Why You Can Trust CNET Philips 40W Equivalent Candelabra LED review: It doesn't dim, but it does the job
At a little over three bucks each, these LEDs are a respectable efficiency upgrade for your chandelier.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
The non-dimmable 40W equivalent candelabra LED from Philips.
What's the difference between a non-dimmable LED and a dimmable LED that you'd never want to dim?
Philips 40W Equivalent Candelabra LED
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Answer: about five or six bucks.
At least, it is if you're talking about candelabra LEDs. After eighteen hours of tests, I couldn't find a single dimmable option that dimmed without flickering. The average price of those dimmable bulbs? A little over nine dollars. Each.
That makes the explicitly non-dimmable candelabra LED from Philips -- which sells in a $10 three-pack at Home Depot -- a pretty appealing option. You won't be able to dial the light down, but it does offer sufficient brightness, efficiency, and light quality. It's nothing special, but at a few bucks per bulb, it really doesn't have to be.
The non-dimmable candelabra LED from Philips didn't win any of our performance tests, but it didn't lose any of them, either. At 322 lumens, it offers brightness that's just below average, but high enough to earn a passing grade as a 40W equivalent. At a power draw of 4.5 watts, it's putting that brightness out at about 71.6 lumens per watt. In terms of efficiency, that's almost the exact average for the entire candelabra LED category.
Philips also found the middle of the pack in our thermal management tests, where we test to see how much heat affects each bulb's performance. After switching it on in our integrating sphere and waiting ninety minutes, the brightness had flat-lined at about 86 percent. Though not the impressive 92.4 percent we saw from a $7 EcoSmart bulb, it's still an acceptable result, and good enough for fifth place out of eleven bulbs tested.
I was also happy that the Philips LED managed to put out a fairly even spread of light, including a decent amount of downward-cast light. This came as a bit of a surprise, as other bulbs with the same form factor did much worse in the same test.
From left to right, the EcoSmart 40W equivalent candelabra LED, the Philips 40W equivalent candelabra LED, and a GE Reveal 40W incandescent. The incandescent does the best job of casting its light out evenly, but the Philips bulb does pretty well, too.
The reason why those torpedo-shaped LEDs typically struggle is because the bulb's glass doesn't extend out any further than the base, where the heat sink lives. This means the heat sink ends up blocking the downward light, as you see with bulb number one in the picture above, a 40W equivalent from EcoSmart.
With Philips -- shown above in the middle -- you've got a nifty, pedestal-shaped diffuser in the center of the bulb to help angle the light downward more effectively. It works to an extent, though you still get a bit of a dark spot directly below the bulb.
All told, the Philips bulb checks off all of the boxes I'd expect a $3 LED to check It's bright enough, it's efficient enough and it isn't ugly. You won't be able to buy bulbs individually, but you're probably going to want matching multiples anyway, and at $10 for a three-pack, you'll be spending less than half of what you'd need to spend for dimming LEDs. If you're looking for a bargain-priced efficiency upgrade for your chandelier, this is about as good as you're currently going to get.
For more on candelabra LEDs, check out our full category overview.