Motoring to Motovun

Today’s travels will take us into the heart of truffle country and to the hilltop town of Motovun (see above), a fortified enclave in the heart of Istria. 

But first we drove about an hour to the seaside town of Poreč (the č is pronounced “ch” like in punch). 

Poreč is a popular seaside resort, which seemed to be populated by a surfeit of Germans. We are here not for the seaside, but to see the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Euphrasian Basilica, which dates from the 6th century. The complex contains earlier 4th century remains, a Bishop’s residence, a baptistry, a Venetian tower, and the spectacular golden Apse mosaics.

The  view from the Venetian tower is really pretty, and as you can see, we’ve been enjoying some lovely weather. 

The Apse dates from the 6th Century and the mosaics predictably depict Christ and the Apostles, the Virgin and child as well as St. Maurus, Bishop of Eurphrasus after whom the basilica is named.

In each of the Istrian towns we have visited we have seen lots of what I might call “Romeo and Juliet” balconies, but there appear to be lots more of them here in Poreč.  It is really easy to imagine yourself back hundreds of years just by looking around at the buildings and the street.

In a land that lives on seafood and meat, vegan options are few and far between.  We’ll have our fair share of fish this trip and will minimize our dairy intake, but it would be impossible to avoid entirely on this trip, even if we wanted to.  So far all the restaurants we have seen have been local Croatian places, which tend to serve fairly simple meat and fish dishes as well as pasta and pizza.  We have not seen any ethnic restaurants yet, although I think we did spot one McDonalds (if you could call that ethnic!) in Rovinj. 

Since we know we’ll mostly be eating fish in local restaurants this trip, we’re taking advantage of diversity when it presents itself.  Here in Poreč there is a vegan restaurant called Artha, which is unusual as we’ve been led to expect only to find such places in some of the big towns like Rijecka, Zagreb, Split, and Dubrovnik.  So we took advantage and had a nice vegan lunch before heading off to the hills and the town of Motovun.

The approach to Motovun is pretty spectacular and reminds me of other fortified hills towns we have visited in France and Germany.  Indeed the overall landscape we’ve been seeing is very similar to Provence, France or Tuscany, Italy.  Even if not quite as pretty, many of the local produce is similar – truffles, olive oil, wine, lavender, and the land and landscape seems vaguely familiar.

In Motovun, you have to park at the base of the hill and either hike up or take a bus.  As it was kind of hot, we wimped out and took the bus, but only one way – we would walk back down under our own steam.  The views from the ramparts are pretty spectacular.

Also the high position and late afternoon thermal currents make this a good place to paraglide and we saw three paragliders in action, including watching this one take off by the city gates.

Motovun has no shortage of truffle shops, most selling Zigande brand truffle products. The next town down the valley is Livade, which is truffle center, Croatia, and the HQ of the Zigande company.  Even here, truffle products are not cheap.  Costs depend on the type of truffle (which varies by season) as well as the type of product.  Fresh truffles seem to currently be selling for about US$300/Kg (2.2 Lbs), so even a few ounces cost a decent amount.  Truffle is often mixed with mushrooms and olive oil as these enhance the flavor and expand the volume of whatever you are using the truffles with.  We bought a medium size jar to make a nice truffle sauce for some pasta when we get home.

Truffles are so expensive because not only are they rare – they are very hard to find.  Buried about 8 inches down, usually in oak forests, the only way to find them reliably is to used trained animals.  Pigs in some other countries, but here they use trained dogs and we’ve seen pens of them on our walks.  Apparently they do the truffle hunting at night, which encourages the pooches to use more of the their sense of smell to navigate (and hopefully pick up the smell of truffles) rather than eyesight.

One of the shopkeepers told me that in the past anyone could hunt for truffles, but they almost wiped out the entire crop from overhunting and picking truffles too small (i.e. not letting them reproduce).  A flood a couple of decades ago also did major damage to the crop.  Today you have to have a license and trained dogs, both of which cost a lot of money, and hence the premium price for this epicurean delight.

We had read about an affordable restaurant called Konoba Dolina in Gradinje, the town next to Livade where we ended up having dinner.  Every night we’ve eaten al fresco as the weather at dinnertime tends to be lovely and tonight was no exception.  The only downside is that lots of Croatians still smoke and while it is supposedly banned indoors, no such luck on the terrace.

The dinner was simple, but very tasty, starting with a simple salad followed by gnocchi with wild asparagus and another pasta dish with truffles, which was the star.    This was made with something called fusi, or homemade pasta, which was a shape I had not seen before – imagine rolling out ravioli squares, but instead of filling them, you just roll end up, kind of like a mini (empty) cannoli. Down home cooking, Croatian style, washed down with the local vino.  Not a bad way to live.

Roving in Rovinj

Istria is, depending on whom you talk to, the most Italian area of Croatia, or the most Croatian part of Italy.  Actually this town, and many others in Istria are officially bilingual and in this case the town is known as both Rovinj (Croatian) and Rovigno (Italian). Indeed Istria was part of Italy until not so very long ago.   The whole Adriatic coast was strategic to the Venetians, and as evidenced by the bell tower at the top of the hill, Rovinj/Rovigno was an important location for them.  Apparently on a clear day you can actually see Venice from the bell tower.

Surprisingly, after Croatian the most common language I hear on the streets is not Italian, or English, but German.  It is a bit of a novelty for shopkeepers to automatically assume we are Germans.

Unlike other major Venetian port towns, such as Pula, the harbor here was not so large and deep, and therefore the Austro-Hungarians didn’t develop this into another navy port.  Staying as a sleepy provincial backwater was actually to Rovinj’s benefit and today it maintains much of its medieval charm and lacks industrial squalor.  Rather the area around the town is surrounded by harbors and beaches, which in this area does not mean sandy shores, but rather rocky patches and man made terraces by the sea.

The town itself is a charming old burg with the sorts of cobbled streets that make you wonder if these stones were ever replaced, or have been there for thousands of years.  After a good walk upon them, we stopped at the museum to see an exhibit of Chagall prints and lithographs as well as a local photographic exhibition upstairs.  Some of the photos were pretty good.  In the “nude/body” category, there were images taken in museums and art galleries which included subjects in black or white full body suits.  Sort of like a “where’s Waldo” it took me a minute to figure out that some of the “artwork” was in fact these people and not inanimate objects.

One thing I like to take pictures of is unusual doors (I have a huge collection from Spain and Portugal if anyone ever needs them!).  The one above caught my attention as it was so ornate.  Only later did I notice the smiley face on the panel next to it.

We sat at a café in the harbor and got some drinks.  Kelly stayed conventional with a cappuccino, but I’m always on the look out for something I haven’t tried.  There was a listing for “Cedevita” which the waiter said was kind of like a lemonade and I could choose orange or lemon.  I opted for the latter and when he came back, he explained this was a vitamin drink for kids and gave me a glass of water and a yellow packet, which ended up being something like Tang (or Squash for those in the British Isles).  Well, at least I know what Cedevita is now.

Kelly and I knew we would have a lot of driving on this trip and as we had recently attended the David Sedaris event in Austin at the Bass Concert Hall where we had a blast, so brought with us a bunch of his audio books. (Shout out to the Austin Public Library – great system – once you are signed up, you can get your content to download and manage checkout, returns, etc. automatically.)  We spent a nice half hour listening to some of his stories, enjoying the view of the town and the crystal blue water, and improving my vitamin intake.

Our apartment manager had recommended a nearby restaurant called Maslina, so we headed there for dinner.  Started with a tuna carpaccio, which was excellent, followed by fish with truffle sauce and vegetables, and a pizza.  They had a special “homemade cake” which was nutella based with a hazelnut crust and a nice end to a simple, but tasty meal.   Kelly compelled me to add that we walked for many miles today, just in case anyone might think we are gluttons. (Maybe gluttons for punishment!)

Plodding around Pula

After a few hours sleep, it was time to move the car.  Thankfully there was someone setting up breakfast who was able to tell me that I could park above the hotel all day for free.  Now, wouldn’t it have been a lot simple to have sent me that information via reply when I emailed them rather than promising to have someone meet me?

Our hotel is just a stone’s throw from the amazing Roman Amphitheater, but we decided to walk around the rest of the town and leave the Amphitheater for last.

Istria, and for that matter, the rest of Croatia, has been a crossroads for various groups of mostly warring people for millennia.  We have the term “Balkanization” for a reason.  Along the coast, the architecture today is mostly a blend of four distinct influences – Roman, Venetian, Austro-Hungarian, and Communist Era.  Pula was an important port for the Romans and there remain many impressive artifacts of their time here, such as gates, temples, the forum, etc.  The prominent bell tower is Venetian, and this was one of the key ports that the Austro-Hungarians chose for their navy, which is why this is still a busy industrial town and port towns.

One of our first stops was a nice indoor/outdoor market.  The fresh strawberries ($2.25 for a about 1.1lbs) were amazing.  We also tasted the local cherries which were equally delicious.  Istria is truffle country and along with France’s Provence and Italy’s Piedmont, it is one of the world’s major truffle producers.  The market was lined with as many different presentations and uses of truffles as you could imagine including spreads, cheeses, and oils, as well as whole, sliced, diced and other packaging of the pungent fungii themselves.

The jewel of the city has to be the Roman Amphitheater, one of the six largest remaining examples in the world.  When at its full scale (it was originally started as a smaller facility then expanded during the reign of Vespasian), it could hold 23,000 people.  The upper tiers would have been wooded and no longer remain.  Today the facility is still used and has seating for 5,000, although they have curtailed the loudest rock concerts as they are afraid they are disturbing the stones.

There were 4 towers, two of which remain, which would have been topped with scented water reservoirs to sprinkle the crowd with what we would today call air freshener, in order to mask the stench of all the death.  Sand in the inner oval would also have absorbed blood.  Archaeologists think wooden masts at the top of the structures were used to raise canvas tenting to shade the audience.  I remember seeing a documentary about this some years ago and am now wondering if it was, in fact, shot here.

The facilities were extensive and in addition to gladiatorial and animal combat, naval battles could be re-enacted when the amphitheater was flooded.

In the area beneath the amphitheater, where the prisoners and animals would have been kept, there is a small, but interesting museum, mostly focused on the ancient production of olive oil, wine, and garum (fish sauce), which were mainstays of the local economy.  On display were hundreds of different amphora, many of which were stamped with their makers marks, which is one way archaeologists can track some of the commerce throughout the Roman empire, when for instance, a Pula made amphora is dug up in Rome.

For lunch we decided to try some truffle pizza, which was pretty good, and very inexpensive.  Then it was time to head off to our next stop, Rovinj.  As we got close to our destination, I realized I still had the key from our Pula hotel in my pocket.  Since we were so close, I figured we should at least drop off our stuff at our Rovinj lodgings before potentially heading back to Pula.

We are staying in an apartment in Rovinj and the owner was able to call the Pula hotel owner for us.  I had asked if he could just mail back the key, or else I would drive back, but instead they agreed he could instead give it to the bus driver on the next Rovinj-Pula bus.  Never would have thought of that!

Tonight we are just going to head to the local supermarket and have a simple dinner at our apartment.  Tomorrow we’ll explore the town.

Poo poo in Pula

There are actually a couple of direct flights to Croatia from Dublin.  Aer Lingus has regular service to Dubrovnik in the very south and Ryan Air flies to Zadar in the middle of the country.   After doing research I found another flight on Aer Lingus into Pula in Istria, in the north of the country, which is what we took to get here.  We’ll eventually fly back to Dublin on the Dubrovnik flight in a tad under 3 weeks.  The Pula flight turns out to be seasonal – 3 times a week beginning May 19th, so we are on one of the first of these flights this year.

The only downside to this flight is that it arrives at 10:20pm.  Well, that and the fact that within Europe, Aer Lingus operates as a budget airline, so the cup of tea and glass (not bottle) of water we got on the plane when asked “what would you like to drink” were not in fact free, but cost Eu3.  Not going to break the bank, but none the less a bit of surprise, especially as the glass of water was charged for at 0.60 cent.  Really, Aer Lingus can’t give you a free glass of water?  Luckily I did not see a coin meter on the bathroom door.

So why is 10:20pm a problem time to arrive? First off the car rental counter for Sixt, where we had reserved, closes at 9pm.  Luckily I noticed that when I booked and contacted them.   For Eu32.50 more we were able to have someone stay late to meet us.  When we went to get our car, there was another couple in front of us, who seemingly had also paid the same fee.  Hmmm, sounds like a bit of a racket to me.

The other problem is that check in to our hotel was supposed to be before 9pm.  Again, I had emailed them and they told me that it was no problem.  Someone would meet us and show us where to park.  Except that when we arrived at our hotel, there was no one there, but there was an envelope with my name on it that contained our room key. Later we were told they have a new person on late duty and that they had misunderstood their directions.  The challenge here was parking in a country at night when you don’t know the regulations.  The spot outside the hotel had blue stripes around it and consulting people in a local bar yielded opinions that the car was fine until 10am tomorrow or maybe only 7am tomorrow.  Deciding I didn’t want one of my first experiences in Croatia to be that of getting a parking ticket, I set my alarm for 6:30am.

Meantime we found our room, and noticed something on the pillow, as you can see from the photo.  At first glance, this looked like the mess a small dog might leave on the carpet to let their owner know they weren’t too happy.  Which was quickly followed by the following thoughts – how did the dog get into and out of our room?  Why did it do this on BOTH our pillows? and what sicko came in and wrapped their poo in plastic?

Instead this turned out to be some chocolate covered, banana flavored marshmallow sweet.  My brother Andrew, ever the punster, opined later that this might be a Croatian specialty, named after the city along the coast, i.e. Banana Split!

Europe Here We Come

Time to get ready to roll out the blog again!

On Tuesday we head to Dublin, Ireland for about a week, and then off to Croatia, starting in Pula, Istria, and ending 3 weeks later in Dubrovnik.  Along the way, we plan on side trips to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro.

From Croatia, we will be going back to Dublin for another week before heading home.

Beginning to get excited!

What do you mean, “What size light bulb do I want”?

My previous article got into wattage, lumen output, etc.  This is about the actual size and shape of light bulbs.

What you may or may not know is that every light bulb type has one or more letters and some numbers that are used to categorize it.  Thing of this as the taxonomy of light bulbs, and if you are ordering one online, it is especially important in order to be able to search for the correct bulb.

The “common” light bulb is an A19.  The letter indicates the shape.  A is used for, well, what I would call a light bulb shape!  Some common types:

A – standard light bulb shape

G – Globe (the rounded style often used in bathroom and vanity lights)

R – Reflector (think spotlight)

PAR – Parabolic Aluminized Reflector. 

B – candelabra shape

MR – metalized reflector

There are many others, but the above are the most common.

 

The numbers indicate the widest part of the bulb in multiples of 1/8 inch.   So, for example:

A19 – the “common” light bulb is 2 3/8” at its widest part (19 x 1/8th inch)

MR 16 – 2 inches wide (16 x 1/8th)

etc. 

 

While this is the bulb’s overall shape and size, the connector also has to be considered, i.e. how the bulb plugs into the light socket.

The standard American “medium screw base” is officially designated E26.  “E” is for Edison screw, a nod to the light bulb inventor and 26 is the diameter in millimeters.  Because they are essentially the same size and interchangeable, you may see E27 bulbs in places like IKEA, since the European screw base is 27mm.  Because the size difference is so small there is no problem using an E27 bulb in a US fixture (as long as it is 120 Volts of course!)   So the good old American light bulb shaped light bulb might be listed as A19 / E26 or A19 / E27.

By contrast, the smaller, “candelabra” base in the US is an E12.

There are other bases, which are typically only found on specialty bulbs such as bi pin halogens, e.g. MR 16 bulbs.  Since those get much more complicated, but sure to take your old specialty bulb with you to the store as there are many bulbs that look very similar but often have subtlety difference base sizes. 

 

So next time you see an A19 / E26, 800 lumen, 5,500, 85 CRI, 10W LED bulb, you will know that it will be:

- Standard light bulb shaped (because of the A)

- Standard light bulb sized (19 x 1/8”, or 2 3/8” at the widest point)

- Standard medium screw base (E26)

- Putting out 800 lumens of light (about the same as a typical 60W incandescent bulb)

- Cool white (5,500 degrees Kelvin)

- Able to show all colors well (since it has a Color Rendering Index of 85)

- Using only 10W of power (to produce the same amount of light as an old 60W bulb).

 

Now you just need to choose clear or frosted….!

What? Watt? What?

It used to be pretty simple to buy a light bulb.  Barring specialty items, you just went to the store and bought a “standard” light bulb.  The more watts the more light – 60 W was normal, 40 a bit dim, 100 W as bright as most sockets could handle.  Oh yeah, you had to choose clear or frosted, but that was pretty much it, right?  The common light bulb was available just about anywhere.  The standard American screw type light bulb was invented in 1909 and for about a century, not too much changed until recently.

If you go to buy a light bulb today, it can be bewildering to figure out exactly which bulb you need.  Consider this a primer on light bulbs for the average home owner.  There are literally thousands of light bulb varieties, but most of these are specialized for various applications that really don’t concern the average home owner.   As someone who is a photographer and has a degree in Physics, I am pretty familiar with much of the techno-babble surrounding this topic.  I also worked one summer in a wholesale electrical supply warehouse - but that’s another story.  I thought I would try to de mystify some of all this for the average home owner.

Technology

There are three principal technologies we are concerned with – incandescent (think “old style”), CFL (compact Fluorescent Lightbulb), and the newest, LED (Light Emitting Diode).

Incandescent bulbs work by heating up a wire until it gets so hot it emits light.  Halogen bulbs are a particular type of incandescent bulbs that use a tungsten coated wire and include halogen gases in the bulb so it can operate at higher temperatures and wattages, putting out more light.  Unfortunately most of the energy used by an incandescent light bulb is emitted as heat and only about 2% produces light in the visible spectrum.  But they are cheap – basically a little wire held inside a glass container under vacuum and presto – the light bulb.

• Good – cheap, standardized, familiar, “the standard” for our expectations of the amount of light and the quality of light.
• Bad – inefficient, relatively fragile, short operational life.

Flourescent and Compact Flourescent (CFL) bulbs work by exciting low pressure mercury vapor to create UV light that causes a phosphorescent coating on the bulb to fluoresce or glow.   Fluorescent light bulbs, including CFLs require an electrical component called a ballast that limits the current flow through the bulb, otherwise they would self destruct.  The ballast is build into CFL bulbs, which is a major portion of their cost, whereas typical large “shop” fluorescent fixtures have discrete external ballasts, which is why the tubes are so inexpensive.

• Good – moderate price (has come down dramatically), more energy efficient, longer lasting, wide variety of options.
• Bad – contain mercury vapor (dispose of properly!), poor quality of light (see below), take time to “warm up”, lighting changes with age, fragile, strange looking, special versions needed to work with dimmer circuits.

Light Emitting Diodes (LED) bulbs use semiconductor technology to create light.  Because these are electronic components, they are much less fragile that incandescent or CFLs, but also currently more expensive to purchase.

• Good – most efficient technology currently on the market, cool to the touch, good quality of light,  long lasting, robust.
• Bad – expensive to initially purchase.  Special versions needed to work with dimmer circuits.

Who, Watt, Huh?

OK, but why can’t I just buy a “60 Watt” LED bulb.  Well, first let’s think about what a watt is – a unit of energy.  Specifying a light bulb’s output by the energy used is crazy.  It would be the equivalent if all gas powered cars more or less got the same MPG, (say 25MPG) as asking someone how far away a place was and instead of them answering “100 miles”, the actual distance, telling you “4 gallons”, the fuel consumed.  It works out the same, if all cars has the same fuel efficiency.  But along comes new technology such as hybrid cars that get 50 MPG.  When you ask someone how far the place is, it is still 100 miles away, but they have to answer “it is equivalent to 4 gallons in your gas powered car, but only 2 gallons in my car”.  Sheesh, just tell me it is 100 miles!

The unit of light output we care about is the lumen (equivalent to the mileage in the above analogy).  The precise definition of a lumen is actually quite complex, but for simplicity we can think of this as the “amount of light”put out by the light bulb, which is what we care about when we need to measure or compare brightness.  What makes CFL and LED bulbs much more cost efficient is that they have much better luminous efficiency (think MPG in the above analogy) compared to incandescent light bulbs, plus they last much, much longer.    A typical CFL will use about a quarter of the energy to produce the same amount of light as an incandescent bulb and a typical LED bulb will use more like 1/6th the energy of the same incandescent bulb.  In other words for the same amount of light, a 60W incandescent bulb bulb can be replaced by a 15W CFL or a 10W LED.  You should see the actual wattage on any light bulb package, but most new packages will more prominently list the lumens used and may have a “60W equivalent” or similar tag somewhere on the package.  You can imagine that if someone doesn’t understand this, they will think the 10W labeled LED bulb will be very dim compared to their 60W incandescent bulb. FYI, a 60W incandescent bulb puts out about 800 lumens and a 40W incandescent bulb around 420 lumens.  Good numbers to keep in your back pocket when you go shopping.

Wait, There’s More!

The power used (watts) and light output (lumens) are not the whole story.  For instance, aside from the physical characteristics of CFLs (e.g. their sometimes strange shape, and fragility), CFLs had other problems, some of which are noted above, in particular “quality of light”.

There are two things I’d like you to understand about “quality of light” – color temperature and CRI (Color Rendering Index).  First color temperature.  This is essentially how “white” the light is, something very important to me, since I am a photographer.  Our eyes tend to adjust such that we usually perceive the brightest thing we see as white.  But in reality the color of a “white” light bulb is very different from the “white light” outdoors.  If you look at an indoor light bulb while simultaneously gazing out a window, you will perceive the common incandescent light bulb as orange and the daylight as much bluer.  The actual color is measured in degrees Kelvin.  Higher numbers on this scale are “bluer”.  Perversely although their color temperature is higher, we describe them as “cooler” since they are more blue.  A typical tungsten light bulb will be about 2,700-3,000 degrees Kelvin.  Soft/warm CFLs are around 3,000, cool/daylight CFLs about 5,000 which is closer to the color of sunlight at noon (5,500), but not as high as an overcast sky (6,500).   LED light bulbs are offered in different colors – look for lower numbers (around 3,000) if you want something “warm”, i.e. closer in color to an old incandescent light bulb, or higher if you prefer closer to daylight.

But again, this isn’t the full story.  Turns out that different light bulb technologies don’t evenly reveal colors in objects.  You can have bulbs that have the same light output (lumens) and the same color temperature, yet the things lit by them will look different.  A good test of this is to get a paint palette or test pattern with all the colors and just look at it under the different lights.  Some of the colors will pop and others will seem very dull.

This is because although they may have a particular color temperature, the light bulbs may have a spike (or for that matter, a relative gap) in the color spectrum.  Fluorescent light bulbs are notorious for making things look greenish, which is particularly problematic for skin tones since it tends to make people look like ghouls.  The CRI (color rendering index) is a measure (out of 100) of how well a form of illumination can reveal different colors.  The standard incandescent light bulb has a CRI of 100 and so you can see all the colors of the palette.  CFLs vary widely here – a cheapo CFL can have a CRI of 50, but a high quality bulb can get as high as 89.  Typically I have only seen the CRI of a CFL listed on expensive bulbs, typically used for photographic applications.  Most LEDs are above 85 and thus their ability to render colors is much better than all but the best CFLs.  So even at the same level of light (lumen output), and same color temperature, the lighting from an LED will just look better than a CFL and should be virtually indistinguishable from that of the common old incandescent light bulb.

Over time, the difference is even more dramatic – CFLs get worse as they age.  While incandescent light bulbs might dim a little as they age, they will usually burn out first.  They also tend to get a little more orange as they age, but most people aren’t able to notice.  However CFLs may not only change noticeably in color, their CRI can drop too, i.e. as they age, things illuminated by them look even worse.

Economics

The typical incandescent bulb has a useable life of about 1,000 hours, versus about 10,000 hours for a CFL or 50,000 for an LED.  So you’d have to buy 50 incandescent bulbs (or 5 CFLs) for each LED. Right now a 60W incandescent bulb costs about $1 and a 60W LED replacement about $10, thus the purchase price is 10 times as expensive.  But, since it uses 1/6 the power to run, it is obviously much more efficient and less expensive in the long run, even if the up front cost is relatively high.  In fact, LEDs can be had for much less (about $5-6 at Costco, and even less at IKEA).  Depending on the cost of electricity from your utility (the more expensive your power, the more you’ll save), over the the life of an LED bulb, your actual cost (for the bulbs and all the electricity used) should be about 1/4 to 1/8 of that versus using incandescent bulbs.

Replacements for the standard 60W and 40W light bulbs will be the least expensive type of bulbs.  More specialized bulbs, such as spots, globes, etc. will cost more.  For instance, right now Costco sells a 2 pack of 65W spotlight (R30) replacements for $18.  See the next blog entry for more on decoding the light bulb alphabet soup.

My Two Cents

LEDs will continue to come down in price, but for now, my recommendation is that if you are not ready to take the plunge and replace all your old bulbs with LEDs,  pick a place in your house that you use a lot – the kitchen is probably the best option - and try replacing the main bulbs in that room with LEDs.  Also, if you have a room where you switch the lights on and off a lot, e.g. the bathroom, LEDs work much better than CFLs.  By the time the CFLs get fully warmed up, you may be ready to turn them off.

Some interesting factoids:

60W incandescent light bulbs are more efficient in the US versus Europe and other places that use 230V electricity. What?  Turns out at the 120 Volts used in North America,  our 60W light bulbs put out 850 lumens, vs. just 584 lumens in 130 Volt countries.  Or essentially our 40W light bulbs have about the same light output as a European 60W bulb!

Since I replaced almost all of the CFLs in my house with LEDs, I did a little testing to try to compare the brightness of some incandescent vs. CFL vs. LED bulbs.  I wouldn’t say these are “lab quality” results, but I did measure everything and I used a consistent testing methodology.  Interesting findings:

• My new 400 Lumen IKEA bulbs were actually a bit brighter than the incandescent 40W bulbs they are supposed to replace.  The light output was actually as much as a new 100W replacement CFL bulb!
• All of the CFLs I tested, (new and used) seem to put out less light than their incandescent or LED equivalents.  Most likely had I waited longer for them to get to “full temperature”, the light output would have improved a bit.
• I had about a dozen CFLs of a particular type, all theoretically identical power and style, but of various ages. In testing them, I found their light output when measured the same way varied by as much as 8x!
• I replaced these supposedly 65W replacement CFLs with 40W replacement LEDs and could see that the room appeared brighter.  By my testing, even the brightest of these CFLs was dimmer than the supposedly weaker LED, often by a considerable margin.