Best Light Bulb Brand

Introduction

Hi, and welcome to this article about the best light bulb brand available.

In a recent article I looked at which is the most popular light bulb brand. But which one is the best?

Firstly, lets look at what are the major brands in the light bulbs business.

Market Share By Light Bulb Brand

As shown above the top brands are GE, Sylvania, Feit, Philips and private label bulbs. Private label bulbs are those made by one company, for another company to sell. For example, TCP Inc make the Great Value Brand for Walmart that serve as their home brand.

To include these private label bulbs into our review I am using:

• EcoSmart – Home Depot’s home brand
• IKEAs own range of light bulbs
• Great Value Brand from Walmart

So taken all together I will be looking at seven different light bulb brands.

Ranking of Brands

In order to work out which brand is best I am going to rate the main brands on a number of factors:

• Customer ratings
• Price
• Range of products available
• Lifetime of the light bulbs
• Quality measures such as the length of warranty provided and whether the bulbs are Energy Star certified.

In each category I give the brands a rating from 1 to 5. Where 5 is the best. And then add them up at the end to work out who the best light bulb brand.

Customer Ratings

In order to look at customer rating I turned to Amazon. Amazon sell products from almost all these brands. The only exception being IKEA’s own brand.

So as to ensure that the reviews were for similar type products I only looked at 60 watt replacement LED light bulbs. Also I only included standard A-shaped bulbs. So no candle shapes or flood lights. Additionally I excluded any smart bulbs.

In this way I hoped to give a level playing field by which we can compare the online ratings. As mentioned earlier I had to pull in IKEA’s ratings from their own U.S. website.

The results are below. I am going to use the rating directly as the score for this factor. So if a brand has a rating of 4.5 then they get 4.5 points from this section.

Price

I don’t know about you but price is something I definitely consider. Most of use want to find a bargain. In order to compare prices I looked at a standard 60 watt replacement bulb from each supplier. Where possible I chose a 4-pack of bulbs and worked out the individual cost.

The best price bulb comes in at $2.50 so I awarded 5 points for this. For each increment of 50 cents I removed a point. So if a bulb cost $2.35 that would be 4 points. And$3.25 would be 3 points.

Range

Obviously having lots of different options is a good thing. There are so many different light bulb shapes, sizes and uses. And we would like our favorite brand to make all of them. So I looked at just how many options each brand produces. Including different pack sizes, as this offers choices to the consumer as well.

Unfortunately it is not simple to know just how many different bulb options a brand has. Manufactures tend to group them by type and functions. And these groups can overlap. Therefore, I looked at the major sellers, and took the maximum found for each brand. So if Amazon showed 600 options for Feit, but Home Depot had 1,000 I chose the 1,000.

Points are awarded for being in one of the following five ranges: 1500+, 1500-1000, 1000-500, 500-200, and 200-100.

Lifetime

When I am buying a light bulb I want it to last as long as possible. Modern LED light bulbs now come with lifetimes up to and beyond 20 years. To point out though that these year ratings are always based on 3 hours of usage per day. As such I look at the lifetime in hours for the 60 watt replacement bulbs used in the price section. The scoring is the lifetime, in hours, divided by 5,000 and rounded down.

Quality

How do we define quality? We have already considered the lifetime of the product. So, what else? In this section we look at the warranty provided. After all if a manufactures says its bulbs will last 22 years why is it only providing a one year warranty. Though all the warranties listed here are limited. Normally being based on the bulb only being used for 3 hours per day. After all if you run your bulb 23 hours a day common sense tells us it will wear out faster.

With this in mind, to me a longer warranty suggests that the manufacturer believes in their products. And also that they have faith in their quality. When a manufacturer gives a 1 year warranty I start to worry what they are not telling me.

Additionally I look to see if their products are Energy Star compliant. This is a testing scheme overseen by the EPA. When a light bulb is certified this means that an independent lab has checked it, and that it meets the claims the manufacturer is making. At least in terms of efficiency. In my opinion submitting and receiving the certification is another sign of quality.

So, I scored 1 point for each year of warranty and penalized 1 point if the bulb was not Energy Star efficient. I should point out that no manufacturer has every one of their bulbs certified. So I only considered our sample 60 watt replacements.

Overall Results

Finally I took the five sections and added them up: ratings, price, range, lifetime and quality. The totals are shown below.

In Conclusion

In general I would have a top-3 result. However the third and fourth places are so close together that is seem unfair to exclude one of them. So our top four results for the best light bulb brand are:

• GE – A great range of bulbs with good lifetimes and warranties. Also reasonable prices.
• Feit – Just loosing out to GE on price and range. Overall excellent quality bulbs from a reliable manufacturer.
• EcoSmart from Home Depot – Reasonably priced bulbs with good warranties.
• Great Value from Walmart – Great prices on bulbs with good lifetimes.

This doesn’t come as a great shock. Here at Light Bulb AtoZ we rate a lot of light bulbs. See our articles here. GE and Feit regularly turn up on our best-of lists. Also EcoSmart and Great Value for their well priced bulbs.

GE have been in business since 1892 and they still seem to be the company to beat.

Finally a shout out to IKEA. Who produce some of the most efficient light bulbs you can buy. They lost out on range and price. But don’t let this stop you checking them out.

Light Bulbs From Our Best Light Bulb Brands