- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poor CRI and SSRI
- Flickering
- Dim-to-warm is uncommon
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
- The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford.
- It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal
- Retrofits generally work poorly on principle
- LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
In a screw base, maybe. But compare:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i...
$25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30...
$3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.)
So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30.
Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast.
To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks.
I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it:
https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...
With Edison-style bulbs, anyway, the orientation they're mounted in makes a huge amount of difference. They're last a lot longer if they're oriented upright (base down) than in any other orientation because it reduces the heat buildup in the power supply.
If there was a "DC" light socket in the house we could have LEDs outlasting owners, and for cheap. Nearly all the expense of LED bulbs is the power supply. Everything else is dirt cheap. A single home DC power supply with ~200W of output could light an entire house, flicker free.
What's even more frustrating is I think we could fix it. A national regulation for DC light sockets would fix it. Mandate a voltage, shape, and max amperage and BAM, you'll get 1000 different manufactures making standard compliant bulbs and home power supplies that will last an eternity.
The lights are all basically cut 12v light strips inside of old light fixtures with a custom controller that also terminates PoE. The 48 volts that most PoE standards specify is more than enough to push power down the line for < 100 meter runs.
The advantage of PoE here is that anything under 50 volts is considered low voltage and does not need to follow the same rules as normal house wiring. I did not like that everything is hinging upon a beefy PoE switch so I actually made it passive PoE instead by design.
USB-C PD is at a useful voltage & wattage level, and so is Ethernet POE. I wouldn't be surprised to see them start to be used for general power distribution in niche applications, like RV's and off-grid cabins.
I don't think we're going to ever get a bulb standard, though.
I could definitely see this becoming more common. Powering the ~100 watts of fixed lighting spread across my whole house on ten different 15A 120v circuits, each with their own arcfault breaker and 12 gauge copper electrical lines running back to the panel is fabulously expensive for what could be done with a bunch of CAT5 in each floor running to some conveniently located “POE injector” type devices.
You would want to be able to take a standard fixture and just push DC through it and use special bulbs with a standard A19 base, but that’s problematic when the next owner tries to screw in a standard bulb - what happens when it sees 48V DC?
I would guess if for safety reasons it has to be a non-A19 connector, then your light fixture choices get cut down to almost nothing and no one will make the switch?
It’s really interesting to think about, most everything I’m plugging into AC outlets in my house, the first step is converting it to DC. A lot of my outlets I’ve switched to include USB ports so I don’t need the wall warts. If you have solar and battery backup even more-so you start to question why we are wasting so much money moving everything back and forth between DC/AC/DC within a house.
If by "standard" you mean a incandescent tungsten filament bulb, nothing at all.
For a true LED driver power supply, it would be constant current, so the tungsten filament would see 25mA (or whatever the constant current is set for) of DC, and nothing bad would happen (the filament also would not likely illuminate either).
Screwing in an LED bulb with integrated power supply, the external supply will still feed the constant current value, so what happens depends upon the design of the LED bulb's integrated power supply. If 25mA is enough to drive everything, the LED bulb might light up. If 25mA is not enough to drive everything, most likely nothing lights up.
For constant current, you'd need to drive at least 9 watts so it would be more like 250mA if not higher.
A 1600 lumen LED module might take as much or more current than a 60w incandescent. If your constant current supply can output between 0 volts and input volts, and it's set for a bulb with such a module, it would be able to power an incandescent bulb.
(Of course, they’re quite hot and radiative cooling increases like T^4, so this isn’t necessarily a show stopper. But it’s probably not helpful.)
Either it lights up or not? I don't see a problem here.
But I'm not sure moving part of power supply elsewhere will help that much, it needs current driver electronics anyway.
But choosing a DC system for part of the house can make a lot of sense.
For one residential new construction room, it can be practical to have one shared power supply rather than one per LED. Say you have a 12 V, 5 A DC power supply. Using a star wiring topology, this can serve 10 lights (at 500 mA) fine with 16 AWG.
And switch mode power supplies are relatively inexpensive and quite efficient.
Not practical
I say this, because I was guilty of this exact shortcut thinking (in another comment). But I paused and thought to myself "I should run the numbers before just repeating the usual voltage drop criticism".
So I compared scenarios and it depends a lot on the topology, lengths, costs, and situation (new vs renovation).
Sure, a whole house system doesn't typically make sense, but I don't think that's what people are really talking about. I think people are interested in hybrid systems; e.g. DC power supply for each room.
I don't know if you meant it, but the sentence about "any sophomore level electrical engineering student can solve this" can easily come across as dismissive. I also think it gives too much credit to sophomore students. :)
I would have more confidence in an electrician apprentice on this one. I think they'd have more practical experience when it comes to figuring out what are the right questions to ask.
I did EE in college and do a fair bit of hands on residential electrical work.
P.S. How many sophomore level engineering students learn to do a sensitivity analysis?
I completely disagree. Where exactly are you going to put a power supply in a room? Make a special electrical box for it? Won't it be unsightly in many rooms, or need some huge special panel that looks like a breaker panel? The comments I see seem to be advocating a whole-house solution, where a power supply is mounted in the breaker panel to supply LVDC to the whole unit. But this makes no sense for several reasons, especially the voltage drop.
>I don't know if you meant it, but the sentence about "any sophomore level electrical engineering student can solve this" can easily come across as dismissive. I also think it gives too much credit to sophomore students. :)
It's supposed to be dismissive, because this whole discussion is a bunch of software people trying to make up solutions for a perceived problem when they obviously don't know one of the most basic things about electrical theory, which makes all of their solutions unworkable. It's like a bunch of people trying to make a new kind of personal vehicle to replace cars when they don't even understand Newton's Laws. It's really annoying, because I see this kind of discussion pop up every so often, over many many years.
I have another comment here I don't feel like copy-and-pasting, but basically this whole discussion is silly because people are trying to make a solution using a very expensive power supply to fix a problem they see because they're buying cheap $2 light bulbs that burn out quickly, instead of just buying light fixtures that were properly engineered in the first place. With modern SMPSs, you're not going to get any kind of benefit by centralizing the power supply to drive individual LEDs, you're only going to get problems. LEDs need a driver circuit to provide constant current, and that means the power supply needs to be matched to the emitters and kept very close to it.
Switched-mode power supplies can be as small as your average Arduino board. They can fit inside the space used for wall outlets or light fixtures. Or you can put the DC transformer inside the light switch.
This sounds like a non-issue, specially considering the pervasive use of "unsightly" installations like air ducts, heating vents, radiators, electrical sockets, telecommunication service panels, routers, and even light fixtures.
If you intentionally dismiss obvious solutions, of course you only end up with problems without obvious solutions.
> It's supposed to be dismissive, because this whole discussion is (...)
If you have nothing to add, please add nothing.
It's not about DC vs AC, it's high-voltage vs low-voltage. The power dissipation by wire resistance scales with the square of the current ($P=RI^2$), and low line voltage means that you need large currents to transmit the same amount of power.
But what about the sub 100W or even 200W applications? That's where I think something like 48VDC would start to shine. Every light in a home, phone chargers, tablet chargers, computer monitors, televisions, computers? (maybe not gaming rigs, but certainly laptops and nucs).
How so? Exactly what benefit does it have over the current AC mains? With 48VDC, you'd still need to use DC-to-DC converters to power everything. I fail to see how that's any kind of improvement over the current switch-mode power supplies used. Instead, it'll just be less efficient because you'll get higher line losses in the power lines in the walls and all the way from wherever that 48VDC is coming from. If that's from a big SMPS in a closet somewhere, that's going to have its own losses. Overall, the entire system will have lower efficiency compared to the current system.
Exactly what problem are you trying to solve with this idea? If you think you're going to eliminate SMPSs in all your electronic equipment, you're not; that's a fantasy. Everything needs a power supply because electronics only work at very low voltages (5V, 3.3V, even 1.8V in places, now 20V with USB3) and most equipment has some kind of peculiar voltage requirements, and usually multiple different requirements inside the same device. There's no improvement in efficiency by running a computer, for instance, from 48VDC vs. 120VAC or 240VAC, in fact it's probably worse.
Also, DC and AC have differences in power transmission independent of resistance, some due to first principles (reactivity), and others related to devices for stepping voltage up or down (eg transformers).
I think the way to change it is to replace sockets with hardwired LED fixtures. This is easy for something like a standalone ceiling light. It may be harder for other devices like ceiling fans that integrate a light bulb socket, but converting those devices to take DC power as in your proposal isn't easy either (most would just get discarded and replaced).
Doing it well is more expensive in the short-term than screw-in bulbs. A quick look on Amazon suggests integrated ceiling lights are about 10x the price of LED bulbs, though I suspect the longer service life pays for itself.
Absolutely, the incandescent light bulbs have that shape for a reason: the screw is small because there is nothing to put in it and it doesn't heat, the bulb is large to dissipate all the light and heat it generates. And the LED light bulbs have exactly opposite problems: almost all of the heat is generated near the screw while the bulb itself generates almost none and the light-emitter doesn't even need the bulb that large around of it. Oh, and the casing around the screw is plastic so the thermal conductivity is horrible. Honestly, it's a profoundly terrible form-factor which we're now stuck with.
<https://www.designboom.com/technology/self-cooling-100-watt-...>
<https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b5/c2/c5/b5c2c5d69fb240a571ba...>
It's also helpful to recognise that existing lighting fixtures and lamps were designed around the constraints of incandescent bulbs. The first generation of LED bulbs and lamps largely conform to these. As LEDs mature, both fixtures and lamps which address the limitations and requirements of the technology (transformers, perhaps dedicated 12v circuits, heat dissipation for the transformer rather than lighting elements themselves, and better light-temperature and intensity regulation) should emerge.
We're presently in the somewhat-messy half-emerged state. Think horseless carriages, wireless, and the days of dual gas/electric lighting and lamping systems (yes, these existed, and yes, the failure modes were ... much as you might imagine).
24V is okay. 48V would be nicer for indoor use.
Also low voltage wiring can legally be done by anyone in NZ (a bonus when doing your own work, and a pitfall when buying a house?)
And besides, idk if you have ever pulled 12ga wire, but it's a pita. Idk any electrician that would agree with you saying it would be a pain to cut back on heavy wire and pull half that with light 22 awg.
Other circuits must be 20A, e.g., kitchen outlets serving appliances.
A summary of standards here: <https://www.thespruce.com/common-electrical-codes-by-room-11...>
A 15A lighting circuit can serve up to 14 100W bulbs. Or 150 LEDs drawing 10W each....
Heck, with such a standard you could have 120VAC -> 48VDC converters and you'd be in the same position we are today with Leds, only better because you'd just have to replace the converter and not the whole bulb.
Not extremely thick. Wire losses remain similar at 12V as they were at 110V (Replace 100W bulb with a 10W bulb at 12V, current remains ~1A so wire losses stay the same as the were). Wire losses might be say 1W for 1mm2 cabling. 240V example: https://ausinet.com.au/voltage-drop/
Agree that it is worth upping voltage to chase a few more percent savings, but still need to consider other constraints.
https://www.sansiled.com/blogs/learn/what-are-the-benefits-o...
That's also the pitch of the smart bulbs: a sane way would be to make a smart light switch but what if you can't do that (e.g., you rent the apartment)? So we'll shove the controller chip into a disposable light bulb, that's still perfectly fine for the environment.
By the way, I don't know how things turned out in your part of the world but over here, after the ban went into the force the manufacturers of incandescent lightbulb started selling 95W light bulbs 8D
Simple metal fins are more than sufficient along with a high efficiency power supply.
I live in Japan, and instead of just a pair of wires coming out of the ceiling, there is a standardized "ceiling socket" [0] which can also support the weight of a lamp. This means that swapping out light fixtures is plug and play, so the standard LED lamp is something like this [1] where you have a nice big flat metal plate backing the hardware is mounted to for heat-sinking.
I don't own any LED bulbs at all - all our lamps are of this type so I wouldn't have anywhere to put one.
It was the same when I lived in Sweden - a standard ceiling light outlet (IIRC there is a EU standard for this now called DCL) so that replacing light fixtures was easy. Moving into an apartment, often they wouldn't even come with light fixtures, you'd bring your own.
[0] https://www.e-connect.jp/images/to_quickB.jpg
[1] https://www.irisplaza.co.jp/IMAGE/HK/PRODUCT/H246902.jpg
And since we need high voltage (at least 100V) to keep line losses very low and allow the use of thinner-gauge copper wiring, we need a switching power supply at every light fixture, so it really doesn't matter if it's AC or DC, since modern SMPS (switch-mode power supplies) work equally well with either.
Finally, on top of all that, LEDs are current-driven devices, and need a constant-current power supply. So the power supply must be very close to the diodes, or else fluctuations in supply voltage will have very negative effects.
That means it's totally fixable. You can install such a system in existing buildings right now, and it's not crazy expensive unless you want to run the wires inside the walls.
If we could shift cultural expectations around this, adding a LV system in new construction would not significantly increase the construction costs. It will start to be done if buyers start demanding it.
The constant current thing is true, but that's not a terribly difficult problem.
Depending on who you ask, the limit for low voltage DC might be 42 or 50 or maybe 60 or 120 or 1500.
Having multiple transformers is perfectly doable and commercially viable -- though I would appreciate more product availability for something easy to stash in the hollow space of a ceiling, like recessed lighting is installed.
Everyone here is complaining about ultra-cheap LEDs that don't last very long because they're poorly engineered, but that's exactly what you're all trying to do here by using a separate, shared power supply. You could get away with that in the 1980s using incandescent bulbs, but you can't do it now unless you want the same crappy lifespan and reliability you're all complaining about.
The solution is very simple: buy fixtures that are engineered well. Switch-mode power supply electronics are not expensive at all, but when mfgs cheap out or do a crappy job designing them, you get bad results, usually short lifetime of either the power supply or the LED. What you're trying to do here is buy a really expensive power supply, which has to be engineered to a far greater degree and for a far wider range of operating conditions (since they don't know what you're going to connect to it), just because you had a bad experience buying some $2 light bulb that had a crappy power supply built-in. This really makes no sense.
LEDs are like 15% efficient and power supplies are >95%. They just need to be separated slightly so the LEDs aren't heating the power supply. Most recessed LED lighting now has a separate junction box with the power supply.
I think the biggest problem is that many cheap power supplies cycle at lower frequencies that cause flickering which is perceptible subconsciously. A modern switchmode power supply might operate in the 50-500khz range which will not cause perceivable flickers.
I'd say it's a very bad choice for a bedroom or living room light, but I have nothing against it for the outdoor lights, signage and a bunch of other applications where cost is king.
Just don’t use these devices, please.
But then, a wise entrepreneur would recognize paying extra to have non-flickering signage would attract some customers.
Flickering lights can induce migraines in susceptible people, so literally, saving a penny here actively drives away business.
You can fudge it with resisters like in an LED strip, but you lose efficiency and dimming quality.
That being said, I expect that power supplies with 48VDC input or so would be cheaper.
Probably with some sort of current sensing system to make it compatible with dimmers.
Pair that with DC A19 LED bulbs that have no internal power systems.
Probably expensive to put together and to install, but if the goal was to have LEDs that last longer, that would do it.
The problem is that in 99.99% of homes outlets are on the same circuits as light fixtures, you would need to do some major rewiring.
Those bulbs would then have no internal switching systems to burn out and rely entirely on the module hidden behind the wall to handle their power needs.
I think that non-bulb LED fixtures are relatively common. For example, a style exists where you cut a hole in the ceiling and friction-fit the LEDs with the power supply up in the attic (presumably with infinite convective airflow): https://www.lowes.com/pd/Utilitech-Canless-Color-Choice-Inte...
These power supplies aren't going to die from overheating because the power supply is nowhere near the heat-producing LEDs. And, it's not like $30 for your entire light fixture is going to break the bank.
How about power over ethernet?
It seems like there would be a market for cheap as possible 10 mbit switches with 802.3bt/802.3af support though.
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-802-3af-100Mbps-250Meter-Unma... is pretty cheap as is, I'm sure you could buy something in bulk for cheaper.
It's true that the power supply versions are so poorly designed and inefficient that heat is a problem. Design and quality control effort could reduce heat generated by the entire assembly to a fraction of what the socket, fixture, and wiring can sink.
It's more common now to find bulbs that have no power supply at all. They're literally a rectifier made of LED's in series. If the bulb flashes at 2 * mains frequency, that's likely what you have. They die out quickly because the LED strings add up to a maximum voltage a bit over mains voltage, but that's RMS not peak. It's a natural outcome, as using enough LED's to accomodate peak voltage reduces light output by underdriving them, increases obvious flicker from dwell time below minimum voltage, and increases cost.
Hotwired LED strings are cheaper to design, source, assemble, bad parts fail fast more consistently with no effort wasted on quality control, and the market's so flooded and volatile that there's no room for consumer side quality awareness effective enough to make the negative outcomes matter. Power supplies in these bulbs are going away. Ubiquitous 2 * mains frequency strobing, short-lived, hotwired LED bulbs is where the home LED lighting market is taking us.
This is a great idea and I would love it if you would post a Youtube how-to video. It might encourage a bunch of hobbyists to do something useful with those dead bulbs.
I've had a number of LED's fail after only a year or two, in fact more quickly than the average incandescent bulb. Seems like it defeats the whole purpose of "upgrading" and in fact may be more of a downgrade.
LEDs are super cheap. I bought few hundred pre-covid for $3.
LEDs are indeed extremely cheap, but for me, the benefit is reducing the amount of electronic waste I produce, not cost-savings.
I have the exact opposite experience, virtually every single light bulb I have torn down - one LED (all in series) has a black dot, if I shorten it - it will 'work' again. The bulbs I have seen tend to drive the LEDs so hard that some of the latter fail, power supplies might have huge ripple but generally don't fail catastrophically.
Edit: now thinking, it can be a US thing, with the voltage being ~120. Lower AC voltages means worse efficiency for the power supply (and all of them tend to be universal, unless totally cheapen out on the primary capacitor [250V] for the US market). Generally speaking low AC voltages have mostly disadvantages.
I have had lamps that lived long enough to see LED failures (the "black dot of death") but that's not the most usual failure mode that I've personally encountered.
I've been considering following in the footsteps of Big Clive and modifying new LED bulbs to stop them from overdriving the LEDs, but my interest in doing that hasn't yet overcome my inherent laziness.
If the bulb dies but you notice that all of the elements are still just barely on (like a dim spot of light in the middle of each one) then that's a good indication that you have a dead LED.
This is also the same industry and the same players that were perfectly fine with agreeing to not improve incandescent light past 1000 lifetime hours, illegally. I have no doubt that there is a tacit agreement not to make good lighting, as that would extremely disrupt the industry.
No. I like the fixtures I have, and I have no desire to throw them in the landfill so that I can be “environmentally friendly.”
Otherwise, for probably at least 40 or so bulbs swapped for LEDs over the years, I've experienced maybe 4 or 5 failures. The vast majority of my bulbs have been Feit and GE. I never buy smart bulbs. My best experiences have usually been to just buy LED fixtures though, I replaced a lot of my flush mount ceiling fixtures and ceiling fans for ones with integrated LEDs and have not had a single failure so far after a few years, knock on wood.
I had some problems with my old dimmer switches, but upgrading dimmers to newer ones which advertised good LED dimming and ensuring I had bulbs which stated dimming compatibility it eliminated my noise and flicker issues. There's a recent standard out there, NEMA SSL 7A, which seeks to ensure good compatibility. I set my dimmers to this SSL 7A mode and I've had no problems since.
https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/asset/documen...
They're all in freestanding floor lamps installed in a horizontal orientation, which might have something to do with it. That seems like it'd dissipate heat a lot better than e.g. a pot light housing in the ceiling.
They produce great light at the temperature you want and I’ve yet to have one fail after nearly 10 years using them.
Not cheap, but given I’ve never had to replace one maybe in the end they are
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Hue-Bluetooth-compatible-Assi...
$45 a bulb! That's probably >$2000 to replace a house's worth.
The white, color-temp only ones are about half the price, which is better, but still not cheap:
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Ambiance-Hue-Equivalent-Assis...
* bulbs with the UK-standard bayonet fitting in light sockets that are suspended from cables from the ceiling with lampshades -- these I don't think I've ever had fail on me yet
* 4.6W bulbs with a GU10 fitting in recessed spotlights -- these fail on me more frequently (perhaps every few years to every five years)
My assumption is that this is all down to the spotlight-fitting bulbs being in a confined space and getting a lot hotter. I use Philips bulbs in both cases.
- Older LEDs house bulbs were much worse than newer ones; far more prone to failure from "things". I had many of them fail after only a few months because our power was "flickery" and their power supplies could not handle it. That's _far_ less common now.
- The power supply / controller circuitry is not a fan of heat. Don't mount them upside down (so the heat floats up to the circuit) and never mount them in a recessed mount. The heat buildup will destroy them a lot quicker. That being said, this advice can be ignored is you're paying attention... mounts that have a way to heat to escape; bulbs that are designed to go in upside-down mounts (maybe?), etc.
- While you certainly don't want to always buy the most expensive bulb, you also don't want to buy the cheap ones. They are far more likely to be made from poor, failure prone components.
It’s not my fixtures’ problem.
It’s these crappy bulbs.
You don't go buy offroad vehicle, then complain it doesn't drive as comfortably on the highway and say it's an objectively worse vehicle. It was designed for a different goal than the 4 door sedan you're comparing it to. It does better at that goal, and worse at others. And, over time, offroad vehicles have gotten better on highways; they'll just never be as good.
The way most people use lighting goes far beyond whatever the manufacturers want to foist.
I don't know if there are any regulations around the 10-year claim, but if there are then I'd expect that it's either an average or something like a one-standard-deviation threshold, like 68% last past that but 32% don't.
"Guaranteed 10 years" doesn't actually say anything about expected lifetime at all, just that they'll do a warranty replacement if it fails sooner.
Personally I'd want a durability guarantee to be more like two standard deviations, on top of replacement in case of early failure.
A lot of this topic smells like typical geek snobbery. They're lights, folks. Cheap consumer products have always been cheap. Halogen bulbs suck too.
First, this driver actually specifies flicker, and it has a credible number. Second, I own several and have tested them. Performance is excellent. It dims well, too. If you want a crappy driver, you don’t need to spend $25 for it :)
Second, this LED chip is a serious one, with a serious data sheet, intended for people building their own fixtures.
Sadly, with San Fran anywhere from 4.5x, or more than where I live (Quebec), and with LED products lastly barely longer than incandescent bulbs, it is typically a loss.
Maybe a 5 year warranty on LED bulbs should be a law, to ensure better quality control and build. The competitors can compete around that requirement.
I’ve had the dimmable coloured hue bulbs for a while and while expensive I can say none have ever died on me in ~5 years. Certainly no flickering.
10 hours per day sounds like a crazy amount of time to use a light. I think we use some lights in our house maybe 4 hours per day on average max. Maybe I just have a lot of windows and don't live in Alaska in the winter.
I think the Alaska point is close. Yet even in (for example) southern Canada, the sun just doesn't get high over the horizon in winter. So you have 7 hour days, but those days are mostly dim and dark.
Even without clouds.
On the other hand, summers are spectacular.
A whole fixture with nice components like this is not cheap.
I ordered samples of a lot of LEDs and found that almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs.
Driving caps at well above their specs, at high temperature, basically ensures speedy failure. Not only that, but undersized smoothing capacitor causes visible 100Hz flicker.
What's even more interesting is at the price point putting better caps was almost inconsequential to the price of the product. I have ordered capacitors that should have been there in the first place and replaced the original ones with the new ones. Not only LEDs are flicker free now, I suspect they will be serving me for much longer.
Well, the LEDs themselves will last up to 20 years, so they have to make something in the bulb fail before that. Can't have people only buying replacement bulbs every other decade.
> How exactly did the cartel pull off this engineering feat? It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anybody could have done that. But to create one that reliably failed after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours took some doing over a number of years. The household lightbulb in 1924 was already technologically sophisticated: The light yield was considerable; the burning time was easily 2,500 hours or more. By striving for something less, the cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress.
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/innovation/origin...
In some situations you want planned obsolescence, such as in parts which are critical yet should not be used beyond a certain time period (a filter in a medical device) and it is standard practice to design them to stop working in a controlled way before they become dangerous so that they will be replaced on a timely basis. I've also heard that one reason the Soviet Union failed is they relied heavily on standardized components. This meant that everything was easily replaceable, if your washing machine motor failed you could replace it with the same electric motor taken from an old car. But this also meant Soviet engineers had trouble designing new products since new products with new parts could not compete with those made from low cost and massively manufactured standardized parts. If you needed an inbetween motor size you were stuck with just the standard motor sizes. A higher performing motor that used less energy and lasted longer would have to compete on price with standardized massively produced motors. To some extent this limited the development of new technologies and products. The article linked above mentions that customers also drive product design; if people will always buy whatever is cheaper and pay no attention to product longevity then it is difficult for a manufacturer to compete with a long lasting product; the benefit is not immediately apparent to the purchaser and claims about longer life are hard to prove for the seller (many sellers lie). A lot depends on the specific type of product and peoples perceptions. Many people are willing to spend more on tools that last because they have seen poorly made tools wear out or had it demonstrated how much better a properly made tool works. They are not willing to pay more for long lasting LED light bulbs because the experience with incandescent bulbs is they always wear out so they are used to having to replace them and they are not going to track the individual lifetimes of each bulb type/maker, though that is starting to change as people notice LED bulbs not having the claimed lifetime (hence this discussion).
So some things need to have a limited lifetime, some things are more efficient in terms of manufacturing cost versus lifetime when designed with a limited lifetime, sometimes a limited lifetime leaves room for invention and improvement, and sometimes a longer lifetime uses less resources and is more efficient and makes life easier. Longevity and standardization can work both ways, for and against the minimization of resource use. Capitalism has flaws, and many of them are tied to profit motive, but it does improve some efficiencies and encourage invention. A lot of it is up to people who decide how much they are willing to pay for things. Not everyone can pay the price for longevity, a cheap screwdriver can be used to fix things right now while an expensive screwdriver may mean not also having the use of a cheap hammer right now. Do you live with the house falling apart or buy the cheap tools? Cheap cellphones meant everyone could have one, and replacing them every few years meant the design of cellphones could advance quickly. Once cellphones reached a plateau in design (remember when each new model had more sensors and cheap models had fewer sensors?) the focus should have shifted to longevity.
However, after saying all that, and considering the climate crisis, society and corporations need to be leaning more towards making things last than they are currently. Making things more easily recyclable, making parts reusable, making products last longer. It has to be approached on a product by product basis though, and affect designs where it makes sense. Bring back bumpers on cars that actually prevent damage to the body:
https://ccmarketplace.azureedge.net/cc-temp/listing/108/7778...
If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs.
About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC).
> - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
[0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen...
They overheat and die really fast if used in something that's not vented/cooled. You need fixtures that fully expose the bulb so it doesn't burn itself out.
Amusing that LED bulbs, the energy savers, die from excess heat.
Other solutions to this include using much larger devices, but that costs proportionally more and has application issues because people want their light bulbs to act like either line or point sources, not as areal sources. So most lights on the market use a single small LED, unless they are targeted to a buyer demanding high efficiency and long life, like a city streetlight.
If you get an LED strip, the power supply itself can become warm; but even a LED with no voltage changing needed will warm up.
So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself:
> Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticis...
There are initiatives to come up with a better metric, but there doesn't seem to be much traction:
The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.
Utilities don't have that. Everyone is stuck paying for both infrastructure and use, so it makes sense to charge them separately.
If each neighborhood had exactly one restaurant that everyone used for all their food, maybe it would make sense to split the burger flipper costs evenly.
And it says on the box.
I usually stick to the same brand too. All Phillips bulbs are 90+ CRI and some are 95+ so I just buy Phillips. Problem solved.
A Home Depot bulb is like $2.75.
I hate that you have to research bulbs but you’re making it out way harder than it is.
Unless you claim they are the same tier as the waveform bulbs?
Waveforms are even better but it’s like springing for the luxury item.
But unless you’re someone that could readily tell, it’s not with the price difference.
(Edit: I’m also coming from buying Philips Hue bulbs for precisely this reason, so in fairness, it’s not as big a price jump.)
this is why more and more businesses only accept cards. :-P
Incandescent bulbs were very simple. Cheap vs name brand. White vs soft white. 120v vs 130v. LEDs have at least 7 attributes, some of which are not documented well or at all.
Tell me what LED bulb is ideal to produce 1500 lumens of output in an outdoor semi-enclosed fixure? It will take about 10 minutes of googling around if you are in the know. The average consumer doesn’t have a chance.
I would prefer incandescents though. The only thing I don't miss about them is the heat. Everything else was superior.
They're not terrible, but the low CRI keeps me coming back to halogen.
That the underlying issue might be the fixture, or in the older electrical system, is not always an intuitive jump.
One of my Waveform Lighting bulbs arrived defective, and it flickers all the time. I couldn't detect the Cree flicker with the naked eye but the defective Waveform bulb flickers visibly. Not sure if Waveform's QA is up to snuff.
Ketra was good, smart bulbs like Hue with an open API, but far better than Hue. Lutron bought them, killed the API and and proceeded to require inferior and costly priority controls
I made sure they were all the same color temperature, and also all >> 90 CRI.
The main issue I've seen is that dimmer switches are usually not compatible with the electronics in high-end fixtures, and that high-end fixtures often take a long time to power on. (Like, walk across the room and open the fridge amounts of time.)
They should choose a standard way of dimming bulbs that doesn't result in noticeable 60hz flicker, and that dictates a max 100ms turn on latency, then ban the sale of "dimmer compatible" LED bulbs, or "LED compatible" dimmer switches that are not compliant with that standard.
Also, bulb reliability should be tracked, and any product with a > 5% failure rate in the first 5 years should either be banned, or the company should have to put replacement funds into escrow.
(Current bulbs have a ~ 5-10% failure rate from what I've seen.)
Yeah, I love Alec's Technology Connections video on some bulbs with that feature, but he pointed it partly because some of the few bulbs that offered it seemed to be getting phased out.
Its much like a bunch of other points on the list. There are a fair few that would only add a small amount of additional cost, but because the companies can save money by not doing it, they don't.
It does not actually cost all that much more to add a few more diodes, to avoid severely overdriving the ones on the board, or to improve the power supply circuitry so that it will likely last longer.
But it really sucks that even if you chose to buy the more premium tier bulbs being offered at the big box store, they often don't fix some of these issues. They may have a better CRI, but are still often overdriven, with questionable power supply designs.
- low power factor (usually 50%).
- cheap passives, caps/coils
- terrible heat dissipation, e27/e14 are no good target, but see overdriven again
- close to no input protection (see power supplies, again), so motors totally wreck them with their induction kickback
A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.
An expensive bulb with a nice heat sink will fail just as quickly as a cheap one when you put it in a well-sealed can light or something else that traps all the hot air.
Funny enough most mains/350V DC, chips tend to have a limiting resistor for the current drive - lower resistance = high current. Most (if not all) have two resistors in parallel (for a better control, and less power per resistor) - desoldering one would greatly improve the lifespan for a minimal luminosity loss. So by picking a larger heatsink, they might picked a bit large value for the resistors as well.
For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.
Although, as was pointed out to me at some point, because LEDs are more efficient, people feel less guilty about having more of them; replacing 1x40 watt bulb with 8x5 watt LEDs means the net result is the same. I've got like 7 cute LED spotlights in my TV closet for example, I wouldn't have had that setup if I was forced to use incandescent lamps.
Maybe I am missing something from this conversation, but all of my LED bulbs produce far _less_ heat than incandescent bulbs. The lamp in my bedroom no longer keeps me warm!
I think it's much easier to design entire fixtures than retrofit bulbs, as there's much more control over heat dissipation and so on. Finding trusted manufacturers (and supply chains that resist counterfeits) is also extremely important.
Can lights have historically been an issue for insulation of houses, as they provide a channel for the warm ceiling air to enter the plenum space between floors or the attic. Thats bad for insulation, but actually amazing for a retrofitted LED light, because it's the only fixture that will provide airflow to cool it!
On the other hand, faux-recessed LEDs can also be installed directly on top of the ceiling drywall, without any penetration. Thats the worst case scenario for heat build up, as heat rises and it's completely trapped by the dish of the light and the ceiling.
LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.
Man I'd love me some indoor lightning, no matter the cost.
- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
- Poor CRI and SSRI
- I don't see flicker on any of my cameras. The light is actually really nice for filming too.
- The price is way less than hue (I own a few, and don't think they are any better)
- I get way more light per watt than with any other bulp type. Not sure what you mean with luxury.
- I love that each of them has an independent API on their own IP. Works perfectly for my smart home design.
I've had several cheap (in build quality, not price) bulps fail on me meanwhile. Not a single WiZ had failed so far. As said I own some hue too, but I wasn't willing to spend over $1000 just on bulps for my house but then I found the WiZ brand.
Not sure if am just lucky. But I really enjoy multicolour plus warm and cold LEDs in the whole house.
As a general answer, dimming. Incandescent bulbs are fantastically sensitive to applied voltage; Wikipedia's article on the subject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamp_rerating) notes that bulb lifespan is inversely proportional to the applied voltage to the fourteenth power or so.
In an ordinary home you can't directly reduce the supply voltage, but dimming a higher-rated bulb will get you somewhere in the ballpark through a reduction in the duty cycle.
However, this comes at the expense of luminous efficiency. Reducing the applied electrical power reduces the filament temperature, and the black-body spectrum of a lower-temperature filament has proportionally more output in the infrared region.
I wanted to upgrade the super faint positional lights in my two garage openers, and I need to stay <= 10W, so I tried some LEDs. But they kill the 433 MHz remote signal, sadly. Tried 3 different brands, a couple of which don't actually fully turn off, or give off a loud hum to boot.
The openers use rear car light bulbs, for some reason (BA15s).
I'm going through this again now. At one point I found Philips EyeComfort bulbs on Amazon which checked all my boxes (2700-3000K, 60W, dimmable, almost non-existent flicker). I've had a couple bulbs die on me now, and I cannot for the life of me find replacements, it's like they stopped manufacturing them. I have no clue what to replace them with now
Where? How? I can no longer buy quality LED lighting at any price. I have a bunch of Sylvania Ultra Sunset Effects bulbs purchased ~15 years or so ago that nothing since even comes close to.
> Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons
Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.
There's the kicker; how can you tell when something is better quality anymore? Qualifiers like "is this device run at max capacity or is there leeway" are never listed on packaging or product features.
To accept the premise is to believe that anything made of quality will never get bought/used which is manifestly not the case. And it strangely completely ignores the incentives companies have to make things as shitty as possible, namely lower expenses and planned obsolescence.
I disagree. It is a ratio of quality to price. People have different opinions about what the acceptable minimum ratio is, and it varies by product, and by time. For example, many people find Costco to hit the right ratio most of the time.
For example, I have been using LEDs and dimmable LEDs from soft white (~2700K) to cool white (~4000K) with no problem, all purchased at Home Depot/Lowes/Costco. Some have failed earlier than anticipated, but nowhere near enough to cancel out the cost savings.
Some consumers will happily pay for business class seating on planes. Others will generally overlook inconvenience and less comfort if they can save $50.
In other words, more efficient, but not longer lifespan.
There must be some kind of listing error on Amazon, maybe an old listing being repurposed without clearing the old reviews.
I haven't contacted them for replacements yet, but seeing their comment makes me much more likely to purchase them in the future, despite my early issues.
Like if you were to drive your car in 2nd gear on the freeway, at 6000rpm. The engine would wear out much quicker than if you drove in 5th gear, at 1500rpm.
So the economics just drive cost down no matter what. And even a picky consumer is hard pressed to get what he wants when you go to the bulb aisle at Lowe’s. They literally went from 10 SKUs to 250, with no meaningful standards.
For example https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php...
"Set all the lights to red" and every single bulb in my house and porch and walkway and garage etc, all turn red.
"Turn on/off all the light"
Set kitchen to firebrick...
Etc.
I LOVE IT.
During the day I rarely have any lights on at all - but at night I have precise control over every bulb in my house with alexa voice.
I initially would never have put alexa in my home, but now that I have it and all bulbs on it, as well as several alexa-fied power outlets, its just a very nice thing to have.
Im not too concerned over "lighting quality" - as I get exactly what I want.
The bulbs I bought were from Costco, where they had them on sale for $5 for a (2) pack. so I replaced all CFLs with RGB Wifi LEDs with alexa, and it was ~$70 to do the whole house (27) bulbs.
EDIT: Dimmability "Alexa Set Kitchen to 10%" --> I can dim or brighten all the lights at once "Alexa set house to 100%" etc...
They last for YEARS, and give a soft warm light - the bulbs I have a dim (but then 'Edison style squirrel cage bulbs have always been dim).
Let's put a capacitor before the regulator to store that power, and design the regulator to compensate for how the voltage will vary over each cycle. Since we don't want to drain our capacitor entirely, let's spec it for .05 joules at 100v, which means 10µF.
Digikey says a 10µF 200v capacitor costs ten cents.
If there's flicker, I blame the voltage regulator or lack thereof, not the requirement of power efficiency.
Otherwise why exclude the california market in this case.
That there is a huge turn off for me, even if I don't have a smartphone handy ;)
Basically the industry figured out how to win at the CRI game without actually creating the same underlying spectral distribution of light. So they same up with another metric to try to optimize called SSI (also TLCI, etc.) SSI is mostly relevant in the digital cinema space, where the observer is a digital camera, not a human eye, as they can't be tricked the same way because they have different underlying RGB spectral sensitivities.
https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-...
An incandescent lightbulb is a piece of tungsten wire.
Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.
I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.
Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.
But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.
One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.
I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban.
But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.
If LEDs were exactly as efficient as incandescent bulbs there wouldn’t be a law that bans all lightbulbs. Also there’s no way a law would pass that sets the efficiency standard of incandescent bulbs because the law would do nothing.
It’s a ban on incandescent bulbs with the thinnest veneer of generalization.
If all your indoor lighting was 5000K, then it would be like you would be living your indoor life constantly at noon.
It's why software like f.lux was created (and the functionality has been incorporated into some OSes as well).
> Further analysis of these 15 reports indicated that a two-hour exposure to blue light (460 nm) in the evening suppresses melatonin, the maximum melatonin-suppressing effect being achieved at the shortest wavelengths (424 nm, violet)
> The melatonin concentration recovered rather rapidly, within 15 min from cessation of the exposure, suggesting a short-term or simultaneous impact of light exposure on the melatonin secretion.
This seems like a very dubious claim - the "golden hour" is obvious to everyone, and there's an intuitive mechanism for sunlight being "warmer" in the morning and evening (blue gets scattered in proportion to the amount of air it travels through). Do you have a citation for this?
> It is crucial to control upward-directed light, but we now know that the color of light is also very important. Both LED, and metal halide fixtures contain large amounts of blue light in their spectrum. Because blue light brightens the night sky more than any other color of light, it’s important to minimize the amount emitted. Exposure to blue light at night has also been shown to harm human health[1] and endanger wildlife[2]. IDA recommends[3] using lighting that has a color temperature of no more than 3000 Kelvins.
* https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-citiz...
I've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.
That’s what it’s good for. But do you want that lighting in your living room while you watch tv?
If I'm looking at color prints in a book or on the wall that is reflective light and it is dependent on the spectrum of the room. My main TV room has RGB Hue lights that can simulate "warm" or "cold" light but also specific colors. I think 100% green is the ideal light for hot summer days because a full spectrum is also coming in the windows and it gives the most light for the minimum amount of heat. I also find other colors fun sometimes. The guest room that also has a TV has sengled lights that can be tuned from cool to warm.
RGB lights that can produce saturated colors are not going to render reflective colors so well, see
https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/
Personally I like high color temperature light but with the system we have we can have it any way we like. If I really need accurate color rendition I bring in high-performing spot incandescent and maybe someday LEDs. My work is all "born digital" so I spend at least 80% of my time looking at screens and looking at prints, handling paper and such is a small but essential fraction of that.
What I really gotta do though is set my system up so it can vary the room color together with what's on TV, that ought to be cool.
If you care that much about that, it would probably make more sense to get something like Philips Hue bulbs that can vary their color temperature.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Candle-shows-different-c...
I'd imagine that the "warm" color temperature is modeled after candle and gas lighting but after reading some articles on the history of light bulbs it seems that all the folks working on it were trying to make the brightest, whitest light they possibly could. Today's "daylight" bulbs would probably be perceived as an engineering wonder by those folks.
(I am over 60 and have some health problems that chronically elevate my levels of oxidative stress -- in all cell types, though the light-detecting cells in the retina are more vulnerable than other types of cells are.)
I.e., I wanted to buy an LED that vaguely approximated a 2700K incandescent, tried many brands, but could not find one, so I don't know what you are on about.
Bright blue light will make a brain more alert -- and the effect is immediate. That is probably why you young people like it, but I am baffled by your "a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen" (not that color temperature is a useful way of summarizing the spectrum of and LED bulb).
I think there's a reason for this, which is that sunlight supplements indoor lighting during the day. People rely on indoor lighting more at night when those warmer tones are most desirable.
For daylight, people typically prefer daylight (5000K) bulbs.
But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal incandescent bulb only to have the color rendering/brightness/etc be downright awful.
LEDs come packaged as "daylight" or "bright white" or whatever else. I want one that's labelled "just like your normal 60W incandescent".
For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.
It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.
Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.
Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder.
I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.
With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"?
I'm sure early incandescent lightbulb manufacturers had a lot of shoddy products and consumers just had to figure out which brands to trust themselves. Eventually, it'll even out for LEDs too.
That sounds like an ideal situation the free market should be fixing -- so why isn't it?
The article has a similar sentiment: it's hard to translate from what the box says to how it'll actually perform in the real world.
Like the others I want to buy an LED where the visible light cannot be meassured differently from a normal one, and with the guarantee that I can return it for a full refund if it fails before the 20k hours are up.
Not skimping on lamps helps prevent most problems, usually. IKEA sells great LED lights over here in Europe, for prices that had me worried at first. Most other budget stores and brands sell lamps that mostly emit warm light but will make any food look disgusting from missing wavelengths; fine for lighting a hallway maybe, but generally not worth it in my opinion. It's mostly these bottom of the barrel lamps that people buy, not knowing about the effects cheap lighting can have, that cause visual problems.
It makes sense: back in the day, a cheap lamp may not have lasted as long ,but the colour profile was nearly identical. If you were fine buying a lamp every year, you could just grab the cheapest bulb on the shelf. With anything beyond incandescent light, that's not true anymore.
The difference between a €5 lamp and a €10 lamp is quite significant and worth it considering they'll probably last you at least five years anyway. My personal approach is to look for "warm white" (or 2700k if they use that instead), not pick the very cheapest lamp I can find, and if that leaves multiple options, start comparing statistics like CRI.
When I upgraded my house, I spent maybe 30 min reading some articles and then 30 more going through product listings [1]. To upgrade a core piece of infra for my whole house.
[1] I can already hear people saying "an HOUR???" But guess what now I know about LED bulbs forever.
I hope by "you" you are also including TFA and the comment I was replying to, right?
Your response directly contradicts TFA. I don't know who is right, I just know I'm not entirely satisfied with the LEDs I have. It's not my most pressing concern, but I'd rather not have to deal with 5 concepts when picking a lightbulb.
It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage.
However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.
Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.
(don't get me wrong, I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy. I'm simply saying, when I want to turn a light on to see, I want it to cast a good amount of light.)
(oh, let me add on, I also know that 1 tiny little blue or white LED power indicator on each of a few gadgets I buy seem able to bathe my bedroom in light when I'm trying sleep.)
Recently I even got out the big guns and bought this thing, mainly to replace my halogen floor lamp. It's 40w, and more like the equivalent to a 250w incandescent, though it is awkwardly ginormous.
Man, My brother is a constant light-stepper (he always has on harsh, too bright, lights even when he is not in THAT room, or if he falls asleep.
It drives me nuts!
STOP TURNING ON FLOURESCENT TUBE LIGHTS AND FALLING ASLEEP!!
I recognize the visual acuity, but I cannot stand tube-FLs at all - and while I have every single bulb in my house an addressable RGB LED Alexa bulb (Feit Electric) -- there are certain lights I cant replace (a few ceiling fans with integrated LED lights, tube lights in certain spots, etc) -- I have learned that the position of the lights is also important.
For example, if the kitchen tube light is on, it lasers-into the corner of my eye if I am sitting on the couch at night and the kitchen tube light is on. I cant alexify that just yet (the alexa light switches require a 3-phase (meaning the requirement of a ground wire) to mount -- my house was built in 1959 and the wall switches do not have the req ground wire....
but yeah - its interesting how sensitive you become to the lighting environment once you pay attention to it.
When I was doing architecture, I was always wondering why we paid "lighting designers" so much... but after working with them, and working with lighting in my own home, I am amazed at what they accomplish with lights.
Fortunately, my home has plenty of overhead lighting and a few lamps, so 60w soft white bulbs are sufficient for the other rooms in the house.
Those satisfy my need for super-bright light.
But, I can only find them online.
Per wikipedia[0], there's a vaguely defined unit, the Einstein, which may be defined as the energy in a mole of photons. (The vague definition being because each photon may have different amounts of energy, and thus an Einstein would be some weird function in order to describe total energy.) Wikipedia suggests using measures of Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)[1], like Photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) instead. I suppose this is because PAR is literally defined to measure according to "what plants crave", but it also allows bounding the "total joules of energy" above and below by the PAR wavelength limits.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_(unit)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetically_active_radi...
Things flickering in the corner of your vision is distracting af.
But then my partner started complaining about headaches reading, but only in certain rooms in the house. I put two and two together and stopped buying a brand of CFL (I might have upgraded to LEDs at this point, I don't recall).
More recent advice was to go to the hardware store and record a slow motion video of the demo bulbs, to see if you can detect flicker during playback, but I think I've only succeeded in that one time and so I'm not sure if it doesn't work as well as advertised or if retailers have gotten better vendors.
(Yes, I know I could search online and order them. It's not that important.)
I've made these my standard lightbulb for any non-dimmable lamp/fixture, so pretty much every light in my house can be dimmed now.
(Any fixture attached to a dimmer gets Philips "Warm Glow" bulbs, which also get warmer as you dim them, and which do a good job of filtering out flicker.)
EU has banned incandescent lights years ago and the situation for LED buyers is much different here. My local drug store chain (Rossmann in Germany) sells 1000lm E27 bulbs under their own Rubin brand with CRI>97 for 4.99€. No flickering and available as 2700K or 4000K. My Opple Light Master 3 even reads CRI 100. So for me right now, it's just going to the drug store and buying a bulb, like before the ban.
Here I find it is very easy to find good LED bulbs with the strength and color profile of my choice and I have used LED in all rooms of my house for the last 10+ years without any failing so far.
You're falling for the "Europe is better than the US, of course" mindset. What you are actually seeing are partisans spinning a narrative to fit their ideology, not an accurate description of reality.
We have really high CRI bulbs here, too, and they're inexpensive. I can go down to the home store and buy them by the dozen. I'll bet you money that bulbs in the US and bulbs in Europe are mostly manufactured in the same place...
The in ceiling lights I bought to replace a bottom dollar Amazon light was are 94 and I’m pretty sure I bought the cheapest I could that would change temp to match my existing ones.
Your friend has shared a link to a Home Depot product they think you would be interested in seeing.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Philips-Soft-White-A19-LED-60W-E...
Looks like GE’s Sunshine brand has a CRI of 97 and is $8.99 on Amazon.
GE Sun Filled LED Light Bulb, 60 Watt Eqv, Soft White, A21 Standard Bulb, Medium Base https://a.co/d/fLkL8wr
If your paranoid out them on a VLAN that doesn’t have access to your network or don’t connect them at all.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/EcoSmart-100-Watt-Equivalent-A19...
Home Depot's "Ecosmart" store brand, claims 95 CRI, and has admirable dimming performance even on the cheapo not-designed-for-LED dimmer I have on the fixture. And it has a more even and omnidirectional pattern of illumination than typical LED bulbs.
Of course, time will be the only real judge.
Cree, GE's "HD" line, Phillips' high CRI line, and I believe "Feit", the HD brand, also has high CRI bulbs.
You can only get Cree bulbs from HD via shipping; they don't stock them in store, at least in my area.
Phillips and GE HD bulbs are available in a lot of local hardware stores and even pharmacies.
I also don't buy the shitty cheap bulbs. I buy mostly Cree's high CRI dimmable bulbs, Phillips high CRI dimmable, or GE high-CRI bulbs if I can't find the Crees (Home Depot stopped carrying them in-store.)
The problem is that both the author and a ton of people in this discussion buy shitty, cheap, no-name bulbs and then they're shocked when they flicker, don't dim well, and fail often.
This whole discussion is a bunch of angry old men yelling at clouds because the guvmint won't allow them to waste 4x as much electricity to light their home.
Even high-CRI bulbs aren't a "perfect" replacement for an incandescent, but the energy savings, especially if you're in an area where you use air conditioning and thus the heat of an incandescent bulb equals more energy usage for cooling, is worth the small sacrifice.
- Fails after 12 months - Nice and bright while they last - 6 months in, 2 already burned out. - I've already had two die in less than 6 months
CRI isn't even something you can filter by on their online catalogues. At least the new EU energy labeling let's you see what the specs are.
https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-r9-and-why...
It's easy to make a bulb that scores higher than 80 - still, they usually have poor R9 (red reference light source) scores, which is noticeable.
I bought a stockpile of 150W incandescent bulbs marked as 'shock resistant' (they are definitely not) and they give decent light. The 100W LEDs give more like 50W and flicker too..
It's not allowed to sell incandescent for home use in EU, so they are usually marked as some "industrial shock-resistant" bullshit.
This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different
Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/
The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale.
> We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things.
They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.
And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?
I follow his project a bit and it looks like consumers are really at loss. Generally there is no reliable way to choose a good led lamp without consulting such catalog. Lamps packaging often lies about actual specs, lamps with the same packaging but manufactured in different years might have different quality etc
A standard tag for Algolia/web search could work, if any spam comments with the same tag were flagged.
Instead of dumb capitalism, clickbait and silly content marketing driving human activity, to have an AI that saves us from wasting our time figuring out the answer to questions that have been answered long before. And then, instead, points us to those questions that have not yet been asked, much less answered. What experiments have not yet been done.
After all, no GPT-4, no matter how many billions of parameters, could tell you what the best battery is in the world if it wasn’t for that one human dude in his garage in Denmark, or Latvia, or wherever, who actually tested them all.
(random indie site: wet/dry shop vacuums, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411206)
The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current.
Power supply design is a major subfield of electronics engineering and there are all kinds of tradeoffs you can make to optimize for different goals. Consumer electronics almost always optimizes for cost, to the detriment of all else.
It is possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners [1]. The problem is that it requires putting more LEDs in the bulb and driving them at lower current. This makes the bulb cost more and the only benefit is longer life. For a manufacturer, there are nothing but downsides to this approach.
It is also possible (and not very difficult) to design incandescent bulbs that will outlive their owners. In fact, the first mass produced light bulbs generally lasted 2,500+ hours. In the 1920s, the major bulb manufacturers formed the 'Pheobus Cartel' in Geneva and secretly colluded to limit the lifespan of bulbs to 1,000 hours to boost sales [1]. Another example of planned obsolescence harming consumers and the environment.
[1]https://interestingengineering.com/science/everlasting-light...
Veritasium - This is why we can't have nice things - https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE
The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
> On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.
You can dim them, and provide a slow start to prevent the inrush current (which is like 10times more than nominal with tungsten resistance increasing due so high 2500K temps).
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bu...
That is a fantastic point. If they can't revolutionizing lighting in 7 years, it will never happen. Oh, btw, LED was invented in 1962, but it only took about half a century for the commercial viability of high powered LED lighting to appear and begin to take over the lighting market in 2011.
That said ...
... LEDs involve finding materials which exhibit specific quantum behaviours which correspond to human visual acuity.
Photonic bulbs involve the much simpler blackbody radiation concepts of not only incandescent light bulbs but hundreds to thousands of millennia of previous experience with combustion-based lighting ... and, yes, the added twist of finding viable IR-reflective / visual-spectrum emissive materials.
The second problem seems more reasonably simpler. One would hope that progress might be occuring at a more rapid rate.
(There's a similar argument I've used to contrast nuclear fission, which was commercially exploited within two decades of first demonstration, and nuclear fusion, which coming on a century from its theoretical understanding remains not even experimentally demonstrable on a continuous, energy-positive basis, let alone in commercial application. Some problems are just hard.
Yes, there are thresholds and breakthroughs, and they do occur. But given a few decades of lived experience matching advertisement to delivery, as well as a stronger awareness of historical examples and trends, patterns do become evident.
And that said: I will keep an eye on this. It does have the advantages of being simple, based on very well-proved technology, and a reasonable extension of same.
LED has severe problems, some solvable, some not. The article mentions flicker, but really should have specified. Nearly all LED drivers employ PWM. There are constant current LED drivers, and they are more efficient than PWM drivers, but PWM drivers are cheaper to design and manufacture. While many will claim PWM doesn't bother them because they can't detect it, they're not only exhibiting callousness for those that are bothered and harmed by PWM, they're falling into a fallacious trap, i.e. what they don't know and can't detect can't harm them, which is patently false, and one counter example is carbon monoxide. PWM LED drivers are now ubiquitous, and its effects range from annoying to painful, as anyone that has experienced migraine can attest.
Regarding the actual light LED produces, nearly all LED available are weighted towards the blue spectrum, and this light has been shown to massively mess with wildlife and shorten human lifespans by years by disrupting circadian rhythm, which strangely can lead to diabetes and heart disease.
LED proponents are obsessed with brightness, but this is also a trap, because brightness is not as important as what can be seen. Consensus among lighting and eye experts is that more can be seen with a dimmer light that reproduces color perfectly than with a much brighter light that does not.
As these issues with LED are mitigated, the drivers become more expensive and the LEDs become less efficient. And as the article mentions, the phosphors of better color-producing LEDs will fade rather quickly and over time no longer reproduce colors accurately. And let's realize that the best LED can ever achieve, what the technology has always been striving for, is to perfectly match what incan does with little to no development. Maybe someday LED light will perfectly match incan light, but it is not today and it isn't next year.
What it starts to look like, if the trend can be detected, is that as we fully mitigate the problems of LED, the more expensive it becomes until its cost and durability nearly reaches parity with what we already have with incandescent. It's starting to become a wash.
So unlike LED, if incan can be made more efficient, and there is a massive amount of room for improvement in efficiency there, then incandescent undoubtedly will return and dominate the lighting market. I liberally estimated 20 years, but it may take longer, but it really doesn't matter to my major point, which is that incandescent is coming back, and this is a very very good thing, because LED light, as efficient as it is, still absolutely sucks.
I'd pattern the inner surface of the glass envelope with a cube texture - think of taking a cube and pressing a corner normally into a clay surface, then removing the cube. This pattern is a so-called corner reflector, and returns incident light to its source. Figure the cube indentations at about 0.5mm deep, close packed. I'd deposit a dielectric film reflector stack tuned to reflect most infrared radiation onto this surface.
This combination would transmit visible light, but would reflect IR directly back to the filament, reducing the amount of electrical power needed to maintain filament temperature. Glass textural molding and dielectric film deposition are mature technologies. I think this could readily triple incandescent lamp power efficiency, maybe even better.
When we're talking market price, we have to acknowledge that it is a meeting of the price needed to bring a product to market and the price the consumer is willing to pay. We can't assume that the price of the longer lasting bulb would have been attractive to consumers, when compared to the price of the shorter-lived bulb, even if they had all the information available.
It's perfectly valid for a person to decide they'll spend more over the long run, rather than ponying up a larger sum now. And it's perfectly valid for producers to take the chance of deciding this for the consumer. As Henry Ford noted, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Was anybody stopping anyone from offering the consumer a higher-priced and longer-lasting bulb?
I retrofitted entire house - 200+ bulbs and fixture retrofits more that 5 years ago. I had one or failures since. I bought highest CRI bulbs, i.e. most expensive, and they work well. (Also, do not use bulbs for downlights - get entire "led can light fixture retrofit")
I used 1000bulbs.com because I can filter/read specs there, but you can get specs for any high-tier vendor and buy elsewhere.
How trustworthy is that state though? I have always assumed 0% trustworthy. Is that incorrect?
In general it's quite reasonable. Cheaper bulbs failed on me, more expensive ones work just fine for many years.
One thing is I wonder about if phosphorus (or whatever chemical they use) is burning out over the years. I.d. do I get worse light quality as these bulbs age?
It's usually not that much, but I can see why they might eventually be upset about it.
Not all of them! I was very surprised to open up my generic outdoor patio LED bulbs and find two strips of LED filament wired directly to power.
AFAICT it’s just enough LEDs in serial for 120VAC at 60 Hz to be “good enough” that they survive for “long enough”.
Of course they won't be as efficient, and output very little light, but they will last forever. (also, no white, but hey, win some lose some!)
I feel like I can't just have a casual fun hobby anymore. You have to have all of the knowledge about the entire space just to be able to decide if something may or may not be garage.
This has always been the case. The difference now is that with the internet it's within reach.
You don't have to dig through your social network to find someone working for the lighting division of GE. You don't have to visit your local library to check out books on how lightbulbs work in order to figure out which makes one better than another. You just need to hop on Google or ask New Bing.
--
Think all incandescent bulbs were the same? Think again. Manufacturing conditions and filament thickness are two of the several factors involved in how long that lightbulb will last and how bright it will get. Cheap, shitty lightbulbs from discount stores were a thing.
Oh, and one more thing! You're pretty much stuck with one color temperature.
--
There are plenty of examples throughout the 20th century of poorly-made, barely-working tech being sold as acceptable. The plethora of non-electric "vacuum cleaners" sold around the turn of the century are one notable early example. The lightbulbs which came after the agreements made by the Phoebus Cartel are another.
1978! Home video! Do you go with VHS from JVC, Betamax from Sony, SelectaVision from RCA, or DiscoVision from MCA?
For an entertaining diversion, imagine you're living in 1973 and it's time to purchase a new car. Is that Plymouth really going to hold up against your new concerns about gas mileage? How do you know? Do you have any mechanic friends? Do you know anything about how cars work? Does the local library have any books to help?
Random final tidbit: The "older"=="better" myth is the result of the fact that we're not exposed to the junk of yesteryear; only the good stuff. The junk was thrown away years and years ago.
Awful junk existed before the internet. It’s just that people didn’t have much of a way to know any better, nor did they have many options to choose from. People relied on word of mouth, marketing material, or the shop keeper’s advice to decide what to buy… that is, if the store even had multiple options.
There’s not more crap today, there’s more perspective.
At this point I believe companies are willfully refusing to inform their customers.
In other words, what they are selling isn't the same as the thing in the box nor the aggregate of all the components (since they interact with one another).
High end museums for example buy bulbs guaranteed to meet their datasheet specs, at a much higher cost of course.
To expand your metaphor: it's like judging a dish solely on the balance of flavors while not noticing that the restaurants have started changing the smell of the air, the firmness of the seats, the relative humidity and temperature individually.
- Efficiency >= 45 lumens per watt
- CRI >= 90
- R9 Color Rendering value >= 50
- Rated life >= 15000 hours
- Minimum dimming level <= 10%
- Flicker <= 30%
Theoretically if a bulb is listed as JA8 compliant (and the certification isn't fake) you know it at least meets these thresholds.
And what do you do when the lightbulb burns out after only 3 years? The product has long since changed SKU, the manufacturer gets to claim they fixed any deficiencies (and it'll take years to find out if they are telling the truth), and you long since lost any proof of purchase.
This one was a little tricky for me when I was buying bulbs last year. I prefer warm-colored bulbs, and I was kind of confused why Amazon kept on saying it was refusing to ship bulbs to me. It took me a while before I realized it was because I'm in CA and the CRI was too low, and Amazon didn't have a way to just filter by CRI. Eventually my wife just ended up finding some warm-ish LED bulbs at a local store.
https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-2...
Like any informed consumer you must read every retail-based HN comment thread ;-]
6 of them have failed in less than 9 months, either flickering so badly it could cause an epileptic seizure or just straight up dying on me.
It's maddening.
It's possible the quality has changed, but i'm also wondering whether the mains voltage might be a factor - there is quite a wide range of possible voltages allowed whilst still being in-spec, so maybe i'm lucky at my properties and mains voltage is on the low end of the standard and maybe you're running hot. It's all most frustrating!
BTW, I went with Philips on the basis that there was a good chance that if I did need to replace a few after a year or two due to failures i'd be likely to be able to source the same bulb, as it's really annoying if you find one bulb a different colour than the others...
With Philips spinning off the lights division, I don't know the current quality.
On the other hand, I've had others (non smart ones) starting to flicker or otherwise just dying after as little as one year.
PITA I know.
Consumer Reports tests a lot of consumer goods and used to be my go to for testing. They don’t take ad revenue so that helps. Though you have to be a member to see their reviews.
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/about-us/what-we-do/inde...
They used to be the go to for car reliability info (when your car was rated high you sold more, according to my dad who was in the car business)
I can't edit my post. Trusted reviews are hard to find, I would still trust Consumer Reports over random Amazon reviews.
There is simple heuristic - all LED bulbs are bad. They generally have insufficient heatsink and unreplaceable PSU immediately next to LEDs.
Better are LED tubes (with T12 interface, as a replacement for fluorescent tubes), they have much more area for cooling and for PSU, and sometimes have replaceable PSU. Similarly lighting units with integrated LEDs.
At the end of the day, the author recommends giving filament-style LED bulbs a try, where the emitter is built onto a thin filament away from the circuit housing so it's far away from the heat.
A scale that can measure grams is like $10.
That's the million-dollar question of the '10s and '20s (and likely beyond), and is far bigger than just bulbs.
The only solution that I can think of that could work is a distributed rating system with a built-in web of trust. It theoretically shouldn't be that difficult for people to adopt, if only they got collectively fed up with the universe of crap we have now, and someone provided a nice app and protocol to federate information with.
(direct regulation of quality, vendor-controlled ratings, and browsing Reddit/HN comment threads are all fatally flawed non-solutions)
On the other hand, Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel prize in 2002 for researching with Amos Tversky on how we make decisions, and how having more options makes our eventual decision less fulfilling as we suspect that we probably did not make the optimal decision. However, done is better than perfect. At least that's what some people say.
Given that we have multiple technology purchases to make, all of which will involve "research" and making decisions it is very frustrating, to me, that we do not have more reliable trustworthy guidance. There are competent review organizations and websites but they more frequently tend to be owned by product manufacturers and funded by advertisers. We know that marketing tries to create desire in our primitive consumer brains.
And as individuals with deep and long experience in at least one or more areas, we have our own biases that help us make decisions. And if we think carefully about how we gained this expertise, we should conclude that a lot of wasted time and mistakes were involved.
And we know that becoming an expert in lighting, spectral, power consumption, lifetime, CRI, etc could take a long time and there would be more to learn as the engineers create new solutions (blue LED plus yellow phosphor, or RGB LEDs, COB or something else...).
So to answer your question. You won't know that brand X produces quality bulbs that last a long time until you purchase and test them. Assume that they won't last a long time, don't buy the most expensive option, there will be improvements in LEDs and bulbs that will make your next purchase even better.
To sift past the marketing to get actual quality, well we do have some well known brands that distribute through well known stores. Buying from Alibaba or the dollar store is not going to result in the best outcome, but it might. Put those options aside as an experiment rather a "must make me happy now" experience.
How do you know that a product won't slip in quality over time? Well you won't know until you make that purchase. This happens all of the time with everything from salt ("Himalayan" salt with rocks, sea salt with microplastics, honey adulterated with sugar, olive oil with other oils)...
We live in a very interesting time, we no longer have to "follow the herd" or "hunt for the roots" in new locations. We're mostly protected from weather, earthquakes, famine, etc (exception occur). Our health generally good. There is however dog poop on the sidewalk and pot holes in the roads.
So when the grocery store moves your familiar product to another aisle, or changes their product line up, or increases the price, these are all opportunities to step out of "cruise control" and experience the uncertainty that comes with a constantly changing world.
"Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery." - Erma Bombeck
Up to 70 years ago, item X had an extremely low complexity, and up to some 30 years ago, supplier Y had reliably constant quality between its products.
No previous generation had to deal with the problem we currently have.
- Does not overdrive the LEDs and Does not run power supply components at the limit of what they can. (Thus good longevity)
- Has a current based driver, so that slight voltage shifts from an appliance kicking on don't result in an obvious brightness shift.
- Suitable for use in recessed lighting or enclosed fixtures. (For better or worse, can lights and enclosed fixtures are still relatively common.)
- Makes bulbs in most common shapes like A19, chandelier, and PAR/BR shapes (for recessed lighting fixtures)
- Dimmable (And yes, I am quite well aware that being in conjunction with a current source driver is more complicated, but it is still possible). I'm not even particularly big on dimming, but I am big on smart switches, and many of those include dimming capabilities, and I don't want to worry about which bulbs I put where.
- Good color rendering index (and other similar features)
Even the linked companies products don't meet the full list. Their only dimmable A-series bulbs are the filament bulbs, which are not suitable for all use cases. Similarly, non of the non-filament bulbs in the A series shapes are marked as suitable for use in an enclosure.
It's possible to get power supplies to support multiple bulbs daisy chained, so you can invest in one decent power supply.
For general bulbs (e.g. chandelier tulip bulbs) i've found it to be really hard to find stuff that works reliably. 'Normal' round bulbs seem to be more reliable for some reason.
As evidence, notice that Philips refuses to sell the Dubai lamp outside Dubai. They are designed for truly long lifetimes, and nobody at Philips want's that.
What fraction of Microsoft Windows engineering goes into the complexity of picking and combining the feature sets of Windows Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate? It isn't 0.
Engineering that is negative for user-value is routine in big business. It's a big part of what MBAs are for. It is such a counter-intuitive thing to do that it requires special training.
What does "in the West" mean here? Is the situation better outside "the West"? Is this really a modern "tragedy"? Caveat Emptor is not a new saying.
I think the issue is that there are no more reputable retailers. Just amazon, which more than half the time isn’t even amazon.
I pay them and they do the research. A very logical business model.
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/light-bulbs/article/how-to-b...
(Both will be irrelevant for Americans, I have never noticed a multi-voltage bulb.)
I searched for "A19" since thats the kind of bulb type that a regular old joe like me has. Just one match and its only 80 CRI. Thats not anywhere competitive with what else has been suggested in this thread.
Besides, I don't control the lighting decisions of every place I go that's not my own home. And many people might be impacted in tiny ways without even noticing (cf. the old research about fluorescent lighting in schools/offices impacting mood or concentration or whatever).
You mean incandescents? I disagree, their efficiency is terrible ("space heaters that happen to glow"). And their lifespan was artificially limited.
I had to drive all over town to find a specialty lighting store with some 'real' Sylvania brand. (But then found the supermarket across the street has Philips on the shelf. Oof.)
Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.
This is also called boiling the frog. People actually do care, but in the scheme of things, they'll accept it.
The default lightbulb in the store 20 years ago had a tender warm light. The default lightbulb in the store today has garish light, or doesn't dim, or has that ugly plastic half cover. A real decline in quality of life. but sure, we can be dismissive about it, of course you can spend hours on the internet figuring it out (ignoring the fact that it took no effort whatsoever to get nice lighting before).
This is such a lie - no, you can't do the research. There are no reseatch papers conparing consumer products
Doing the research means buying everything avaliable on the market and testing it yourself.
Googling is not research, its choosing which SEO'd fraudulent article will lie to you today.
Quality is going to shit, because there is no way to twll apart which item is qualify. The market is failing.
Googling for “premium LED high ratings 95 cri” or searching on Amazon definitely isn’t going to work, because they will just send you to the highest bidder, or the most proficient scammer.
AV forums for picking a TV or projector, cooking forums for picking a knife set, and HN, you know, for picking the contrast level of your <body> text.
Recent purchases include usb cables, rechargeable batteries & USB power pack, LCD monitor, SSDs, multivitamins, torque wrench, belt sander, pressure washer, washing machine, gluten-free pastas and baking mixes, video games…
LED bulbs are kind of a pathological case, along with things like USB cables, speaker wire... If you want something better than the lowest common denominator it’s very hard because they are nearly indistinguishable from the outside and take a long time to fail.
But for example shopping and comparing washing machines online wasn’t terrible. You can narrow down the list very easily based on your requirements and budget, probably you end up with 2 choices that both seem great, you can watch videos of them running, and then you pick the one assembled in your home country or the one that makes a more pleasant ding when it turns on, and call it a day? Obviously the “reviews” are all fake, but the point isn’t for someone to tell you what to buy, but that all the options are readily discoverable while I’m lying in bed on my phone.
That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.
I did find these tables from Budget Light Forums handy for shopping, however the fact that you have to use these I think only reinforces the point of the article:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12jj1A6PNjHmWbFNu0FSi...
edit I learned a bit from a marketing blog article; CRI measures reflection of 8 spot colors but it leaves out some important parts of the spectrum, particularly deep red. https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rend...
Maybe I should just give up and install a bunch of these "sun tunnels" in my house.
But yeah, explaining to normal folks that they need $30-$60 lightbulbs for every fixture in their home is basically a non-starter, but for me, I use this lamp every day and it should last a decade or more, so the value prop isn't bad, especially compared to spending $500 or so on something like a Humanscale "nice" desk lamp, which technically has much worse CRI and much lower output.
We recently built our home and went with WAC recessed lighting in all the main areas, which was about a $15k premium over just using what the contractor wanted to use, involved a lighting design company (that was also purchased the fixtures from), and took a dozen+ hours of our time and input, but I think it was worth it in the grand scheme of how much we spent. I personally can't stand hanging out at peoples houses where they have mismatched lights or just very poor lighting; it kills any interior design niceties and makes you really realize how much lighting affects the general feeling of indoor spaces.
The hardware stores near me, both big and small, stock only a single brand of bulb, as if they have some kind of exclusive deal.
Some of the bulbs have exact CRI listed, and some have "90+". I only buy the first kind.
Lately I've been using the GE Reveal/Relax. They were better than the contractor grade bulbs that came with the house but still just... wasn't there.
If you know any other manufacturers like this I'd greatly appreciate it if you could provide their links.
GE Filled With Sun, Philips Ultra HD (available on Amazon, but from Canada), and some other Chinese brands are currently top of the chart for CRI 95+, RA 90+ bulbs
Budgetlightforum.com
I read the site and ... Now all my flashlights MUST run open source firmware.
Buy a flashlight with the Anduril UI and you will understand. (search on amazon)
With my flashlights:
- press and hold the power button to ramp up brightness from zero
- press and hold again to ram down brightness
- click twice to get the maximum brightness from the light (mostly)
there are lots of other modes available, designed to be harder to stumble into, plus customizations you can add.
Also, the good flashlights have an always-on dim green LED that lets you find the flashlight during a power outage.
http://www.seoulsemicon.com/en/technology/sunlike/casestudy/
Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible.
And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.
It is a clear ripoff.
I thought full spectrum LEDs are future tech because I haven't seen one.
16 incandescent bulbs, averaging 3 hours per day, would cost about 50 cents per day. $150-$250 per year in most of the country.
So getting the really premium LEDs is still cheaper than lighting used to be. Even better if you use the good bulbs for room lighting and the cheap bulbs for closets and outdoors and such.
You say that like the utilities weren't even larger before the change. That $11-18 a month is explicitly not going to utilities.
I'd say those people are getting an upgrade in food or other things at the cost of CRI. And they can choose not to take that trade if they prefer CRI. You only need to buy one bulb at a time, after all, no need for massive savings. And even if you buy the extra fancy $18 bulbs you'll still save some money compared to incandescent.
$200 Canadian (including shipping) for 6 bulbs is stopping me. $33 / bulb with no guarantee how long they will last.
$18 USD for a single 10 Watt bulb? I don't care how expensive electricity is, the $2 incandescent bulb is a better value.
the 4-for-$10 A19 LED bulbs from amazon or ikea are flicker free to my eyes. i've bought some fancy bulbs with big metal heatsink bases, supposed "high CRI" ratings, equivalently high price tags. to my eyes, i can't see the difference. the super-cheap bulbs from one of those amazon marketplace sellers with a randomly generated name are flickery, but just going up to anything other than the absolute bare minimum of quality is good enough. "what the peasants get to use" is because that's actually probably good enough for what us peasants need. if you want to geek out about super high-end LEDs, you're not going to find that in consumer-grade products and that's probably fine.
Very rarely will bulbs visibly flicker in my experience. What happens instead is after several hours I'll start to get headaches and feel fatigue without knowing exactly where it's coming from. Since I replaced my Hue bulbs (which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even) I've felt so much better at home
I used to have an expensive Phillips light alarm and it flickered like no other. Especially if you lower the dimming you'll tend to see more flickering or just notice an "ick" feeling with crappier bulbs.
all bulbs have some flicker, and the fact that it resonates with your phone screen's refresh rate or your camera sensor's sample rate doesn't really mean anything.
Apathy towards the consumer, or by the consumer? I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just buy name brand LED bulbs (usually Phillips) in the color temperature of my choice and am completely satisfied with them. Color rendition is fine, no noticeable flicker, long lifetime. In the past 7 years I haven’t had any fail prematurely, though I’ve replaced some early to change color temperature.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>
Discussed numerous times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons>
To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required:
- Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality.
- Expensive quality assessment.
- Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both.
You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above).
This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products.
Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others.
There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk).
As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.
Consumer education is rarely an excellent business opportunity.
Consumers are very good at comparing prices, and "incandescent watt equivalent" labels provide an understandable comparator for light output. Beyond that, the statistics become much less meaningful.
Consumers typically don't read colour temperature ratings (in black-body Kelvin), but instead follow "warm white / soft white / cool white" descriptors. Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting.
CRI is a step worse. It is a higher-is-better indicator, but there's no intuitive connection for a consumer. Is a CRI of 80 bad? Is 95 better enough to be worth double the price? Worse yet, CRI is a summary statistic that can gloss over less-measured color reproduction difficulties, and worst yet not all bulbs even publish CRI numbers on the box. My local hardware store is happy to sell you its store-brand generics, none of which have CRI numbers.
Flicker is another step into the unknown. No bulbs that I'm aware of publish flicker numbers, even the otherwise respected names like Philips. If you consider this a 'business opportunity', you're left with an unverifiable claim that your bulbs are uniquely better than the competition.
Sadly, for now good LED lighting really is the domain of the expensive professional or the hobbyist who spends their spare time tracking down reviews or building custom lighting rigs.
Do it right, and eventually your best customers will tell their friends to 'just buy brand "X"' and you can expand from there.
Is this a good plan to take over the bulb market? No. But a good product could be a nice, sustainable business.
Maybe I'm hypersensitive to it, but I don't understand how it's viewed as okay. I walked through a house on a home show and despite being listed for 800k+ (in Iowa), they had a couple mismatches.
As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.
It's not peasants who's gonna use AI, it's the elite. Peasants are gonna get nothing.
"Good old-fashioned" incandescents were also subject to a multi-decade scam to limit their lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
It's manifesting slightly differently this time around, but it's the same principle.
Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence.
Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials.
Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave.
Late stage capitalism started in the 80s.
aka capitalism? People prioritize price over quality, but you can't make something better the cheaper it gets. So in an open and "fair" competitive market, all goods and services get shittier over time. It's a race to the bottom.
This drives me absolutely insane. When we were shopping for a TV for the living room a few years ago I wanted a 120Hz display. Finding one was a pain in the ass because all anybody wanted to list in marketing material was the backlight strobe rate; you had to dig and dig to find the panel rate.
No, I don't care that you can flash the backlight at a thousand Hz, I want an actual panel that's well synchronized with 24FPS content, and I don't want to spend hours of research to figure out which displays have one.
When I was a teen, I wanted an alligator on my shirt, and not too long after I started seeing simulacra shirts... Enough of a demand for more than one entity to mimic it...
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...
The second option may be more difficult but let’s not pretend there aren’t companies that choose it and succeed.
For me, it’s rarely about efficiency, and almost always about improving outcomes for workers and users.
Micromanaging efficacy to maximise profit is an economists job.
If the general public wants a cheap, bad product, they can do so, but they rarely have the inside knowledge to discern quality. Marketing is responsible for telling miseducating them.
Nobody's denying you nice things at low prices just out of spite. Nice things just cost more. To put a positive spin on it, our innate sense of 'nice' is a well tuned heuristic for good engineering (and/or whatever the Joneses can't afford).
The homeless certainly aren’t worried about lightbulbs but the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck probably appreciate the savings.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09H3VFG8B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
This movement away from standard bulb-sockets to direct wiring is short-term-ism at its finest. Least of all because very time you rewire this, you're going to degrade or shorten the wires.
I've replaced a couple ceiling sockets with panel-type LED fixtures and they're going strong years later. Perhaps they'll fail eventually, but their lifespan has far exceeded anything I've screwed into a socket, so the increased replacement effort/cost has already paid for itself.
I happen to work with a lot of LED light sources nowadays and I can see most problems discussed are related to the light fixture, driver or psychology. More often than not it is the capacitors in these mains powered LEDs that fail first, because the circuit is designed to run at the highest temperature possible to lower the cost of the final product. The bulbs, or LED chips, looks quite innocent in this regard.
So consumers in hot climates who abstain from A/C cooling will suffer such failures disproportionately.
We've only used LEDs in my country for, what, 15 years now? They are perfectly fine, no issues really, much cheaper than incandescent bulbs of course. We just buy the ones in IKEA and they haven't really failed us so far.
250Hz flicker in very visible in lighting under certain circumstances. I'm of the opinion lighting should be flicker-free, or at least over about 5kHz.
People are going to express preferences for one or the other, telling people that LEDs are exact equivalents is just wrong.
We can say, “yes they’re different, but the environment is more important [1], suck it up” but it changes the tone.
[1] Which is such a joke, the waste from my electric stove or leaving the window open with the AC on uses more than the savings from LEDs. Halogens are already more expensive and you pay per watt so there’s not some horrible externality not being priced in.
You're familiar with color temperature - that's essentially the orange-blue axis for white light, but there's also a red/green tint axis to consider. Humans vision is most sensitive to green light, and the lumen as a unit is calibrated to human visual sensitivity. You'll never guess what companies trying to add a few more lm/W to their efficiency rating do to the tint. Incidentally, one study I read that doesn't seem to be online anymore found people prefer tints redder than incandescent bulbs.
Flicker can come from running LEDs from AC, resulting in a low-frequency flicker that's very visible to more sensitive people. Incandescent bulbs change brightness much slower, so they're fine on AC. Another possibility is a power supply in the LED bulb that intentionally flickers the LEDs, usually at a higher frequency than mains power in order to control brightness with pulse-width modulation. Flicker-free variable constant current power supplies are available, but tend to be more expensive than PWM.
Finally, color rendering is affected by the spectrum of the light. An incandescent bulb has a spectrum that peaks at a specific wavelength and falls off relatively smoothly to the sides. LEDs can have a wide variety of spectra, often with many peaks and valleys, such that the two light sources viewed directly can look the same, but render colors very differently. A crude measurement of this is color rendering index, and many LEDs advertise theirs. 100 is the highest possible rating, and over 95 is considered very good.
The problem with CRI is it's based on a mere eight color samples, and leaves out some colors LEDs tend to be bad at. It's getting more common to see an R9 (deep red rendering) rating advertised. LEDs often do badly on R9, and there can be a big penalty to efficiency to achieve a high rating. Less commonly advertised, but also a common weakness for LEDs is R12 (deep blue rendering).
I care about this stuff and use an LED videography panel with adjustable color temperature to light my work environment. It's neutral to slightly reddish, flicker-free, has excellent CRI (97) and R9 (98). R12 is a bit weak (82).
It seems like some people are more sensetive to flickering light. I've asked people every now and then when in a group if they can tell the light is flickering, and I'm usually the only one. The effect is pronounced in my peripheral vision and somehow even more when drunk.
I don't think these lights emit the entire spectrum of light either, but a spectrum that "fools" us to think we're seeing the whole spectrum. Maybe that feels uncomfortable for some?
The ikea bulbs I have flicker a little when dimmed, but I don't really mind.
But even so, good LEDs are perfectly fine. Don't assume that all LEDs are crap because you bought one cheap set and they weren't very good.
That's because it is. George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the incandescent bulb in the US in 2007. Incandescent bulbs are a niche product in the US, LEDs have been the mainstream choice for years.
First, bans on incandescent bulbs are foolish because they encourage defeatist foolishness like this article (as far as I can tell, for the sake of virtue signaling and modest acceleration of a change that was already happening.)
The CFLs which preceded LEDs were really awful, especially for closets (where they'll linger for decades, given the low utilization of those bulbs,) but LEDs are fine, amd really nice if your 70 year old house gets retrofitted for AC and you need the reclaimed electrical capacity. This author just needs to pony up for dimmable LEDs, which aren't expensive except by comparison. Non-dimmable LEDs are right up there with running toilets and rodents in the pantheon of things to make homeowners lose their minds.
Really? I've never understood the affection for dimming lights. Essentially always I want lights on or off.
But other times I'm just wanting to cozy up to the fireplace with a book and some light music and a dram of whiskey late in the evening. I don't need the room to be super bright, so I might just have the lights over the fireplace on set very dimly.
Same goes with the kitchen. When I'm actively cooking a meal, I want it very bright. But I don't always need it that bright, sometimes I just want it a bit more ambient in its lighting.
Or the dining room. Sometimes I use that space for projects as it has the large table, and I'll want it as bright as possible. But other times, I could probably stand to have it at about 75% of its brightness as we're just sitting around together having a meal, and with my home layout its a bit of a central space so its nice having it at like 20% brightness to act as a bit of a night light as people go through the house.
But, dimmable bulbs are also an indicator of quality. Someone cared enough to make sure it worked in that situation, so there's evidence that someone was caring during the design.
Maybe. It could also be to avoid the situation in which the average consumer just picks up the cheapest bulb and, when he gets it home and it is flaky when used with the dimmer, returns it to the store.
Or maybe it's a low quality way of ticking a feature that a customer has been told to look for regardless of whether it is relevant to his situation.
It also is a tad hyperbolic to include non-dimmable bulbs in the pantheon of things to make homeowners lose their minds.
I think the big surprise for most people would be that many LED bulbs are not dimmable, as that hasn’t been something they had to worry about with older bulbs (it was also an issue with CFLs, but people avoided them because of the harsh color)
I'm really miserable in a too-bright room. I have some sensory processing issues which contributes a lot to this admittedly, but when I talk about it with people who don't they often understand it immediately or admit to experiencing the same thing, though to a smaller extent.
It's about choice. I have several dozen LED can lights in my house producing 1600 lumens each. Sometimes I want every bit of that power, but I also like being able to turn them down a bit in the evening when I don't need it.
You could hire a lighting consultant, then buy expensive bespoke bulbs so that having them at 100% is the right choice, or you could spend an extra ~ $50 per room for a dimmer.
Further, if you dare to mix bulbs you’ll often get different color/brightness behavior at different levels of dimming.
I also have a lot of "sunlight" LEDs which I'll describe as "white" and I LOVE them for big rooms and making daytime feel like daytime. Great for my office.
I recall blue being a big problem when LEDs for homes were new, but when I bought a house 3 years ago and revisited it, I was delighted to find so many very solid options. Dimmable, non-flicker, warm LED bulbs. The Canadian government also chipped in with my tax dollars so they were about 50 cents each.
My one complaint is that even the fancier, pricier ones seem to burn out too. In 3 years I've had to replace 4 ceiling bulbs of about 50 (the builder went nutty with recessed ceiling lights). I think they're just driven really harshly by the A/C.
This is what drives your "warm" lamps. No deep red at all, man.
By filtering out other wavelengths I’m left with all this warm light rather than nothing.
It's likely that you're buying bulbs with a low CRI. Unfortunately, this is poorly-marketed (and CRI still doesn't capture certain edge cases).
I'm a fairly serious amateur photographer, and until I moved overseas, I'd set up a room as an edit and print studio, with a pro-grade photo printer. I specifically sourced high-CRI bulbs, and found that my eye couldn't tell the difference between my room at night (with a measured color temperature of 4500K or so) and my room during the day with the blinds open (with about the same color temperature), even looking at a variety of photo prints.
Blue LEDs are used to create white because it's easier to convert blue to lower frequencies. But red and green LEDs absolutely exist. LEDs exist for a wide range of narrow wavelengths, including for example infrared LEDs that emit at 940 nm without a trace of blue (obviously, otherwise they would be visible!).
Is there any LED capable of emitting 780nm? Or maybe a luminophore for letting manufactures to convert invisible 940nm into anything visible? AFAIK both answers are negative.
This seems to match what you're asking for. But converting longer wavelengths to shorter ones is always going to be difficult, so I don't think there exists a practical way to make visible light from 940nm.
> We were renovating our apartment, and one day our contractor summoned me to the bathroom in dismay. He adjusted the dimmer switch he’d just installed, and a new LED fixture began strobing like we were in a seven-by-eight-foot basement dance club.
I’m not sure what skill-level of contractor he was using, but it’s pretty obvious that nobody checked that the light fixture was dimmable with that particular switch.
This kind of scam is getting really old for me. LED lighting isn't the only one being pushed on us.
However, I would always buy standard socket LEDs unless you're really committed to that lighting style.
"New LEDs can last 50,000 to 100,000 hours or more. The typical lifespan for an incandescent bulb, by comparison, is 1-5% as long at best (roughly 1,200 hours)."
I've never seen more than 15000 hours from an LED bulb at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb
"The chart below lists values of luminous efficacy and efficiency for some general service, 120-volt, 1000-hour lifespan incandescent bulb"
I spent most of my life in incandescent bulb lighting and rarely remember changing a light bulb. LED bulbs I can remember changing multiple times in the last few years since we started using them.
It's almost like there's a conspiracy to convince consumers incandescent lighting didn't last long which is odd given the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light#:~:text=The%2....
"The Centennial Light is the world's longest-lasting light bulb, burning since 1901, and almost never turned off."
It's been a long time since I thought of that. I don't keep spare bulbs around anymore and can't remember the last time an LED bulb burnt out.
With the LED bulbs at our home (many of which have failed!), the problem is always the inverter. They just start flickering wildly and inconsistently one day, which is never pleasant, and they need to be replaced. It's frustrating because when the LEDs have stable power, they can produce just as much brightness as before, but their integrated power-conversion circuitry sucks in reliability.
The centennial light was neither cheap or bright - presently it’s about the strength of a 4-watt nightlight. You put enough power through a thick filament it will glow for a very very long time, but no one wants to illuminate their house that way!
The 1200h are slightly above the 1000h target put in place by the cartel.
The story of the Dubai bulbs show that the industry could easily make bulbs that last (even) longer, but there's no money in selling products you'll never need to replace.
So, making up numbers, a 2,500 hour bulb may cost $5 to replace and would incur $20 of electricical charges for a total cost of $25 or 1 Cent/hr. Meanwhile, 1,000 hour bulbs would cost $10 ($4 * 2.5) while incurring $10 of electrical charges for a cost $20 or 0.8 Cent/hr... even factoring in the cost of having to replace the bulbs.
Edit: one other thing, I'm also sensitive to the cooling needs of LEDs, so maybe that helps. At my last apartment, I had the 'ceiling boob' style built-in fixtures which didn't allow proper airflow for the LED. I built a little spacer and got a longer mounting rod to allow a 1/8" gap around the bottom, central hole and the top edge of the glass. That kept the LEDs cool and wasn't noticeable.
My house came with installed LED bulbs that were absolute shit. Within a year all the can lights eventually would turn a purpley dim color and slowly all started to fail within the same time and would fail to turn on. Same thing with the smaller fixtures - all started to fail around the same time.
Each time one failed I replaced it with a higher quality LED and every bulb has now been replaced. Most lights I've only replaced once and it's been 6-7 years at least for many of them without any problems.
Previously I used to use incandescent lights and replacing them was a frequent occurrence and just an expected thing to maintain.
I can't really remember how long incandescent bulbs lasted, given that it's been over a decade since anyone in the EU used them... But good LED bulbs last plenty long enough.
The EU forbid terribly inefficient light around a decade ago. Yes, we had plenty of debates. Yes, people were concerned about all kinds of things. Most of them were entirely made up, some were exaggerated out of proportion.
I can say that we still have lights, the debate mostly vanished and no, it's not blue everywhere.
> The EU forbid terribly inefficient light around a decade ago.
So did we. Very few incandescent bulbs are on the market here since they were basically banned a decade ago. There are some niche options, you could still find expensive halogens, but that's it.
They definitely cost a bit more, but I had one fail 5 years out and I was able to call Cree up for a replacement. The rep collected a few questions - model, when it was bought and what type of room and fixture it was installed - and then sent me a new one. Despite being a different model, it matched the temp and tone of the old set of bulbs.
I empathize with the author, but at the end of the day, a lot of people seem completely unaware of lighting to begin with. Walk down a US street at night and look inside, you'll see clashing warm and cold color temperatures in the same room, sterile cold bulbs in entryways and living rooms, dreaded boob light everywhere.
By being conscious and careful, I believe I've managed to have a pretty flicker free house. Cree has always been my go to non smart bulb, but I have not purchased any (I guess other than dimmable cans) since their acquisition. I was not impressed with their smart ecosystem and returned all of it. The software wasn't ready and the firmware was glitchy.
Another thing mentioned not mentioned in the article, is how bad light looks to pets. Dogs can see the flickering, and with one previous fixture that is now gone, I noticed the dogs getting more anxious when the light was on. They didn't like me moving at them suddenly. I can only imagine how choppy the light made the world to them. Imagine a world where to everyone else things look fine, but to you everything is strobing.
A small link dump of resources I found on hn over the years.
https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database
https://www.lutron.com/en-US/Pages/LEDCompatibilityTool/Comp...
https://www.derlichtpeter.de/en/light-flicker/market-tests/
http://fastvoice.net/led-testberichte/
https://gembared.com/blogs/musings/the-best-daytime-white-li...
And Light Brands / Shopping
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_li...
From my understanding, the ban will start somewhere around Q4 this year. Still, you'll always be able to buy them for "decoration purposes".
They are very efficient heat bulbs after all.
The only LED bulbs I buy now are the "filament" types. Their bulbs are filled with helium so heat transfer is good, and they have a close-to-incandescent warm light color. I have had good luck with their longevity so far, but haven't really used them long enough to judge.
Without any sort of detail about what brand or what it was used for and why it was a bad experience, it’s really not adding anything to the conversation. It’s just a blanket judgement on a technology that has a great deal of variation and options and uses.
You do want to consider kerosine lamps - check out https://www.sevarg.net/2022/10/09/keropunk-part-1-kerosene-l... - browse around and he does some spectrum analysis of LED bulbs, too - https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/26/feit-electric-wifi-rgb-bul...
I told him I had bought some LEDs (started moving over 2 years ago) and that is when he mentioned that. I guess I will find out, so far so good.
I did stock up on 100 watt incandescent years ago and have a many left just in case. I found LEDs cause me eye strain, but I experimented and found if I use a Lamp Shade with a slight yellow tinge, I can deal with them.
BigClive covers this issue a fair amount on his Youtube teardown videos. It's not exactly built-in obsolescence, so much as being built to cost.
The cheapest way to build an LED bulb is to minimize the number of components. Instead of spreading the light emission out over a couple of dozen LEDs, it's cheaper to use a handful of LEDs but really overdrive them with high currents.
The result is a bulb that's cheap to make, but in ordinary use the chips and phosphors inside will run at high temperatures and degrade much more quickly. This effect will be even more pronounced with enclosed fixtures (like ceiling lights) that have little to no ventilation.
Manufacturers could design their way out of this by increasing the component count (spreading the light generation over more LED chips at lower current), but that's an expense that doesn't translate well to a brand or marketing claim. As it stands, ordinary consumers are unlikely to try to exercise their warranty on a bulb that fails after 1,000 hours rather than a rated 3,000 or so; there's no reason to expect that "this bulb is more expensive but will last a really long time" would make it in the consumer-facing market.
As for the business rationale, I think it's less about consumer demand and more about the recurring revenue for the light manufacturers. Products like this exist where mandated - see his video on the Dubai LEDs - but aren't made broadly available.
Even if the producer expects absolutely zero return customers (and therefore no recurring revenue), having the more durable product be more expensive, and durability being hard to advertise, means there's a race to the bottom where the more durable product is competed out of existence.
If everybody is forced to make the durable product, the race to the bottom disappears.
(Alternatively, having better packaging regulations that make it easier to identify long-lasting products would also help)
So, if I want bulbs that are less likely to fail, would it help to always buy enclosure-rated ones, even for applications where they're not going to be enclosed? It seems like that could be a way to get the safety margin that manufacturers aren't bothering with.
> unlikely to try to exercise their warranty
I'm in this exact situation now, and it's because of the hassle. You must take the bulbs back to the store. There are various issues like waiting in line, and I haven't done it. I bought name-brand bulbs thinking they'd be good, but now I'm unhappy because the guarantee process is such a bother.
I wonder if a company could make a viable product by differentiating in this area. Make a truly no-cost, no-hassle return process. Allow me to print a pre-paid shipping label and just drop it in the mail. No in-person store visits, waiting on hold for customer support, etc. And really push this in marketing. Maybe even put some kind of hour meter on the bulbs as a visible sign that I am buying the one brand of LED bulb that takes reliability seriously. People might pay more just to be spared from the headache of LED bulbs that fail a lot.
How do you know this? Seems completely implausible. Source please.
“The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours)..”
It's not so much "planned obsolescence" as it is "consumers shop on price primarily". And its even harder because there really isn't much benefit to putting specs on your bulbs because 99.9% of consumers won't understand them anyway.
What should happen is a mandated "nutrition facts" that gets put on all bulbs so people can familiarize themselves with a standard fact sheet.
I read the "guarantee" when I buy new bulbs but who keeps receipts or track of light bulbs?
And no, I am not happy about having to think about storing receipts for mundane things like light bulbs either, but it is the only thing that calms down my nerves when yet another bulb with 5 year warranty fails in a year.
a) you can choose not to trust them
b) you can choose to trust them
For a $3 item, most retailers would pick #b every time.
Are there any good brands of LED bulbs these days -- bulbs that are likely to work as long as is claimed on the box? I've already scratched GE and FEIT off the list.
I have led bulbs everywhere (new build, recessed lights). Thankfully they don’t have the flicker effect I’ve seen on other bulbs. And I’ve found that I actually prefer the more “daylight” bulbs in certain areas such as kitchens. The cans do have adjustable color temperature (a physical switch) so it’s not too bad if I decide I’d like a warmer light down the road.
But I really can't think of more than 1 or 2 failures over more than enough years.
We still have florescent and incandescent, but I get the most useful lighting in a room with 5 LED lights and nothing else (and most of the time its actually kinda painful with how bright they are!)
If I cared much about the flicker, I'd get a https://www.crowdsupply.com/test-equipment?sort=latest OpticSpy or Labrador, or something cheaper, and just go into a store with a light display and check each one.
- - -
> Apple’s software will convert the image according to what it has machine-learned that white ought to be
My old lexam camera apparently has machine learning built in too?
Unlike my frustrating old camera, iPhones should be able to lock the white balance, exposure, et al, right? through which, comparisons can still be made.
It's bad luck for us. We've had at least 10 bulbs die within the past two years, at least half of which had been installed just months before. I'd guess they were a poor quality batch in the box we bought at Costco.
Meanwhile, the Philips Hue led lights we bought ages ago are still working perfectly.
Personally I prefer the phillips warm glow dimmable bulbs
Now I had some flickers in recent weeks but they went away again, not sure what had caused it.
I genuinely have no idea what people in this thread are talking about.
This seems odd considering they surely can't be used in Hungary either. The EU started phasing out incandescent bulbs more than a decade ago!
Don't miss them, personally. LED lighting is excellent if you buy good quality ones. And I certainly don't miss having to periodically go around the house changing blown bulbs!
They emit a pleasant looking spectrum, have good heat sinks for longevity, have high-quality ballasts, built-in dimmers and do not flicker.
They also blow out any alternative out of the water when it comes to pure brightness for precision work (soldering, painting minis, etc.)
They are also fairly cheap (can find some lights as low as 50c/watt on sale)
Oh and lastly - I can always just move them and use them to grow any kind of plants (wink wink, nudge)
Also, you never look at the light directly.
That being said, maybe it's a good idea to use a plexiglass UV filter when using it as a workshop light.
> If you had a strong emitter of UV in a relatively dim room
A 150 watt LED right above your head is the opposite of dim.
But maybe there's an argument that you have to pay a significant premium to get a bulb that doesn't have the issues you've run into and, once you factor that premium into account, LED bulbs aren't worth it. But some of the broad claims here, and in the article, about the allegedly poor performance of LED bulbs just don't cohere at all with my experience with them. I made a point of buying high quality bulbs that are dimmable, don't flicker, and have the color temperature and CRI that I want and...well...that's exactly what I got.
We can turn on every light in the house and it will use less than 200w. With incandescents and halogens (for gu10s) I'd be looking at more than that just to light the bathroom. The whole house would use about 1.5kw. Given that the lights are on a lot outside of summer (I'm in the UK) that's a pretty big saving.
But the ones that didn't fail have been fine, and lasted for years. Like CPUs, the yields aren't good but the ones that pass give good service for a long time.
As for the color reproduction issue... you do experience it, I imagine you haven't done color critical work under incandescent and then under LEDs?
I do have some stupidly expensive $29 D-50 compliant LEDs in my office that don't bother me at all. One failed after about 9 months, but the company replaced it for free.
Anyway, I'm highly sensitive to LED flicker, and my wife apparently can hear the buzz from rooms away.
At risk of sounding like a consistent theorist...The market factors that led to the lighting industry forming a "cartel" 100 years ago are certainly alive and well today. I think it's likely that these manufacturers are only selling energy efficient lightbulbs to make more money than they otherwise would -- it's certainly not to save the planet.
High quality LEDs with a good CRI are vastly better for that sort of work. You don't want to be doing anything like that under 2700k incandescent light.
I'm not an LED hater. But I do think the Lightbulb industry has taken advantage of us in not so honest ways, as expected by their shareholders.
This is complicated, and I don't think the consumer knows what they're asking for. From my understanding (and watching a lot of Big Clive lightbulb teardowns on YouTube), this would require an active sensor in the bulb. Most of the circuits in these bulbs are embarrassingly simple - 3-4 mostly passive components, and 1-2 silicon based chips or raw transistors. If you add an active sensor to that system, your cost balloons significantly. Then you have to calibrate the sensors. Then we get into the "printer cartridge" problem, where "my light bulb won't turn on because it's insufficiently cyan, but I only want a red light."
We didn't know that we wanted things when we had incandescent bulbs. Now that we're being forced to switch away from incandescent bulbs and use a new technology, users are able to ask for things. I think that's partially exciting (users having preferences is good!), but it's also potentially complicated by companies not providing low-cost solutions that are as good as the old thing. So, overall, good and bad.
For the uninitiated, these are microwave-driven light sources that are about half as efficient as the best LEDs, but still way more efficient than incandescent. The light output spectrum is continuous and single-peaked, and in the case of sulfur lamps, so close to solar that they are routinely used as a "synthetic sunlight" for testing solar panels.
The MW band used in existing appliances is generally the 2.45 GHz Bluetooth and microwave oven band, because it's unregulated, but the high output power and the need for a transparent housing means that they can interfere with other consumer electronics. There is virtually no risk of two bulbs interfering with each other, so even a relatively narrow dedicated band should work fine. As I understand it, the light output is continuous — no flicker — and anyway the beam power of a circularly polarized microwave should be continuous.
Usually, microwaves are created using magnetrons — vacuum tubes — which have a high minimum power output (think floodlight). Microwave diodes do exist, although they haven't yet been applied to electrodeless lamps, because consumers won't be interested in using a light bulb that kills Bluetooth.
But it is physically possible for us to enjoy an efficient light source that looks nice. There are just a few kinks to work out.
savingourstars.org
https://www.redrivercatalog.com/browse/60lb-polar-matte.html
?" and I'd say that LED bulbs do OK when I set them on the high color temperature (blueish) settings and poorly on the warm color temperature side. This company
https://www.solux.net/cgi-bin/tlistore/index.html
became famous for high color temperature lights for art museums also used to make an advanced incandescent bulb that had something like a halogen bulb inside of it. Those bulbs do really well on my test, I still have a stock of them, and I use them when I need to make fine color distinctions. I've seen bulbs with a similar construction for sale at Dollar General but I haven't tested them.
Note there is a tradeoff between an RGB bulb that gives really saturated colors and one that gives good color rendition. If saturation was what mattered you'd want laser-like spectral lines, for color rendition you want each component to have a broad spectrum.
There's no reason why LED light can't have excellent quality however anyone defines quality because you're not limited to the raw output of the LED but you can tune the output with a phosphor. Consumers have to demand something better though and the market has to respond.
I wonder how much of this color quality complaint is due to familiarity and comfort with what you grew up with?
At the same time, I find fluorescent lighting unbearable over long time periods, so I completely appreciate that these differences can be important.
https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/11/how-your-leds-are-killing-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902429
After reading it, I realized that having overhead led lights in our home were possibly contributing to my worsening sleep and general tiredness over the past few years. Granted, we used 4100k lights which are much bluer than 2700k.
We swapped all our leds back to incandescents and halogens (which were a bit tricky to find, but not impossible). Anecdotally, I've been sleeping so much better since, finally feeling well rested and far less stressed. I just feel a tremendous amount of relief after not sleeping well for years.
Also, while we had leds, I had to replace a surprising number of them for burnout/failure, and also experienced flickering, dimming issues, buzzing and more.
You had this realization and yet still went the route of switching back to all incandescents?
It's trivially-easy to find 2700K LED bulbs. The ones I have look just as good as the old incandescent. And despite the article making it sound like you need a PhD to sort it out, you don't: most medium-end 60W-equivalent, 2700K LED bulbs look good and are easily available in any hardware store.
Also, maybe it just in my head, but I think the light from incandescents/halogens look nicer than leds... it feels more natural.
Yes, I think 2700k would have been better, we had originally picked 4100k because we prefered the look.
But the article says that even 2700k leds have a blue light spike (albeit smaller than the 4100ks) since the led source is blue light.
From the article: ``` I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome. ```
What? And then they go on to talk about how hard it is to illegally find incandescent bulbs. This screams cognitive dissonance. An incandescent bulb's normal way of responding after several months to a year was to just not work anymore at all. That was just 'normal' and you would swap them out. If you went to any room in the country and looked at the light fixtures, you had a very good chance of finding bulbs that were burned out. It was normal to hear or say "we really need to replace the bulb in the pantry" but in the meantime not be able to see in there very well. Finding one led bulb that fails early is not an indictment of the technology, even if it was defective. For all we know his kid might have been throwing water balloons at it.
LED bulbs are great, they are now incredibly cheap and there is no reason to keep producing CO2 because of misoneic propaganda. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we either have to pass the true cost of carbon to consumers, which would mean dramatically increasing energy costs to people who likely can't afford that, or we need to make it less likely to consume all that artificially cheap electricity wastefully. LED bulbs are a great way to do this.
Could be a number of reasons but the most common is either its wired to a dimmer or similar which is leaking some current when its "switched off" or its switched on the netural side and the wiring is acting as a capacitor and letting some current flow.
If you are using the bulb itself to adjust the power level, like with some smart bulbs that you are supposed to leave switched on, it's possible that they never turn off the power completely for some reason. LEDs are dimmed using PWM so they may have an off setting that is like 1% of duty cycle or something, who knows.
I believe this is due to the poor quality of the electronics that comprise the base of the bulb and control the LEDs. The same issue with compact fluorescent bulbs I had opened up some of those cf. bulbs when they burned out prematurely and found burnt ou components.
I haven’t bothered to do this with LED bulbs because I have every reason to assume they’re the same manufactures that need the CF bulbs and are making the LED bulbs are pulling the same trick.
It was a race to the bottom to make the cheapest bulb stand compete on price may have resulted in bulbs that are far more faulty than they need to be.
Do you mean the stated lifetime of a specific LED or the lifetime promises generally assigned to LEDs. In my experience you get what you pay for.
For now, I always go to see bulbs in person before buying them, and record them in slow-motion video on my phone. This makes it easy to tell which ones flicker badly and which don't.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/articles/flicker-understandi...
- Make sure your dimmer switch is compatible with LEDs - ideally only compatible with LEDs, as sometimes the ones that also handle halogen bulbs can buzz
- Make sure your bulbs are dimmable
- The LED and dimmer switch need to either both be leading edge, or both be trailing edge (but almost all are trailing edge now)
- If your bulbs are too dim, read the manual for your dimmer switch - there will be a series of pushes and twists to configure it and/or manufacture reset
- Lights starting up slower than a normal on/off switch is normal - it's the bulb and dimmer "negotiating", and it makes them both last longer
Negotiating? Some dimmers might “adapt” and choose which style to be (leading or trailing edge), but most don’t. I think the real issue is the startup time of the power supply, especially when starting dimmed and therefore getting a horrible waveform.
Unfortunately the market is swamped with cheap low quality ones that produce pretty crap quality light and burn out quickly. I learnt pretty quickly that it was a false economy to skimp on them.
I bought two light fixtures like this that claimed to last "up to 40 years". Almost all have weasel words like "up to". Both were dead within a year. Instead a quick operstion to swap out the bulb I had to find whole new units and re-hardwire them in.
More recently I needed a new garage light and Home Depot didn't cary a single option with replaceable bulbs. Not one.
I had an over-the-stove microwave with an overhead light. When the bulb burned out I replaced it with a LED. The new bulb outlasted the microwave.
This is as vapid and facile an argument as petrol heads complaining that electric cars don't sound right.
- The issue is not that they are "not the same color", but that they have a low CRI which means that they make look everything bland and greyscale.
- That they use some shitty low frequency PWM to drive the light causing eye fatigue and headaches
- That they use low quality electronics causing your bulb to fail as fast as an iridescent one that costs 5 times less.
What you are saying sounds a bit like someone complaining why people want to move on from CRT monitors.
I still have original incandescent bulbs, fluorescents and in-ceiling LED can bulbs in place. I'm not sure what makes the flood-style LED can bulbs so much better. I have not replaced a single one indoors. Same mfr. as the standard size LED bulbs (Fleir, sp?). I have not found a good brand of the standard size LED replacement bulbs.
I think there just might be more of a spectrum with LED bulbs, since they are more complicated than incandescent ones. The worst ones are much worse, but the best ones are far better.
There seems to be an element of luck with the cheaper ones. The ones in a batch that work well just keep going, while a small number fail relatively quickly. Once you've gone through a few replacements you are left with just good ones that just keep going.
If I want to feel more awake I ask Siri to change the colours of the bulbs to white. If I went to go to bed earlier I ask Siri for the colour tan and to dim the lights by 30%.
At this point I can’t imagine not having control over the colour or brightness of my lights. These things are essential for a good sleep.
The idea that the old bulbs shouldn’t be banned is ridiculous. You only have to look at other countries than the US to see yes it can be done and yes the world doesn’t end.
Luckily there are LED fillament bulbs that are awfully similar to the old incandesant bulbs, except they last far, far longer and have the same energy savings as standard LED bulbs.
I buy those now.
imo, modern led lights are much, much, much better then the incandessent bulbs & these power-saving lamps we used to have. Both in durabillity & color etc
It had that harsh, strange white hue to it and I found it incredibly distracting and unattractive.
I'm no expert in the field, and I assume there are bulbs that put out a more natural spectrum, but clearly this hotel didn't buy those bulbs. It felt strange to walk down that hallway, just something "off" about it.
Logically, I'm thinking that the pure LED components are a much smaller part of the price, and that maybe there is less skimping?
Like... I was used to the GE Reveal 100W Incandescent Bulbs. For comparison, the light bulbs with like a slight blue tint to them that just worked great.
I had them all over my house.
But then when I did my remodel, I put in can lights. LEDs.
And the can LEDs are really great.
They're bright, they're the right color, they give off plenty of consistent light. I went with 6" cans, and I used about 50% more than they said to use... so like on the box it said, "Use 4 for a room that's X by Y feet..." And I put in 6. No more than 1 every 8 feet, no less than 1 every 5 feet.
The cans have this little color toggle on the back, the only thing I wish I had done is I wish they were all wifi lights... so that I could use a different warmth after sundown.
But hey, that'll be my next house. (=
I think it's becoming more of an easy option for most contractors to set up.
I understand that moving DC long distances can be problematic. But is 100-300 feet too long? Am I completely off on this?
This feels like a legacy inefficiency issue.
My home has 3 non-plumbing busses: AC to every room. Twisted pair to like 6 rooms that will never see use. Coax to 7 rooms that is only used for a modem in one room.
If we can run all that wiring, I think we can introduce a new standard for upcoming homes.
In fact, now that I think of it, my home has a trait that the homes I grew up in never had: the overhead lighting and the wall receptacles are never on the same circuits. ... I wonder if I can re-use the 14-2 Romex for DC and retrofit one or two rooms myself and see how it works? (I recognize this is a bad idea for many reasons, such as them being indistinguishable and wrongly colour coded, making it a dangerous trap for future owners).
The main advantage you'd get is no 120Hz flickering (light bulbs would still need power electronics because LEDs are driven by current rather than voltage), no 60Hz hum on motors, etc. But you'd be stepping away from the massive economies of scale of the consumer market.
FWIW what voltage(s) would you pick, and why? There's no free lunch here.
Ubiquiti for a while had hardware you can order not sure if they still do.
It works *perfectly*! I can max the dimmer and it's bright white daylight, or I can dim it down to a very dim 2000k. There's no buzzing, no weird high-temp/low-light weirdness. It works magically. And it's the cheap option!
I replaced all BR30 & BR40 bulbs with it. I wish it came in more shapes! I'd replace every lightbulb in the house with them. I paid $5-$13 per bulb.
No one seems to know about them, not even the guy at Home Depot who worked in the aisle. He was surprised how much I raved about them.
So I shopped around for alternatives. It turns out that we're now standardizing on 24V DC wiring for lighting for commercial buildings, which makes sense. 24V can be directly used by LEDs wired in series, and the wiring cross-section is similar to 120V lamps.
I even found some dim-to-warm 24V LEDs. But so far they are all kinda niche. I don't want to risk buying hardware from a supplier that can go out of business in a couple of years, leaving me with a slowly degrading system.
If you want to try, then search Google for "tunable-white lighting".
* A19 base
* 2700K
* 7-11W (at typical efficiencies, not sure about lumens)
* dimmable with very high dynamic range (fully dimmed should be just barely lit)
* good color rendering (high CRI / R9)
* good PSU design for long life
* flicker free under all circumstances
* cheapish (< $10/bulb)
They aren't generally used in residential buildings. You could install them, but it tends to be kind of expensive and complicated because they require a ballast. Also, they tend to be most efficient at high wattages, and most people don't want their house lit like the surface of the sun.
I've been using 15-25 watt traditional incandescents in a bunch of lamps around the house and they're absolutely amazing. Consistent light, cheap, and comfy as hell - the warm fire-like glow appeals to my caveman sensibilities. So much better than soulless, flickering, sun-bright but ice-cold LEDs. I feel better, see better, sleep better, my house is just so cozy.
Thankfully, the low-watt appliance bulbs that I use seem to be exempt under the coming ban. And if they were banned, I'd find a way to make them on my own - I'm never parting with them.
Add in the fact that LEDs have a much higher embedded energy of manufacture, and the fact that they seem to last a lot less than the 10 years they're specced for, and switching my house to LEDs appears to have increased our carbon footprint. Plus now we're using more heavy metals and such in circuit boards. Aaaaand the light sucks.
I think in the seven years we've owned this house I've replaced two of them that got cooked in the weird enclosed recessed light in the living room. I did have a (commercial, hardwired) strip light fail in the basement shop, and disassembled it to find a cold solder joint on the bulk filter capacitor -- easy fix for me, probably not for most homeowners.
We don't have any dimmer switches, I suspect that may have something to do with it.
LEDs are part of a progression to everything being addressable, think of them as pixels. There's a decreasing incentive to not make everything addressable and support not just dimming but also colour. This is ultimately a completely different approach to environments. Transitioning from "the lights are on and I can easily see my broccoli" to very fine relationships between sources and qualities of light and their interpretation. Some of the benefits will be emergent, which sounds like hand-waving, and sometimes it is. (-:
Regarding the color criticism(s), it's wonderfully subjective and it's definitely a case of "once you see it, you can't unsee it". Early bulbs were too blue in color temperature; later ones finally got the color temperature right (at least technically) but something else still seems "off" sometimes.
There needs to be a way to read reviews of these, AND people need to be willing to spend more money on quality.
And a black box controller that matches output to exterior conditions automatically. No app, just a black box with a wired light sensor.
You can rip my halogen reading lamps cold dead hands.
The only issue I have with LED is the light isn't as nice as incandescent and although I'm not certain it may not be as good for your health.
Be interesting to know more about the context is the authors experience doesn't seem to be the same for everyone
Most of it felt like what things would be like if you had frequent brownouts or just a bad electrical setup.
[edit]: tried again and stopped when it mentioned painting LED bulbs in amber varnish. I have RGBW LED strips, getting a "beautiful" tone is a solved problem.
Someone tell me why I'm wrong, but I feel like a coil of wire in a milk bottle with all the air sucked out that you could make in a blacksmith's forge is going to be cleaner overall than 100g of plastic, fibreglass, epoxy, copper, gallium arsenide, phosphor, and a billion-dollar factory to build it in.
1. http://iskra.com.ua/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar...
https://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/09/27/1351242/selling-inc...
Ketra used to make a good smart bulb, like Hue but much better quality light. Bought out by Lutron, who disabled the open Restful API
RAB now makes a decent warm-dim, comparable to the Phillips warm-dim.
You know that thing where you didn't notice anything wrong until someone mention it and suddenly you notice it too? It doesn't happen to me after reading the article. What should I pay attention to my LED bulbs so I can be on the same page with the author?
That's a warranty case; if people send them back to the producer often enough, they have to up their quality. If enough people also make sure to complain, consumer protection organizations may start a class action lawsuit and/or get the federal whatsits to demand better quality.
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-led-light-bulbs.ht...
I'm not sure yet about the light fixtures that have non-replaceable LEDs in them. Generally these are heatsinked well and use higher quality power supplies though.
Keep in mind that after sunset in nature there is only moon light that has blue spectrum. Fire, as light source is about 1700K.
Some might be tempted to believe that we'd have discovered what technology they suppressed, but they are insufficiently pessimistic. Technology gets worse all the time, and lightbulbs are a great example of that happening on purpose.
Im sure if I spent 10 dollars per instead of 30-40 I could find bad ones, but I didn’t and I haven’t.
Like, it really just seems like you people don’t have anything else to do besides mind other peoples business.
That being said, I am not a fan of the white LED streetlights. Streetlight LED's should be orange.
The same thing happened to lighting.
Back in "the day" nobody cared about light color or light temperature. You bought whatever was cost effective for the amount of light you needed. Nobody cared that sodium bulb lighting was orange and that arc lamps were bright white. They were the economically viable options for their use cases.
Heck, nobody "liked" the florescent lights, especially the early ones but they did the right job at the right price so they got bought in droves.
Now that we have LEDs for everything and the affording the amount of light being scattered is not the primary hurdle anymore so consumers suddenly care about using other performance metrics to differentiate products.
Governments (or other non-profit organizations) should create light bulbs, for the people, and not for the stockholders.
Also a PhDs website: www.FlickerSense.org
I don't take issue with LED bulbs, but I would rather have a choice nonetheless.
I think so. I am in France now and all I can easily buy are expensive and good quality bulbs. In US the quality was all over the place and price was not always a good proxy.
https://www.waveformlighting.com/
No flickering, high CRI.
1) smart LED bulbs? (I have CREE, which keep disconnecting.)
2) bright as the Sun LED bulbs? (My office is very dark and I'd like something close to 10k LUX.)
Cute.
Did you read the article? It discusses this quite extensively