I’ll do a couple of quick posts to share how I have improved efficiency in situations/fixtures that require non-standard or hard-to find bulbs.
40W Spot bulbs
These are hard to find in CFL because of their small size. I couldn’t find a direct replacement that had enough lumens to be any good or had a good temperature.
What I did is I bought some LED GU10 bulbs that are smaller. The GU10 plug looks like two fatty prongs that are intended to be twist-locked in place (see the pictures). I then got a ceramic adapter that has a normal bulb screw on one end, and a socket for GU10 plug on the other.
With that, I could adapt some EcoSmart bulbs and they worked great. Here they are in HomeDepot but with a different packaging than I had them (I bought them in little cardboard boxes, and Amazon doesn’t carry them as I write this). I wish I hadn’t given away the old normal bulb to give you a comparison image – when assembled, the picture of the combined bulb+adapter to the right looks disproportionately long, but the overall length is less than a 1/8th of an inch longer than the original.
The adapters are not cheap (I got them at Amazon for $5.95) but worth it. These lamps tend to spend a couple of hours on in the winter. I got rid of 2 bulbs, so 2 x 40W= 80 W went out and got replaced it with 2 x 6 W = 12W. It repays itself in 5 years with calculated guesstimates.
Finding a bulb that I liked wasn’t that easy – the Philips brand was both too bluish,weak and had a weird, diffuse shadow. These are brighter but 3000K. I would have preferred 2700K for a mellower, warmer look. Still these look great and given how much they are used definitively worth it.
How To Change a Light Bulb 
July 27th, 2012 at 17:16
[…] to less shadows but sometimes you need one very strong light source. Just like for bulbs that are too small, finding efficient replacement for bulbs that are too large can be hard. Fortunately I found this […]