A while back I noticed, hey, we’re actually using a…. plurality…. of 2000 watt halogen Fresnel fixtures in our studio. I brought up to the network’s one lighting guy that I’d found this cool (literally!) VisionSmith ReLamp System that includes a 275 watt tungsten lamp colored drop-in replacement for the CYX lightbulb… and can apparently also let you use acrylic Fresnel lenses which increase the fixture’s output even farther. He gave me this look like I’d just waved a dead skunk in his face, so I dropped the subject on the spot. Oh well, someday we’ll be able to explore MODERN technology 😉

So I’d mentioned this to someone in a thread on Facebook who got sticker shock seeing that the LED CYX replacement costs $945.25 from one vendor. The halogen CYX costs $30 (surprisingly, that’s a little less than the common HPL bulb used for Source Four lamps). I immediately thought to myself the total cost of operation must be VERY VERY much lower so I ran some back of the napkin numbers on it. These do not include the cost of air conditioning to remove the waste heat from the space as I don’t know how to calculate that off the top of my head. This is just for the bulb cost and electricity cost:

Average US electricity cost: 13.19 cents/KwH.

Rated life of the VisionSmith module: 50K hours
Rated life of the CYX halogen: 300 hours

Cost of electric power to run CYX bulbs for 50K hours: $13,190
Cost of 167 bulbs (!): $5010
Total cost of operation: $18,200

Cost of electric power to run the VisionSmith for 50K: $1814
Cost of one module: $945.25
Total cost of operation: $2759.25

Yeah—- I’m pretty sure which one I’m gonna go with.