We talk about LED bulbs extensively on this site (do they flicker, are they bad for your eyes etc…), but that doesn’t mean we’re not fans of halogen bulbs or CFL bulbs too.
No matter what type of bulb is your preference though, one thing you will have to consider is the brightness.
We’ve had a lot of people ask us – does wattage determine brightness? How do I know how bright a light bulb is going to be?
Let’s take a look.
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Does wattage determine brightness for light bulbs?
No, wattage does not determine how bright a light bulb will be. Wattage is simply a measure of how much electrical energy a light bulb uses.
The brightness of a light bulb is measured in lumens, and it’s how many lumens a light bulb outputs that determines how bright a light bulb is/will be.
Think of it like this – wattage is how much electrical energy is going into a bulb, and lumens is how much light energy comes out of the bulb.
But doesn’t more wattage = more lumens and a brighter bulb?
No. This would be the case were every light bulb exactly the same, but we now have many different types of light bulb than just the original incandescent bulb. There are LED bulbs, halogen bulbs, CFL bulbs… The list goes on.
And with each different type of bulb, it takes a different level of watts to attain a certain number of lumens, based on how efficient the light bulb is at converting electrical energy into light energy.
This means that the type of bulb will determine how many lumens are output based on how many watts are supplied to the bulb.
How many lumens in a 60 watt bulb?
As a general guide, per 60 watts an incandescent light bulb will produce 840 lumens, CFL bulbs will produce 3,780 lumens, and LED bulbs will produce 4,440 lumens.
This means that LED bulbs are the most efficient type of bulb, as they take less wattage to produce a certain number of lumens.
Said another way, LED bulbs are more efficient at converting electrical energy into light energy, so need less of it to light up a room.
How to convert watts to lumens
To convert watts to lumens, you’ll need to know how many lumens a light bulb produces based 1 watt, and then scale this up to get to your desired lumen output.
To do this, follow these guidelines:
- An incandescent bulb produces ~14 lumens per watt
- A CFL bulb produces ~63 lumens per watt
- An LED bulb produces ~74 lumens per watt
So, to output 300 lumens, you would divide 300 by 14 (if using an incandescent bulb) to give you how many watts you would need to supply the bulb with – ~21.5 watts.
Closing thoughts
In closing, if you’re looking for a brighter bulb, always check the lumens on the packaging.
You can’t simply use the wattage of a bulb to measure how bright it will be, but you can use lumens as the measure, and the lumens will be labelled on the packaging.
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