Candy seem to be coming up with innovative ideas at the moment and have developed white LED lights for inside their ovens. They call them U-See, and they say they flood the oven with bright light allowing a clearer view across all oven shelves.
They claim they are much more energy efficient than a standard oven lamp though standard oven lamps typically only use 25 watts anyway, which compared with the thousands of watts the actual oven element will be using is pretty insignificant. Never the less, we live in times when people are attuned to (or even conned into wanting) even very small energy savings. These U-See LEDs use just 4 watts.
Don’t get excited about the energy savings
To put these energy saving figures into context a standard oven bulb using 25 watts running for 100 hours (at 15 p per kWh) would cost a mere 37.5p (call it 38 pence). The new U-See oven lights running for 100 hours would cost 0.06 pence. Clearly a lot cheaper but in 100 hours of use the lights will have saved you just 30 pence. Therefore any energy saving claims, though technically true are insignificant and shouldn’t be remotely taken into account. Using these figures it would be possible to claim the lights cost more than 8o% less to run, I hope they don’t but they’ll probably find it hard to resist. Percentage figures are useless without context. (Calculated using Electricity Running Costs Calculator )
Real advantages?
The U-See oven lights do promise to be much better if you can see the contents of the oven much clearer without having to open the door. As such they sound great. If they are much more reliable than the standard oven bulb, and they certainly should be, then this is another legitimate advantage. In my experience (as an engineer) the standard oven bulbs are not very reliable and fail quite often. When they do it is inconvenient and not always easy to buy and fit a new one. If these LED oven lights prove to be as reliable as we have come to expect LED lights to be then this alone is a good move forward regardless of anything else.
However, no matter how much of an improvement, it’s not much use unless the actual oven is good and is reliable.
Disappointingly there is more information about these ovens on the Which? website than there is on Candy’s own website, which is one of the worst manufacturer websites I’ve seen. You can’t even search it, and the oven section mentions nothing (at time of writing) about this new U-See feature.
I’m sure we’ll see more about them in the future, maybe it’s early days yet.
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Oliver Shaw says
Hi Andy,
Sounds like a con!!!!
Saving a few pence when the element is guzzling electricity! You are right these SMALL energy savings are all a con!! But the information as usual will be misleading, like comparing a modern washer with one from 10 years ago, of course it will be more efficient than the 10 year old one. This is just plain trickery and EXTREMELY misleading!!
All the best,
Oliver.
Washerhelp says
It would be a con Oliver if they advertise they are 80% cheaper – or to be fair, misleading, though I haven’t seen any marketing for it yet. I think the new lights have enough of a benefit without them needing to mention the “energy saving” but it’s possibly too good an opportunity to miss because it’s technically true – the bulbs are over 80% cheaper to run. It’s just that 80% of such a small amount is virtually meaningless. If I ever see any percentage figures quoted, I always want to know the full facts before deciding how valid or relevant they are.
Oliver Shaw says
Hi Andy,
Correct!
Lets face it we both know they are going to play on it using the dirty percentage business as all manufacturers do! Also not that many people look at the small print regarding the percentages, so it will sell the ovens as people will attribute the saving to the oven its self not the insignificantly low wattage of the lighting!!
Oliver.
John Rawsterne says
Interesting article!