulb Savings calculator works out what switching a home's bulbs to LED saves, across both electricity and replacement bulbs. Replacement wattage is matched on light output rather than watts — new watts equal old watts times old luminous efficacy divided by LED efficacy — so a 60 W incandescent at about 14 lumens per watt is replaced by roughly an 8 W LED at 100 lumens per watt, not by a 60 W LED. It also prorates how many bulbs each technology burns through over your chosen horizon.
Open LED vs CFL Bulb Savings on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Pick 'What is fitted now' (each option lists lm/W and rated hours), the bulb count, burn hours per day and your tariff in INR per kWh.
Press Match brightness to fill Watts per replacement LED with the lumen-equivalent wattage, or type your own figure.
Read the yearly electricity saving, the payback in months and the Now vs With LEDs table, then use Copy result to export the summary.
Suggests the LED wattage that gives the same brightness, using luminous efficacy.
Rated life turns into bulbs consumed over the horizon, then into money.
Divides the up-front LED spend by the annual electricity saving, undiscounted.
Replacing twelve 60 W incandescent bulbs burning five hours a day with 9 W LEDs cuts lighting from about 1314 kWh a year to 197 kWh — roughly 8900 INR a year at 8 INR per kWh, with the LEDs paying for themselves in about two months.
The energy gain is much smaller than the incandescent case, because CFLs already reach about 60 lumens per watt against an LED's 100 — a 14 W CFL is matched by roughly an 8 W LED, saving about 40 percent rather than 85 percent. The stronger argument is life: 25,000 rated hours against about 8000, plus instant full brightness and no mercury.
About 8 to 10 W. A 60 W incandescent puts out roughly 800 lumens, and a typical LED delivers close to 100 lumens per watt, so 8 W matches it. Buy on the lumen figure printed on the box rather than the watt-equivalent claim.
Household LEDs are commonly rated at 25,000 hours, against about 8000 for a CFL and 1000 for an incandescent — roughly 13 years at five hours a day. Real life falls short of the rating in enclosed or hot fittings, because heat is what degrades the driver and the phosphor.
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