Is airflow the only thing determining the maximum supported wattage of lighting fixtures? I'm curious - I don't know anything about this kind of thing...
The thing determining it is the danger of overheating -- so paper or wood lampshades tend to come with a lower rating than glass or metal ones. An LED bulb will heat its surroundings according to its actual mains power consumption, not its "incandescent equivalent wattage", so an LED with 20W draw and 100W equivalent shouldn't be a fire hazard in a "max 60W" fitment -- but with LEDs there's the extra consideration that the bulb itself has a reduced lifespan if it overheats itself, which basically doesn't happen to incandescents.
Fantastic! Very helpful, Peter. That's exactly what I was looking for.
With regard to LED lifespan, the Cree LR6 downlights I bought 3.5 years ago are still running perfectly. Not a single failure. You can see that they took heat dissipation seriously in their design.
One day I'm going to have to think about those. We have a TON of recessed lights in our house, so it would be a significant investment to replace all of them, but I'd imagine there would be pretty great cost savings. Although, most of ours are dimmed most of the time they're on, so there's a little savings there. How is the light from the LR6? Like their regular bulbs?
So far as I can tell, LED bulbs are already amazing and with the falling costs and increasing brightness per watt, are ready to completely own the market. What I'm waiting for are for more fixtures to come out with built-in LEDs, intended to last for the life of the fixture. Since any metal light fixture might just as well be engineered to be the heat sink for the LEDs, this isn't all that far fetched. There are a handful of such fixtures on the market, but primary focused on commercial applications, street lights, etc.
I can see your point, but I think there will always be a place for replaceable bulbs. Some lighting fixtures can get
very expensive, and even though the bulbs will last a decade, you might not want to throw the lamp away just because the bulb died. Plus, people might like bulbs with different color temperatures, or they might want to throw their money away on a Philips Hue
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
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