Why You Can Trust CNET GE 40W Equivalent Candelabra LED review: The C student of the candelabra class
This chandelier light got beat by the competition at nearly every turn -- and at $9, it costs too much.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
GE's 40W Equivalent Candelabra LED.
There are plenty of bulbs in the lighting aisle that promise to give your chandelier an efficiency upgrade. The GE 40W Equivalent Candelabra LED is one of them, but it isn't a bulb I'd recommend. Of all 11 LEDs we tested for this roundup it was the least efficient, and it wasn't able to dim down any lower than 12 percent. Its brightness also came behind a majority of the other bulbs we tested.
GE 40W Equivalent Candelabra LED
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
GE's bulb simply isn't a good value at its price. At just over $9 each, it costs more than competitors that outperformed it in our tests, including a $7 candelabra LED from EcoSmart and a comparably priced Walmart store brand candelabra LED. The latter of the two sits directly adjacent to GE's candelabra LED in the lighting aisle at Walmart -- it's the better buy across the board.
Like a lot of the LEDs we looked at, GE's bulb sports a flame-shaped build with white plastic covering the hardware in its bottom half. It's a rather bland aesthetic that's pretty typical of LED light bulbs in general, but it might give you some extra pause in the candelabra category, since these kinds of bulbs usually aren't kept under a lampshade. If you're looking for something a little closer to the incandescent aesthetic you're probably used to, then you'll want to be sure and consider the vintage-style filament LEDs from Feit and EcoSmart.
GE's candelabra bulb clocked in at 294 lumens when we tested its brightness out in our integrating sphere. That's well within the margin of error of the stated 300 lumens that you'll see printed on the packaging, but accuracy aside, 294 lumens is about as dim as I'd want from a 40W equivalent decorative bulb. It'll probably be plenty bright for your needs if you're using five or six of the bulbs in a single fixture, but just know that you'll get even more brightness for your buck with most of the other bulbs we tested, some of which rang in at well over 400 lumens.
GE's 294 lumens come from a power draw of 4.5 watts -- good enough to make the bulb a legitimate efficiency upgrade over incandescents. But divide the light output by the power draw, and you'll find that it's only putting out 65.3 lumens per watt. Every other candelabra LED we tested did better than that. All 10 of them.
GE's bulb loses almost 20 percent of its initial brightness due to heat buildup. That's a bottom-three result.
Efficiency isn't this bulb's only weak spot. It underwhelmed in our heat management tests, as indicated in the graph above. It also has a shorter-than-average lifespan of 15,000 hours (the majority of LEDs at this point claim 25,000 hours).
Use it with a dimmer switch, and you likely won't be able to dim it down as low as you'd like -- we weren't able to get it any lower than 12.5 percent on any of the switches we tested. The only bright spot: its flicker was barely noticeable.
All in all, there just aren't a lot of reasons to pick this bulb over the other options in the lighting aisle, especially LED options from Cree, EcoSmart and Walmart that cost less. Consider one of those, instead -- or, consider sticking it out with halogens for another year or two. As a category, candelabra LEDs are still behind the curve.
For more on candelabra LEDs, check out our full category overview.