Even before answering this question, an important practice to acknowledge is that you will use both LED and incandescent lighting in your home.
Each excels at different things, they complement each other, and it will take incremental investments in LED products to transition fully away from incandescent, which will take time.
We all grew up learning about Thomas Edison and had incandescent light bulbs in our lighting fixtures. An incandescent bulb produces light by heating a wire filament to a temperature that generates light. The glass bulb is filled with an inert gas or air removed to create a vacuum. Pretty simple.
Incandescent bulbs are cheap to manufacture and come in a wide range of voltages and light outputs. Technically, they also generate a very “pure” light. The downsides of incandescent light bulbs, compared to LED technology, are threefold: less energy efficiency — most of the energy consumed goes into generating heat — shorter lifespans, and omnidirectional only, meaning they cast light in 360 degrees, necessitating reflection and redirection to light an area, which contributes to lesser efficiency.
LED lighting is entirely different. LED stands for light emitting diode. An LED bulb produces light by passing electric current through a semiconducting material — the diode — which then emits photons (i.e., light).
Since LED lights do not rely on heat to produce light, they run cooler and are much more energy efficient.
From a design perspective, LEDs offer some amazing features. They are directional only — emitting 180 degrees of light. They can be very small, and applied in strips. Finally, they can be designed to generate the entire spectrum of visible light colors without having to use filters.
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