["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published March 3, 2025] 2025
This is Part 3 in my series of Languages I Do Not Speak: Light bulb edition. I mentioned the light bulb issue in a previous column about my other language barriers (Spoken Coffee, Remotes, Grandchildren, iPhones, etc.) but they merit a column all their own.
It used to be that light bulbs for home use came in three denominations: 60, 75, and 100. They all used the same base, and you knew how much light you'd get with each of them
Now it's as if they suddenly switched us to metric. (And don't even think it.)
Even bringing the box that held the former bulbs to the hardware store with me, I need human assistance to find the same ones. I have enough techno-stress in my life without light bulb anxiety.
A while back, we had some Edison light bulbs strung on our property to add additional lighting in an otherwise dark area. As always, I bought a few extra bulbs for replacement. But now, alas, those bulbs have been used up and I was tasked with finding some of the same size, brightness, and base. This has taken hours upon hours of my time. If the bulb isn't exactly the same as the others on the string both in size and light emission, it looks really odd. I think I have looked at least a hundred Edison bulbs on every site that sells light bulbs, including Amazon.
Since I didn't have the box, I got out my magnifying glass and was able to determine that the teeny-weeny numbers on the base of the bulbs read: 120v 60H 0.01 0.9.
Optimistically, I tried to Google that combination and came up with ... nothing.
It turns out that with LED bulbs, watts don't mean much. They pretty much belong to an ancient dialect called "incandescent". It all lumens now.
Unfortunately, like many people in my age group, I do not speak lumen; I speak watt. You need to translate watts into lumens if you are buying an LED bulb.
And then, there s a whole new language of bulb bases. I was searching for bulb with an A19 base but all I could find anywhere were LED bulbs with E26 bases.
We will not even go into light bulb bases. You don t have enough time and I don t have enough column space.
But the short answer is that almost all A19 bulbs are E26. This means that if you have an A19 bulb at your house, it definitely has an E26 base. However, you can't say its the other way around. That's because bulbs with E26 bases come in all different shapes and sizes, not just A19.
Are you still reading? If so, I'm impressed. (And worried.)
So I did eventually find some bulbs that would work and carefully noted everything it says on the box which is: LED String Light 70 lumens. Clear. 11-watt replacement (replaces an 11-watt incandescent bulb) S14 - Soft White - 2700K - 1 Watt - Standard base.
Oh, you wanted dimmable? That's a whole other variable.
As if lumens weren't bad enough, now you're getting into Kelvins which refer to color temperature. Warm white bulbs have between 2,700-3,000 Ks (Kelvins) white the soft whites are more in the 3,500 K range, and the cool whites in the 5,000 K range. As I understand it (and I really don t), higher K numbers are not brighter, merely whiter but in higher numbers will eventually start to look bluer (just to make you really crazy).
We have an entire huge drawer of specialty light bulbs for all the different indoor and outdoor light fixtures in our home, all personally labeled so that we could ever figure out what fixture they belonged to.
When we remodeled our kitchen back in 1999, I had them put in under-the-cabinet lights and eight can lights in an 11x11 space, plus seven more can lights in our small adjoining dining space. Honestly, turn them all on at once and it looks like a nuclear blast. Having spent decades in a kitchen with a single 100-watt light bulb, I wasn't taking any chances.
But as those 15 incandescent can lights have burnt out, they've been replaced with LED bulbs which don't match the light on the previous ones at all. Ultimately, they will all match but in the interim, it's a very weird look.
And now my wonderful desk light is starting to flicker. Except it doesn't even have a bulb. At least not one that mere mortals could access. It's in a "head " I queried the company who makes it on their customer support line yes, you have to replace the whole head ($298) or the whole lamp. But a light that flickers while you're working is a light that is tempting one to rip it out of its base and throw it in the pool.
And then, to add insult to electrical injury, my long-time beloved halogen standing reading light next to my reading chair finally crumped. My requirements for a replacement fixture were simple: it had to have an actual changeable light bulb. This bulb also had to be something standard that you could get at Meanley's, or even on-line without searching through hundreds of light bulbs as I did for my Edison lights.
Annoyingly, most of the standing reading lamps I looked at had heads just like my desk lamp that was giving me problems. Fool me once.
Checking the tag on the reading lamp that seem to fit my criteria, it said no more than 60 watts but that's only if it's an incandescent bulb. Apparently for an LED bulb, you can use any wattage you want in it. (Disclaimer: if your house burns down, this was what I was told by the lighting store person. So sue HER.)
Just to clarify, a 60-watt incandescent bulb is a 7-9 watt LED bulb and is 730-800 lumens. Did you ever want to know all this? I sure didn't. But now, alas, I do.
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