- 1 - BENCHMARK TEST ON LED REPLACEMENTS OF DIRECTIONAL HALOGEN LAMPS Bouroussis, C.A. , Doulos, L.T., Madias E.-N.D., Topalis, F.V. Lighting Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, GREECE. bouroussis@gmail.com ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of the evaluation of various LED in terms of their photometric and electric performance. These lamps are promoted as retrofit replacements of halogen reflector lamps with GU10 base. This type of lamp is widely used in commercial lighting. The tests and corresponding calculations were carried out according to the European Standards in the Lighting Laboratory of National Technical University of Athens. The paper describes the methodology and the procedures of the applied tests. The tests were divided into two categories, photometric and electric. The photometric part consists of measurements of luminous intensity, colour temperature and colour rendering index of each lamp. The electric part consists of power quality measurements. Concluding, the paper presents the results of the photometric and the electrical performance, the corresponding calculations and some remarks on the results. Keywords: LED, retrofit, GU10, halogen, replacement, benchmark 1. INTRODUCTION LED products gradually replace luminaires with conventional light sources. The technology of LEDs has increased rapidly in the past ten years. At the beginning, the luminous efficacy of LED was nearly 30 lm/W, while now most of the commercial available types can easily reach, in bare led, efficacies higher than 100 lm/W (DoE, 2011). Furthermore, the European Eco Design regulations will ban low efficacy light sources, including halogen lamps, from the market in the next years (EC, 2005). One characteristic type of the lamps that will also be banned in next years is halogen PAR16 reflector lamp with GU10 base. The above-mentioned type was used for years not only in professional lighting but also in households. For these reasons, the penetration of a huge number of LED lighting products in the market, such as modules, lamps and luminaries is rapid. However, the compact size, the warm colour and the excellent colour rendering are the strong advantages of halogen lamps. Many lamp manufacturers around the world introduced, few years ago, some LED lamps in order to replace the halogen one after their future ban. The effort of the manufacturers is still to develop a LED lamp with the same characteristics of the traditional halogen, such as dimming, colour rendering index except from its low luminous efficacy. So, could the switch of halogen lamps to LED be carried out without any misapprehension? Thus, the paper tries to focus on this issue using experimental procedures. 2. TESTED LAMPS The tested lamps were selected between various models of branded and private label GU10 LED lamps. These lamps are sold as replacements of the traditional 35W and 50W Halogen GU10 reflector lamps. The types of the tested lamps are shown on Table 1. Two lamps of each type (total 46 samples) were used in the experiments.