"What's wattage should i use in old style light bulb?" is the most asked question from customers. Replacing light bulb becomes more complicated at the moment. There are two things you can look into when you select light bulb, which are wattage and lumen. For most of us, we'd like to use wattage to describe brightness, when electrician prefer to use lumens. That's ok.
How Many Kind Of Light Bulb?
There are few major light bulb technologies from the beginning, which are Incandescent, Halogen, Compact Fluorescent, and LED. The incandescent light bulb is gone, and LED light bulb is the latest version. In other words, the LED light bulb is more efficient, and energy saving.
The Wattage Makes Confused When Select Light Bulb
As long as the technology developed, a LED light bulb can only use 8 watt power but light up similar brightness when a incandescent light bulb uses 60 watt power. There is equivalent wattage between different light bulbs. To stop making confuse, you need to know what wattage equivalent to each other. See the table attached as below.
"A 8W LED light bulb, or 11W compact fluorescent light bulb, or 42W halogen light bulb, is equivalent to 60W incandescent. That's why LED light bulb can save your electricity bill, because a 8W LED bulb only use 8 watt electricity, but can give you as similar brightness as 60W incandescent light bulb."
So, using the chart, If you want to replace a 40W incandescent light bulb, you should select 28W halogen light bulb, or 7W compact fluorescent light bulb, or 6W LED light bulb. In addition, to get the most closely replace light bulb, you also need to check lumen. Try to select the most closely lumen, by compare to your current one.