The only place I now use an incandescent bulb is in my oven. It went out the other day and I was looking for a replacement. I am using LED all over these days but realized it may not be possible to use LEDs in a heated environment like an oven. Is that the case, or are there LED bulbs for that now also?
Oven Lighting – Are There LED Lamps Available for Ovens?
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What you are looking for is a 40A15 Appliance Rated Lamp. If you can find 130V buy it, but the lamp does not stay on long enough to really matter. Believe or not it's the same as what is in your refrigerator. I did a quick search and this is what the Home Depot says (I don't work for them, actually they are the competition, kind of):
The GE Reveal 40-Watt Appliance A15 Light Bulb uses neodymium glass to filter out dull yellow rays for enhanced, vivid results. The bulb is an ideal choice for use in household appliances like microwaves, refrigerators and ovens.
Light output: 320 lumens
Energy used: 40 watts
Life hours: 1,000 hours
The flicker is likely because your dimmer is indeed incompatible with LEDs -- it was designed to drive electronic low-voltage "transformers" used with 12V (typically halogen or low-voltage LED) lighting systems. Switching to a dimmer made for CFL/LED or incandescent/halogen service should cure it.
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Best Answer
As already stated, LEDs can't take the heat. In addition:
Many ovens use halogen bulbs instead of "ordinary" incandescent bulbs. These are a type of incandescent light with two key differences: size and heat.
The size is irrelevant for most ordinary lamps but great for an oven, where you want something small so that it won't take away from valuable interior cooking space.
The heat is a huge problem for ordinary lamps, to the extent that there were major recalls/design changes many years ago because of halogen lamps setting curtains and other stuff on fire, resulting in metal grid covers for those lamps and eventually they disappeared altogether in favor of much more efficient CFL and then LED lamps. But heat is perfectly fine in an oven, where you have a high-but-regulated temperature. If you have the light on while cooking and it puts a few extra watts of heat into the oven, the element will turn off a few seconds earlier and the net energy usage is a big fat 0.
In general with any lighting system, the efficiency is a balance between light and heat. All the energy not turned into light becomes heat. In an oven that is perfectly fine and useful instead of wasteful. For an extreme example of this, where the light bulb is the heating element, see the Easy Bake Oven. In fact, for a conventional electric oven, heat generated from a light bulb is essentially the same efficiency as heat generated from heating elements. Where energy usage is a bit different is with microwave ovens and gas ovens.