A Little Light or A Lada Light?

No, the title isn’t misspelled (if any of my readers are from the Russian Federation or the former-USSR, you’ll probably get the pun). It’ll play in later. What I’m getting at, though, is that we’re now officially in the age of LED lighting for our houses, and you can go and buy LED bulbs of all styles on the cheap! No matter what you decide to run them in, you don’t have to worry about the fixture not being able to safely accommodate the wattage of the bulb, even for the new 75-Watt bulbs! Okay, they’re only about nine watts, but they’re labeled as 75-Watt Equivalent (meaning that they give off the same amount of light that a traditional bulb would take 75 watts to produce in only a fraction of that energy), so that’s the term I’ll be using. Besides, the only bulbs I’m gonna be talking about are LEDs. Yes, the little one is an LED too. When I said you can get them in any style, I meant it.

The two pictures that fail to do the scene justice paired with this paragraph are (in the respective order from top to bottom): the white, 75-We bulb and the not-an-incandescent 25-We bulb. Neither uses more than nine actual watts, so I don’t have to worry about ruining my desk lamp or burning my house by getting a bulb rated for too many watts, but what I do have to worry about is whether or not I’m actually able to see what I’m doing. I’ll admit, I had originally bought the 75-We bulb for my lamp when I got it, but quickly found that it was more useful for… keeping me awake rather than providing a soft illumination over my laptop table. Cue a few months later when my father asks me if I want a two-pack of LED bulbs (one was missing, but that’ll come up later). He said that he didn’t like them because of the glare (I haven’t noticed any yet, but these are two different scenarios) and asked if I wanted the pack. Me being me and not wanting to make a trip to Walmart for just one thing, I decided to take the pack, especially after seeing it was a 25-We bulb (the incandescent theme of the bulb was an added bonus for me) and immediately swap it out with the too-bright LED from my lamp. Well, now I had an extra bulb that was too bright for something that wasn’t a whole room.

My bathroom has, very clearly, four light sockets in this fixture. Bulb №3 was missing for quite a while, assuming it was ever put in, so I used the spare bulb (picture №2 in this paragraph) for that and voila! I can finally stop getting bothered by that one empty socket! Of course, weeks later when I would eventually come to write this article, I’d swap it out for the 25-We bulb (picture №1 in the paragraph) for the sole purpose of making another point… it’s possible to have a room inadequately lighted for a task. I’m sure the older generation is well-aware of eyestrain caused by dimly-lit rooms. Regardless, I did it anyway and swapped the bright bulb out for the desk lamp bulb (if only for a few moments). Already, it was obvious that I made the right move by matching up the bulbs. Neither fixture or socket was at risk of damage, and I was not at risk of becoming a me-shaped lump of charcoal. Anyway, because I tend to want to keep things matched (Every LED bulb I put in my Maw Maw’s house, I always

, apart from the chandelier, used the same 75-We bulbs for consistency’s sake), I had two options: the first was to leave the 25-We bulb in my desk lamp and the four 75-We bulbs in the bathroom or I could go to Walmart for three more 25-We bulbs for the bathroom and end up with a bathroom that’s nearly too dim to use and a desk lamp too bright to be productive.

Much like in other situations, the simplest answer is often times the correct or best answer. If you're looking for a humidifier, the best type is evaporative! If you're looking to light an area, larger areas need more watts of light! If you're looking for a television, you can probably do with a traditional flat screen instead of a Smart TV. Generally, adding details to things only complicates the entire situation, often times to a needless degree.