I saw some LED lighting recently, and didn't care for the bright blue-white shade of light it emitted.

I read an article online that described this color as "alien autopsy" which really fit with what I felt. Like being in a exhibit hall or hospital basement.

Maybe its changing, CFL's have sure gotten better colors fast.
For that matter, there are lots of CFL options out there, they last a long time, too and are cheaper. Good luck, maybe some good neighbor kid will come along to change bulbs.

We put LED lights in our recessed cans in the kitchen and dining room. Cree LR-6 lights are what we went with. As far as I have been able to find, they are the only commercially available LED lights with excellent color rendering (CRI> 90). They are expensive though - about $90 per light. There are many discussions about LED lights in the lighting section of the forum. Good luck!

Dang....wish I'd had this thread to read before we said "yes" to LED cans in the kitchen. GC was ready to do the wiring, and when I mentioned I wanted good lighting in the kitchen but hated it when hubby went off and left the overhead kitchen lights on (from previous house), he suggested LEDs in there for energy savings. I agreed, knowing of the cost savings; I didn't think anything about the color of the light produced, though. I'll be checking out the Cree LR-6s, but wow, that'll be expensive kitchen lighting!

Cree is the way to go - the light quality is fine.

3-4 years - ha! I say.

Please get them but don't expect that payoff. With 100 lights, I am guessing they won't be on very much. I mean you can only probably use 10 lights at a time. A 3 to 4 year payback would require each light to be on 10 or more hours a day. But it does depend on your electric rate. I remember coming up with an 8 year number based on the kitchen lights which are used the most # of hrs/day.

I am pretty sick of marketing lies about payback.

we're doing all LED recessed lighting in our new construction house. the electrician said the 2700 kelvin warm tone light would give us a nice, not too blue, light. i'm hoping it turns out well. we'll be using the CREE LR6. my husband is an environmentalist and a totally energy buff (fully spray foam insulated all exterior walls, all radiant heat, etc.). the advantage of LEDs over CFLs is that they are dimmable and they light up instantly and they don't contain mercury or get hot. so, just hoping the quality of light is good!

We went around and around on this one, too. We really wanted a 3 or 4 inch CREE LED because we like the look of the smaller can. Had 6" in our last house and they are too big. But when push came to shove- the price of the smaller housings was just SO much more. It was something like 12k more for our house so we went with small traditional recessed lights. I continue to hear and read that Cree makes a great product, for what it's worth.

In our last place, we swapped out several 6" for CFLs and the lighting was horrible. Just hideous.

Directbuylighting has the Cree CR6 listed on their website for $59.40. It also says a better price may be available if you call(I haven't called to confirm price or stock). I'm hoping the CR6 ends up selling for under $50 in the near future. I'm using the LR6s in our kitchen and Great Room but we have too many cans to put $80 LR6s in all of them. We'll either use halogen or CFL until the price drops a bit more on the Cree LEDs.

ramor - good tip. I've heard rumors - totally unsubstantiated - that they price will be $40 soon and available at big box stores. This is one of the reason that I have el cheapo incandescents in mine (not even halogen). FWIW - my builder built Cree's ceo's house a few years ago - not that I have any inside info - its just that it is a local company for me so some of the rumors may be based on inside info.

When I built last year $90 was the going price. I've now seen $80 and now we have a report of $60. That is the real downside of buying now. Obviously there is an end point - I think the $$ rational POV is to put it cheapy bulbs and then slowly buy LEDs for the ones that get the most use.

In response to something else - CFLs are not all bad. We have 9 in heavy use in our house (well 1 is a fixture of 5). They put off great light but there is a slight warmup period. There are cheap and bad CFLs - and you will find the same thing with LEDs. But in the end, LEDs have no warmup and no mercury and are slightly more efficient and generally last longer (more consistent).

Well directbuylighting shows a price of $80 - what I've seen elsewhere - either way - down from $90 last year.

I am just waiting to see how the life on the LED power supplies is going to hold up.

Aluminum electrolytic capacitors do not have an infinite life.
They are not hermetically sealed and often 'dry up' after 5-8 years.

The power supplies for the LED lights WILL contain them.

The $59.40 price at DBL is for the new CR6, not LR6. I think the CR6 will work fine for many of my can lights even though it is rated just a bit dimmer than the LR6. I wouldn't be surprised if the CR6 drops into the $40 plus range in the near future. I don't see the LR6 dropping this low anytime soon, but you never know.

Here is a link that might be useful: DBL CR6

I'm all about supporting new "green" technology to build demand and reduce prices for the future. But, for just your lighting, $6k is some serious opportunity cost.

I also agree that the payback is probably longer than you're coming up with. The Energy Star website has some calculators, but I spent a minute looking at one and had a hard time believing the 2-year payback it was calculating (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/business/bulk_purchasing/bpsavings_calc/CalculatorCFLsBulk.xls).

The little bit I know from my experience- I haven't looked at the LED downlights at all. We replaced MR16 halogens at my office in accent lights with LED bulbs. We were able to get good light color with these, but the light output isn't comparable.

In my house, we put in insulation contact airtight (ICAT) recessed cans and used off-the-shelf CFLs in them. My conservative guess is that the cost for these is about $20 each w/ bulb. We finished the remodel 4 years ago, and I can count the number that I've replaced out of ~25 fixtures on one hand (IIRC, it's 2).

I think making sure the cans are sealed up is more important to your energy bill by a long shot. The money you're contemplating spending would go a long way toward upgrading some combination of your HVAC, insulation, and/or air sealing of the building envelope.

We installed the Cree LR6 with the 2700 color too. The 3500 was too blue. We had no real choice since our roof is at 14' and we have CA requirements (huge pain). I posted picks of my lights in the dark with the dimmers and with full light on the Lighting Forum.

We only used these LEDs in the parts of the house that would necessitate the most useage--family room, breakfast room and kitchen. In the kids' bedrooms we are using CFLs.

We grappled with the cost and frankly, I agree with some of the postings above--the price is due to come down soon and I didn't want huge cans all over the house that I'd paid a fortune for, even the new 4" ones didn't seem right. We did a "payback" matrix and came up with a 8-10yr payback based our family's usage--that is a long time! Didn't substantiate installing for our whole home; just did the "workhorse" areas.

We're only doing the kitchen in LEDs because that's about the only place I use overhead lighting AND left on for up to a couple of hours at a time. Doesn't make sense for me to put them in the rooms where I use table lamps, etc. (And I'm glad to learn of the Cree LR6s--I got worried after reading some of the LED comments)

We were in our last new house for 13 years before our move last summer. The only recessed lights I had to buy replacements for in all that time were in the kitchen. The others were just never on long enough to burn out (and thank goodness because the great room had 18' ceiling!).

Are you talking about recessed incandescent fixtures with retrofit LED lamps installed or recessed LED fixtures with integral heat sinks?

The last 4" CREE recessed fixtures I installed cost $182 wholesale.

Initial cost is the relevant issue and the offset of lower energy consumption is not impressive IMHO.

i'm searching for LED options as well. i think anyone considering CFLs should really think about the impact on the environment for future generations. people tell me that there is "only" a small amount of mercury in each bulb, but how much is too much? and how long do you think it will take for the remains of these bulbs to leach into the soil and ground water? CFLs are poison. it pains me to imagine the dramatic increase of cancer, alzheimer's and other disease that will occur from disposal of such bulbs ("proper" or otherwise). that said, i'm all for LEDs. the cost will come down on the bulbs. i wonder if you might use regular incandescent bulbs in the meantime? if not, i would do it.

How about the amount of mercury released if every single CFL bulb in the US was thrown into a landfill this year would increase Mercury emissions in the US by 0.16%?

How about even a landfilled CFL bulb saving many times its mercury released in the decrease coal burning vs an incandescent bulb over its life?

If you think CFLs are poison, then you certainly think buring coal is poison - and thus using electricity in the US is poison (unless you are solar off grid). And since coal based emissions are 1000x more responsible for poison, keep all the lights off.

For those who care, a typical mercury thermometer has the amount of mercury in 125 CFLs (this is somewhat irrelevant as mercury based thermometers are pretty rare nowadays).

So Kate - please buy some leds but don't pretend you aren't poisoning the earth in far worse ways than CFLs every time you use electricity. The comparison to coal only has to do with mercury and coal has a lot of other bad emissions (while CFLs have no other significant bad components).

kateskouros- The amount of mercury in a CFL is a fraction of what's generated in coal-fired power plant emissions to make the power that runs a huge chunk of US homes. Not to mention that non-compact fluorescents that use mercury provide lighting for tons of other places you spend your time (offices, supermarkets, big box stores, etc, etc, etc).

So maybe spending a bunch of money on LED lighting may make you feel better, but if you aren't wringing efficiency out of your home everywhere else you can (smaller footprint- #1 by a longshot, insulation, air sealing, HVAC), you're basically spitting in the breeze. Otherwise, you're responding mostly from a place of hysteria, not anywhere near the reality of commercial/residential lighting all over c. 2010.

You can't get away from fluorescent lighting. But you shouldn't- it's easily the most efficient and economical lighting option there is right now. Well, maybe I should include sunlight, but that's a much-more-complicated evaluation.

If you put them in, you should read/print the EPA guidelines on cleaning up in the event that you break one. I've broken 2 bulbs- one I was replacing from an outdoor fixture and one from a lamp that was knocked over. Following the guidelines was not a big deal. Not worried about becoming a mad hatter.

And when CFLs burn out, 100% take them to HD to be properly disposed of. Much as there are other things they do that don't make me happy, free safe disposal of used CFLs is a huge deal.

well then i guess i'll just keep a hazmat suit on hand to follow the government guidelines on how to proceed when one of those bad boys breaks open on my kitchen floor.

don't forget your tinfoil hat to make sure the aliens can't take control of your brain ;-)

Coming back to this thread of 6 yrs ago..... Anyone with those Cree can lights still on the forum? Mine are now 6 yrs old, and I can tell they are not as bright as they were originally. So much so that I now turn on the kitchen island lights and over-sink light to get back to the original brightness in my kitchen. Now I wish I hadn't used the "specialty" ones. There's plain, good LED can lights that just screw in like regular bulbs available now.

Has anyone else noticed this and/or updated their original Cree lighting. I certainly don't want to put more expensive lights up there (these were originally around $90 each!).

This is a 6-year old thread! But for any readers in the present with a similar concern, the OP really raised two separate questions (perhaps without realizing it):

1) Using recessing lighting fixtures throughout the entire house (regardless of type of lamp used);

2) The type of lamp to be used throughout the house (regardless of the fixture in which it's used).

First, recessed "downlights", even with flood lamps rather than spot lamps, is primarily intended for task lighting, not overall ambient lighting, and certainly not for "feature" lighting where the fixture and the glow of the lamp are the "feature" to attract the eye and create a pleasant emotion.

Task lighting means lighting placed for a certain task: illuminating a counter top or island; illuminating the area adjacent to a door; illuminating art and wall hung/mounted objects (when the recessed lamp can be rotated and adjusted within certain angles). The only overall ambient lighting possible with a recessed fixture is indirect or "bounce" light, which is greatly reduced in usable lumens.

In other words, recessed light fixtures are ideal when you want the light source to not be visible, but you want "something" specific to be illuminated.

The best results for overall ambient and special feature lighting are from other types of fixtures--not recessed "task lighting" fixtures. In most situations, strong lighting design is a combination of the three types of fixtures: task lighting fixtures, ambient lighting fixtures and a very few, carefully chosen feature lighting fixtures. There are very few situations in a residence (or any other building) where only a single type of lighting fixture will be satisfactory for every type of lighting need.

Second, as to the type of lamp, there are many line and low-voltage lamps (and associated lighting fixtures) to chose from. Each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Like fixtures, there is no single lamp which is universally "best" for every lighting need.

What all of this means is that for best lighting, one needs to study, become informed and choose wisely to get fixtures and lamps which best fit the various lighting needs throughout a house.

Thanks Virgil!