My Experience

We own a two bedroom apartment in Paihia, Bay of Islands.  This apartment has about 25 halogen bulbs in it which I converted to LED bulbs.  I tried a few different types of bulbs and encountered a few issues.  Some of the bulbs would not work with the transformers in the apartment and would either flash or not go at all.  The only way to get these to work was to get an electrician in to replace the transformer with an LED friendly transformer.  This adds significantly to the cost of installing LED bulbs. 

Fortunately the bulbs we now use work with 99% of the existing transformers on the market making it a simple job to replace all of the bulbs in our apartment.  All I had to do was change the light bulb.  Three of the lights in the unit are on dimmers and required a different bulb that could be dimmed.  No electrician was required to install the LED bulbs and it took me about 30 minutes to change all the bulbs.  No other electrical changes were made to heating, cooking or any of the appliances in the unit. 

LED bulbs come in different colour temperatures.  I chose warm white for colour as this is the closest in colour to the halogen bulbs.  When I tried the cool white bulbs it washed out the room and looked very stark by comparison. 

The bulbs were changed in September 2013 and I now have eight months of power bills to compare to the same time the previous year. 

Power meters in the units are read every 2 months and estimated in between. If the estimate is too high the bill can show a negative power bill the following month.  This happened immediately after replacing the bulbs as the estimate was much too high from the previous month. 

The power bill has been significantly lower, since replacing the halogen bulbs with LED bulbs.  The total cost for eight months of power before replacing the bulbs was $1741, which reduced to $1120. This is a saving of $621 in 8 months.  We are saving more than 35% on our power bill, just by changing our light bulbs.    For just the lighting part, I am saving 88% on the lighting bill using LED bulbs, but I still use electricity for heating and hot water which have not reduced at all.  

The LED bulbs have paid for the purchase cost within 6 months and even better will save power for the life of the bulb, estimated to be more than 10 years.  In addition to this we do not have to pay the maintenance costs of replacing light bulbs in the unit.  

I believe LED bulbs are one of the best things I can do right now to both save money and save the environment.