So Compact Flourescent bulbs with a dimmable ballast are great but you have to get with the jargon. A 100 watt bulb produces 1,700 lumens, a dimmable CFL producing 1,600 lumens and uses 23 watts is considered comparable. The savings is usually 77%! The ability to dim is limited but acceptable for most people(at some point the bulb just turns off, get out the candles!)

Then there is the quality of light or CRI (corrective light index), a high number is closer to daylight and does not change the color of what it lights and a low number is like having that crappy flourescent light where you can’t tell a red from blue!

A warm white CFL is brighter than your usual bulb but not harsh, and you are saving all of that energy. The bulb also lasts alot longer (10,000 hours) and costs about 4 times as much. The bulbs do contain mercury and there is a warning on every bulb, but there will be fewer of them in the dump.

Yeah, the Kelvin Temperature of light is an old method or measuring light from sprectronomy.
Whatever, the point is that red, blue and ultraviolet light is around 4,000 Kelvin and warm white or candlelight is 2,500 Kelvin.

So I am out searching for a battery operated LED that produces candle light for Mrs. Getty’s chandeliers. She got tired of repainting the ceiling due to candle smut. Her head of household, Larry Friedman asked me to use battery operated LED’s for candles for parties. The staff puts them in a beeswax candle sleeve( see below) with fresh Duracell AA batteries and they last at least 3 hours and dim naturally as the Duracells discharge. No repainting the ceiling, but need to get them rechargable nickel cadnium (NiCa) batteries to reduce landfill waste.

Making the sleeve out of acrylic tube from Tap Plastics and inserting an aluminum plumbing tube to the precise length of a Mini Maglite and covering the tube in white beeswax, then grinding down the Mini Maglite to fit the tube snugly and removing the head did the trick for the three chandeliers we were working with – the Getty’s entertain alot in San Francisco.

The closest I found were the amber parking lights on a car, which are basically orange. So I used an inexpensive acylic lens from TAP Plastics. it is a 1/2″ diameter acrylic tube that filters the horizontal light from the LED and you don’t notice it up on a chandelier. Over a dining table, use clip on shades, like the rest of us. This is an extreme condition.

For all of those recessed halogen lights, a dimmable MR16 LED is not quite there yet. I have found a bulb that is about $8 per bulb, warm white, but not really dimmable. It turns off as soon as you touch the dimmer. For the kitchen whiter light is OK because it is Task light and there are several Edison base (regular screw-in kind) that offer warm white.