Hank Green over at Eco-geek has done a quick run down of a couple different light bulb types.

He mentions at one point an $80 light bulb that is rated at a 60 watt equivalent but that uses only 10 watts. He claims that is worth it because it is supposed to last 50,000 hours.

I thought I would do the math. Lets be really simple and say that energy is 1 cent per watt just to make the math easy. (we also wont factor in the cost of buying all the extra incandescent lights cause they certainly don’t last 50,000 hours).

60 watt bulb: 50,000 hours X 60 cents = $30,000
10 watt LED: 50,000 hours X 10 cents = $5,000

Obviously electricity is cheaper than this, and we haven’t factored in the cost of buying the many many 60 watt incandescents you would need, but you can see that it is a big big savings. The problem is that people are NEVER going to pay $80 up front for a light bulb. Even if it will save them a boat load of cash over the lifetime of the bulb. This is mostly because people simply don’t think that way. Lets hope that fun little video’s like Hanks, and blog posts like mine change that.