LED Light bulbs and trying to get a warm glow

[fallofgiants]

The last of our filament bulbs has gone and I am trying to find a new light bulb that emits the same dim warm light.

It's an E14 shape, but I don't understand what lumens and watts I need despite googling.

Can anyone help?

Lumens and Watts are measures of the light bulb brightness. Watts (W) are generally accosiated with old filament bulbs, while lumens (lm) with modern energy saving types, including LEDs.
I'm not an expert on all the physics of light, but my general take is that lumens scale uses higher numbers than Watts, think sort of like Fahrenheit and Celsius for temperature. Lumen to Watts equivalent of an LED bulb would usually be noted on its packaging (or in the online description, or can be Googled). So, if you were happy with the brightness of your old bulbs, take the note of their wattage (should be imprinted on the bulb somewhere) and look out for an LED bulb that has similar brightness output when converted to lumens.

However, you also mention "warm glow". This is known as "light temperature" and is an entirely different parameter that is not linked to brightness. I think the formal unit measure is Kelvin but, again, nowadays the bulb packaging / online description usually contains a layperson's description of the light temperature which is farily easy to understand - something like "warm white" (similar to the yellow-ish cosy glow of an old-shool filament bulb), "cool white" (more stark white light with blue-ish undertone), sometimes "daylight" (something in-between, some people prefer it for working spaces like home office), etc.

Was meant to say, when you're tryign to figure out the wattage of your old fulament bulb, look out for something like "40W" "60W", "100W" stamped on the bulb's glass dome. You mention your old bulb is "dim", so most likely will be 40W (i.e. 40 Watts).

First off, Watts measure the amount of energy the bulb uses. Lumens is the brightness produced. So the new led bulbs produce as much light (lumens) but with a lot less energy (W) compared to the old bulbs. So once we get used to the new labelling, were should have a better idea of how bright the bulbs are. (Some older style 30 watt bulbs were a lot dimmer than others)
If you look online for bulbs, they will often give you the oldstyle equivalent in watts. Your light fitting might still have a label giving the max wattage it can take if you can't see it on the old bulb. Like pp said, you want warm white.

Most important is to get the right colour light. You want 2700k aka “very warm white”. 3000k is described as “warm white” but it’s really not as warm as a filament bulb.

In terms of wattage you probably want about 3.5 or 4W for a fairly dim effect.

If you want to get even closer to filament light then look for bulbs with a CRI of over 90, such as the Philips ExpertColour range. These bulbs give more accurate colour rendering whereas some LED bulbs give a more “flat” effect.