It used to be that picking up a two-pack or four-pack of light bulbs was a no-brainer.
As if by instinct, most consumers knew what wattage bulb to buy. A 40-watt bulb might go in a closet, a 75-watt could be used in a reading lamp, and a bright 100-watt might go above a workbench. But most often, consumers bought a 60-watt bulb -- pretty bright but not blinding, and not so hot that it ruined the fixture.
Much of that buying decision, though, was based on experience and marketing, including information on the package. It was all about how much power a bulb used.
"We have been conditioned to buy on watts," said Peter Soares, director of consumer marketing for Philips Lighting.
Not for long. Because of new technologies, the industry wants consumers to choose light bulbs by lumens, which measure brightness, not by watts. This will be done with fancy new packaging and a sober, federally mandated label.
The standardized format means that manufacturers are now required to have labels that emphasize lumens, which are on the old packaging but not as prominent.
And they will be required to include the annual operating cost of a light bulb as well as its estimated life expectancy in years, not hours.
"Nobody knows what 12,000 or 20,000 hours mean," said Pamela Price, retail marketing manager for lightning manufacturer Osram Sylvania.
The "Lighting Facts" label is already on standard household light bulbs manufactured since Jan. 1 but the wording appears wherever a manufacturer wants to put it. The new label, negotiated between industry marketing and engineering experts and the Federal Trade Commission over a couple of years, organizes the packaging information in a no-nonsense, obviously government-created format.
Every label is the same, and those on CFL packages must now carry the warning "Contains Mercury" in bold letters. Mercury is a neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to babies and toddlers.
(Although the amount of mercury in the new CFL bulbs is miniscule, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency still advises consumers to remove children and pets from a room when a CFL is broken, air out the room, and then clean up the mess with a dustpan and wet paper towels, not a vacuum cleaner.)
The packaging makeover, which is well on its way, will rely on bright new colors to teach consumers about the new technology choices or about the bulbs' brightness levels. The colors will vary by each major manufacturer.
The makeover includes packages for compact fluorescent light bulbs or CFLs, solid state or LED bulbs, old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, and the new halogen bulbs that look like the old bulbs but are 28 percent more efficient.
Consumers' lifetime of learning about light bulbs will soon be as obsolete as the bulbs themselves.
The standard wattage light bulbs, including the 60, don't meet new federal and industry efficiency standards and will be gone from store shelves in less than three years. They will be replaced by newer versions of incandescent bulbs and by bulbs using high-tech, much more efficient technologies.
No matter the manufacturer, consumer bulb packaging must contain the new label that emphasizes lumens over watts.
A 60-watt incandescent bulb produces about 800 lumens. The old 100-watt bulb, already gone, produced about 1600 lumens.
The new halogen incandescent bulbs produce 800 lumens with about 43 watts. A 23-watt CFL can produce about 800 lumens. And an LED bulb of roughly 12 watts can also produce the same amount of light. That's the reason for the new, standardized label.
Anybody who has ever read a nutritional label (also federally mandated) on a food product will instantly recognize the new lighting label.
Think of a cereal box. That's how General Electric Lighting tried to explain it this week.
"Each morning when you pour your cereal, a quick glance at the nutrition label tells you how many calories you're absorbing, what ingredients you're digesting and a myriad of other facts. Now, that same idea is being applied to light bulbs," the company said in a statement announcing the label revolution.
Consumers might be able to read a nutritional label with "a quick glance," but reading the "Lighting Facts" label will take a little practice.
"I think this will a big improvement. It will be helpful. The terms are more friendly," said Soares of Philips. "And it contains a little bit more information. In the end, I think it will help in the transition."
The label's lumens appear right at the top. The watts - which was the dominant number in the old packaging -- now appear at the bottom of the label as "energy used."
"I am happy about halving new labels on the package," said Price with Osram Sylvania. "Lumens were always on the package. Now it is more prominent. With changes in technology happening now, we have to help people."
The new label also requires a manufacturer to estimate what a particular bulb will cost a consumer annually, assuming it is turned on three hours a day and electricity costs 11 cents per kilowatt-hour delivered. The life expectancy
The label requires a bulb's life expectancy estimate, but not in hours, as was on the old packages, but in years, or fractions of a year.
Price's colleague, Pamela Horner, Sylvania's senior director, government and industry relations, summed up the life expectancy of the company's LED bulbs "as about the same amount of time it will take to get my child through high school and college."
The label also requires manufacturers to takes a stab at explaining how a particular light bulb will make surroundings look to the eye.
That was not much of an issue with old-fashioned incandescent bulbs because the "color" of the light was roughly the same, no matter what the wattage.
The way fluorescent and LED lighting technologies produce light is far more complicated -- and so is the color quality of the light. The wrong tone can be harsh, giving everyday objects a stark look. Too soft a tone can seem too dim.
The new label using a simple horizontal line, from "warm" to "cool" and hints that warm is "2700 K."
That's a hint at what lighting experts know. The K stands for Kelvin, a thermodynamics temperature scale developed by physicists and today used in fields as disparate as lighting photography and astrophysics.
In lighting, the warm lighting produced by old-fashioned incandescent bulbs is in the range of 2700 to 3200 K. The sharp, "cool" light produced by a fluorescent "daylight" bulb is registered at 6000 to 7000 K.
"We struggled with this for two years," said Jim Crowcroft, vice president of market development at TCP, a lighting manufacturer based in Aurora, referring to the industry's discussions with the FTC about the label and what should be included on it.
He summed up the color quality this way: 2700 K equals soft white; 3500 K equals bright white and 5000 K equals daylight.
If incandescent bulbs, including halogen incandescent bulbs, disappear altogether after 2020, as the industry is anticipating because of tougher efficiency standards, consumers will be looking at only CFL and LED bulbs.
That is going to make color quality even more important, said Martin Winston, editor of News Tips, and a critic of the lighting industry.
"Do people really know what "warm" or "cool" or "daylight" means?" he asked. "Or which one you want in your kitchen, or which one you want over the bathroom mirror?
"Under different color temperatures, brown socks can look black, green slacks can look brown and makeup can turn into what-was-she-thinking."
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