There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order
- 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
$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:
This is just an anecdote, but I’ve had multiple “10 year” LED bulbs fail after just a year or two. I suspect much of the claims for these bulbs are theoretical as they just don’t hold up, probably for reasons the grandparent poster is pointing out.
Almost all LED bulb failures are because the power supply died due to overheating, not the LEDs themselves. I harvest the LEDs out of dead bulbs to use in hobby projects.
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.
This is the frustrating thing about LEDs that IDK we can change.
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.
I am designing an off-grid cabin with a solar panel array charging a bank of batteries with a propane generator backup. I run ethernet as power with a custom designed PCB that terminates at the outlet side where it exposes a 20 watt USB charging port and an ethernet port.
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.
If you're willing to share your design, I'm sure there are other folks like myself who think this is a cool idea. I've wanted to do PoE (or passive PoE) for lights for a while now...
I am going to open source it. The goal was to be able to get all the SMD stuff available at JLPCB so you can just send it to be fabbed (with some thru-hole components you would just solder yourself) or I would also sell them at cost + 10%. My brother designed some 802.3at chips and was going to have him review my work first as I don't want to send out into the world a poorly design power system (there are enough of those things out there unfortunately).
We've had 2 standard DC outlets for a while now: 12V cigarette lighter and 5V USB. You do often see them in odd places. But the voltage and wattage of those specs is too low to be useful, so they haven't evolved into DC power distribution.
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.
Cars are starting to move to 48V DC. My under cabinet lighting in the kitchen are powered by DC from a power supply in the basement.
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.
This is a fair point, breaking mechanical compatibility will at least stop any electrically exciting goofs from occurring from plugging a low voltage DC lamp into a (comparatively) high voltage AC socket.
> but that’s problematic when the next owner tries to screw in a standard bulb - what happens when it sees 48V DC?
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.
48V without a current limit shouldn't be nothing, but you should expect less than 10% brightness.
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.
I suspect the results would be quite poor. Incandescent filaments increase their resistance when they get hotter, so driving them at constant RMS voltage means that the power will decrease as they heat up, which will give them a degree of stability. At constant current, though, the power will increase with increasing temperature.
(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.)
I wondered for a long time why we don't have standard built-in DC in building codes that could power our lights, and most electronic devices. Really the few things in my house that require full line voltage are all in the kitchen. Everything else has a transformer attached.
Me too - standard 12V and 5V rails run throughout the house would be great. I even thought about a wallpaper with conductive strips so the power could be invisibly delivered to any part of any room and "tapped" with a push-into-the-wall socket.
The usual counterargument is: voltage drop can become a problem. Trying to use one big power supply and use DC as your only distribution mechanism probably isn't a good idea.
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.
But how far can the power go before wire resistance causes too much Vdrop? Maybe one good transformer+rectifier per room? AC to the room and DC in the room. Those DC runs would be <5m each.
Until I see someone defining a representative example and running the numbers, I'm skeptical of their DC vs AC commentary.
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?
>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 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 $2 light bulbs that burn out quickly, instead of just buying light fixtures that were properly engineered in the first place. With modern SMPSs, you're not going to get any kind of benefit by centralizing the power supply to drive individual LEDs, you're only going to get problems. LEDs need a driver circuit to provide constant current, and that means the power supply needs to be matched to the emitters and kept very close to it.
Where exactly are you going to put a power supply in a room? Make a special electrical box for it?
Switched-mode power supplies can be as small as your average Arduino board. They can fit inside the space used for wall outlets or light fixtures. Or you can put the DC transformer inside the light switch.
> I completely disagree. Where exactly are you going to put a power supply in a room? Make a special electrical box for it? Won't it be unsightly in many rooms, or need some huge special panel that looks like a breaker panel?
This sounds like a non-issue, specially considering the pervasive use of "unsightly" installations like air ducts, heating vents, radiators, electrical sockets, telecommunication service panels, routers, and even light fixtures.
If you intentionally dismiss obvious solutions, of course you only end up with problems without obvious solutions.
> It's supposed to be dismissive, because this whole discussion is (...)
It's not about DC vs AC, it's high-voltage vs low-voltage. The power dissipation by wire resistance scales with the square of the current ($P=RI^2$), and low line voltage means that you need large currents to transmit the same amount of power.
Whether or not that's feasible is going to depend a lot on the application. I don't think we'd ever fully rid homes of AC sockets, it's too useful for things like vacuum cleaners or space heaters.
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).
>But what about the sub 100W or even 200W applications? That's where I think something like 48VDC would start to shine.
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).
Trying to cram all the infrastructure for an LED lamp into the shape of a light bulb is a bad idea, even if the input power is DC. Good designs for LED lighting have larger surface areas for heat dissipation and some physical/thermal separation between the LEDs and the power supply. A quality power supply does not produce flicker. As other comments have noted, dimming, or even predictable output requires some sort of power regulation even with DC input.
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.
> Trying to cram all the infrastructure for an LED lamp into the shape of a light bulb is a bad idea, even if the input power is DC.
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.
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).
Already happens in New Zealand: lighting is usually low current 1mm2 wiring, and everything else is heavier gauge. Circuit breakers mostly care about Amps (all breakers could be rated to mains voltage if you wanted to avoid “weird”).
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?)
Maybe for you, but I have been considering just this. I would love to have dedicated 24v for lighting and charging of devices. My house already has various systems for lighting, such as xenox throughout kitchen under the cabinets and also the basement. Both are driven from separate transformers. Then I got the rest of the house with can lights utilizing br30 bulbs that are just a waste of 12 awg. The one place I was able to replace with dedicated LED fixture, I had to overpay for a decent product that wouldve been better off as a 24v basic LED light. When you consider most hvac systems operate at 24v, there is some real potential to create a decent standard serving multiple purposes.
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.
Lighting (on AC 110v / 220v circuits) also typically is specced for a lower peak amperage than utility or appliance outlets. For US codes, generally 15A rather than 20A. Lighting may use 20A, but isn't required to.
Other circuits must be 20A, e.g., kitchen outlets serving appliances.
This is what I want. A standard 48VDC socket would be a game changer for lighting.
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.
There are also these type of "ceramic substrate" bulbs which claim to give longer life. I suspect other compromises in the construction may negate that.
I don't think we're exactly stuck with the old form factor. We can start phasing them out. Replacement of screw sockets with modern fixtures is well within the capabilities of the average DIYer (though perhaps some places it's illegal for anyone but a professional electrician to touch anything hardwired).
Well, one of the main sales point of the LED bulbs was compatibility with existing E14/E27/etc sockets: no need to change the wiring, or the fixtures, just buy a new, better light bulb and screw it right in! It will also serve longer and be better for the environment, what's not to like? We'll even ban the sales of 100W and higher incandescent light bulbs to help you make the right choice!
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
Probably going to sound crazy, but we could start running water pipes in front of the walls and under the ceilings and mounting the LED's directly on the pipes for cooling. Creativity, thinking wholistically... the entire contemporary western house design needs a rethink frankly, from DC circuits to electrification to modular, mass-produceable utility drop-in pods, all with an eye towards integrated systems design paired with scalable modularity.
One of the problems is that in some countries like the US, ceiling lamps are hard-wired and not "user-replaceable", so people have to resort to using those stupid bulbs in their old fixtures.
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.
In the Netherlands we have just a pair of wires coming out of the ceiling but everyone replaces their own lamp fixtures anyway. Most people should be able to manage clamping or screwing down the brown or black wire to the L and the blue wire to N.
You can't have a low-voltage DC power supply supplying the entire home: the voltage drop between the supply and the LED would be huge. There's a reason we use higher voltages for long wire lengths: to increase efficiency and reduce line losses, since losses increase geometrically with the square of the current (according to Ohm's Law: P = R * I^2). Higher voltage means proportionally lower current, and geometrically lower losses.
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.
Low voltage DC lighting is a thing that has existed for a very, very long time. That most houses don't have it is more cultural than anything else, in my opinion.
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.
12V requires quite a lot of amps for enough light, so low DC is not optimal. Also LEDs are current driven devices, i.e. they will be sensitive to voltage changes (even with a current limiting resistor)
Low-voltage doesn't necessarily mean 12V. I think it's anything below about 50, although lighting systems currently marketed as "low voltage" are usually 12 or 24 volts.
The constant current thing is true, but that's not a terribly difficult problem.
For example: the stairwell shin-height lights in this 90s house are 12 VDC. There's a transformer plugged into a wall outlet in the nearby storage closet.
That works OK because the transformer is relatively close to the lights. If it were a reasonably-large house, and the transformer were on the opposite side of the house, you'd have a problem with a noticeable voltage drop. All these ideas people are throwing out here involve a single whole-house power supply. If it were for 48VDC, it would probably be fine, but 12V would result in significant line losses.
We already see transformers for a run of e.g. track lights, low voltage lights on tension wires, and so on. That's been a thing ever since halogens came to market.
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.
I still don't see the point of all this. If you have a handful of lights in a room, and drive them with a single power supply, you're still going to have big problems: the line lengths to each fixture will be different, resulting in different voltages. You can't drive LEDs that way with good results: they need fixed current. And you can't daisy-chain them either: if one emitter dies, then the remaining ones will suddenly have different current, and probably die quickly. The proper way to drive LEDs is with a power supply very close to the emitters and designed specifically for those emitters and the (short) wire length to them, not 4 meters away and not with some variable-length wire that can't be designed for.
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 must be powered by a constant-current supply, and distribution does not work well at constant-current, and is always constant voltage. So no matter what you will need some sort of switching power supply.
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.
> LEDs must be powered by a constant-current supply, and distribution does not work well at constant-current, and is always constant voltage. So no matter what you will need some sort of switching 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.
The really cheap stuff actually doesn't even have a power supply!
There's a breed of LEDs that takes straight AC and rectifies it using the LEDs themselves. By using a large number of tiny LEDs in series (typically in COB form), you can easily reach close to 110v or even 220v, and then you add a small current limiting controller in series that's dirt cheap compared to magnetics...
These are super cheap, and appear bright, but they flicker at 120hz, which can be annoying when there's motion or if you're sensitive to it.
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.
I have a serious problem with it for outdoor lighting and signage: it gives me a headache. Enough exposure will make me feel actively sick. The effect is not subtle.
Branding matters. If your brand is a light that flickers, you might want to consider the old adage penny wise, pound foolish. As a consumer, why would I choose to shop at an establishment that has flickering lights when I could shop at a different one that did not? Unless of course, I had no choice.
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.
I think this falls apart in the details. LEDs want constant current power supplies, and their owners frequently want them to dim. So you will still need a power supply.
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.
>Maybe this could be a prosumer retrofit thing, where the AC voltage gets converted to DC in the junction box, and then DC is sent down to the fixture.
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.
No, I'm saying you put a module into the junction box that the light fixture is attached to that serves as an AC/DC adapter, current limiting driver, and possibly a dimming sensor that would then provide downstream DC voltage to retrofit A19 bulbs.
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.
> This is the frustrating thing about LEDs that IDK we can change.
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.
Yes. For the commercial DC lighting installations I've seen they were using power over ethernet. That's not necessarily the only way to deliver DC power but whatever you do it's going to be wired differently from 120 VAC.
I used to do electrical installs in commercial buildings and this was starting to catch on, mainly because the the practice of running ethernet (including the 8P8C aka RJ45 connector, patch paneling, etc) is already established. This always felt very roundabout and requires expensive networking equipment just to run lights which I do not personally like because it will just cause confusion.
> Almost all LED bulb failures are because the power supply died due to overheating, not the LEDs themselves.
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.
>> I harvest the LEDs out of dead bulbs to use in hobby projects.
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.
They're remarkably heat sensitive, especially cheap ones. Some bulbs would gladly run for 10 years in a room slightly above freezing temperature, but put them in a semi-enclosed fixture in a normal living space, and they're dead in a few months. Fully enclosed fixtures destroy them in no time, unless you buy really exotic bulbs with truly massive aluminum heatsinks, rated for high temp operating environments. I can't even find domestic suppliers for those, and had to order from China.
The LEDs are surface mount (although big surface mount components, so not particularly difficult to work with). I desolder them with hot air (although you can totally do it with a soldering iron), then use them later as any other surface mount LED. I don't have access to YouTube right now, so can't search for you, but there are tons of videos covering how to desolder and solder surface mount components. I'd be willing to bet there are multiple videos covering this for LEDs specifically, too.
>Almost all LED bulb failures are because the power supply died due to overheating, not the LEDs themselves.
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.
It could very well be more of a US problem. In the bulbs that I've torn down, they all have used a capacitive dropper power supply, and it's usually been the capacitor that failed.
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.
You're right though I want to mention the LEDs are also damaged by the heat, their color temperature will wander, lifetime will be reduced, and brightness per watt will also be reduced. Still useful for projects and areas where perfect lighting isn't as important.
Indeed. And, as another commenter pointed out, LED bulbs often overdrive the LEDs in order to maximize light output -- but doing so significantly decreases the lifespan of the LEDs themselves.
Sometimes it is the power supply, but I've also had a number that died simply because one LED burned out and failed open. Because they are wired in series it only takes one failed LED to take out the entire bulb. If you're a cheapskate you can sometimes get a bulb working again by testing the circuit and bypassing the burned out LED with a jumper wire.
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.
Are they in fixtures designed for incandescents? "Boob lamps" for example are highly efficient LED bulb destroyers, since they don't breathe, and the bulbs overheat.
More anecdata, but I had ~20 lights, of various quality (many Hue, some cheaper Home Depot specials) in boob lamps that survived at least 11 summers in a New England house without AC. Still there probably, but I moved out so I can only vouch for 11 years.
That seems especially lucky. I'd guess they're slightly different in design or installation from the ones in my previous apartment (also northeast) that killed several and various LEDs... They stopped dying when I had the idea to shim the cover and create some ventilation. Mine were fairly heavy glass domes and had some insulating material against the ceiling.
I wish I could say that. I have a 3 year old house that is about 3k square feet wiht alot of bulbs. Every bulb installed was LED and I have replaced most of them at this point, and some more then once. I have even had the electrical company come out thinking there was something wrong with the power in my house or the breaker box. Nothing...
It usually comes down to the brand, factors you can't be aware of like component choice, and the light fixture itself. A lot of LED edison socket lights die quickly in recessed lighting or other tight fixtures because the heat is death to them. Manufacturers build the worst technically functional capacitors into the power supplies with a low temperature rating, meaning they really can't handle anything above ambient.
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.
I'm repeating myself a lot in this thread, so I'm sorry. What fixtures are the bulbs in? Are they a generic design meant for incandescents? A huge number of fixtures out there don't allow for enough heat to convect away and the bulbs overheat.
I've had some generally good experiences with LEDs as well. The only places that I've had somewhat higher failure rates for LEDs were places where I wanted a lot of light but the existing fixture had the bulbs trapped deep inside an enclosed fixture. I ended up buying a different brand than I normally do since it seemed the bulbs I had been going with just couldn't survive that hotbox, but since trying another brand the bulbs have lasted a couple of years so far.
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.
I think there might be something about the wiring in some homes. Some of my LED bulbs have been going for a decade now without issues. I have a few fixtures where bulbs keep hauling in specific sockets after a few months. I have one fixture in my bathroom where a bulb was fine for a few months and then two replacement bulbs failed instantly and three third one failed again after a year or so. Maybe the voltage is wrong and keeps breaking the power supply?
It could be sensitive power circuitry failing due to power quality, but is more likely a heat buildup. LEDs bulbs fail rapidly without good convective cooling ability, particularly in locations where you have the bulb on for great lengths of time.
My understanding is that the quality of LED bulbs has been going down over time. In other words, newer bulbs are less likely to stand the test of time than older bulbs.
Similarly, I started buying Philips Hue bulbs back around 2015 and none of those have failed in the time since, even being used every night since then.
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.
* 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.
The bulbs not being suited to certain uses doesn't make them bad bulbs, it makes them more limited. There are bulbs that are good for external use and ones that are not; but that doesn't make the external ones "better", it makes them different. There's tradeoffs. And the tradeoffs for LEDs have gotten better over time, but are still there.
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.
3 year warranty instead of 10, but I've had a lot of problems with Philips LED Flicker-Free Dimmable BR30 Indoor Light Bulb. They consistently die and need to be replaced within a year or so. I replaced a couple under warranty but just gave up after the hassle involved. I've tried other brands without success and would love to know what a good reliable alternative would be.
10 years isn't a minimum threshold for every item. Any individual item could fail any time, and the overall distribution will have a shape somewhere between a bell curve and a long tail.
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.
I have had at least 10 bulbs die on me within months, while others have lasted much longer, but the average lifespan on bulbs in our house can't be over 18 months. So I don't think people are complaining to be snobs, just noting that led bulbs don't last nearly as long as claimed. I have no idea why you needed to fall into personal attacks rather than concluding that bulbs readily available 11 years ago might be made better than those readily available now, and that most led bulbs are a lot newer than yours.
When I moved into my current place 5 years ago a lot of the lighting was 12V MR16 halogen bulbs. I replaced most of them with high CRI Philips Master LEDspots (specifically marketed as having a longer lifetime aimed at commercial installations but they weren't significantly more expensive vs "consumer" versions at the time if you were looking for high CRI anyway) and kept the transformers in place. I've had one fail out of probably 50 or so bulbs in that time, which feels about par for the course to me.
All the big name brand(Cree etc.) bulbs I've bought have been going strong for 5-12 years. Out of dozens the only ones I've ever had fail were off brand or special purpose like LIFX wifi bulbs.
Your comment is just regurgitating tech specs. In reality, the bulbs that are at hand vary so much in quality, that tech spec discussions are almost useless. The flickering is a real issue. I'm not aware of any standard way of rating the flickering of LED bulbs; they can vary from really bad (literally dark 50% of the duty cycle because one stupid diode) to decent (bidirectional diodes), to very good (full voltage regulator).
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.
Thanks, your posts were illuminating. I'm not looking forward to replacing my ancient quartz floor lamp, but I'm not sure I'll be able to buy a 3rd replacement bulb, when it finally goes out.
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.
Where exactly would you mount a light like the one you linked?
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.
10 hours per day sounds like a crazy amount of time to use a light.
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.
I'm in Oregon, just about on the 45th parallel. Not nearly as far north as some people, but winters can be pretty hard light-wise, and SAD is a bitch. I really should move to Arizona or Mexico in the winter.
As an amateur EE, I have analysed some of LEDs when I wanted to light up my kitchen counters. I wanted flicker-free LEDs with high CRI and temperature matching the rest of my apartment.
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.
>almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs
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.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, when that is exactly what has happened with incandescent light bulbs one century ago:
> 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.
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:
> There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order
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.
They've started marking LED bulbs as "not for enclosed fixtures" which is .... 90% of existing fixtures?
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.
I've taken to just replacing fixtures instead of trying to make bulbs work with existing, though I'm --> <-- this close to just throwing them all away and going back to kerosene lanterns and some incandescents.
It's because despite being far more efficient than incandescent they are still only about 30% efficient at producing visible light. The rest is heat, and unlike incandescent an LED does not want to be hot. The device must be cooled or it becomes less efficient and wears out faster. There is no good way to get the heat out of the front of the device because that's the side you are supposed to see, so in practice all the heat is removed from the back, i.e. the part inside the fixture.
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.
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.
It is interesting you cite that the cost has went up for lighting. Where I live the government owned utility often raises their rates per kwHr. One of the reasons they cite is the increase in efficiency leading to a drop in revenue each year.
The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.
My network and kWh cost are split and the network cost have risen far less than kWh cost. Also the network cost are constant. Looking at where those are used for the main cost are in peak usage capacity which efficiency actually lowers.
This would make much more sense, but if they billed by network cost I think people would quickly figure out there is no real reason to conserve electricity here. The cost of generation is so low (in fact negative sometimes) that it doesn't make a bit of difference.
On my first read of this, it makes sense though. The mileage of infrastructure is the same regardless of use. Those powerlines still need maintenance even if LEDs are making homes more efficient.
Burgers and bread loafs compete on all their costs, different competing outlets actually differ in those costs, and people choose which ones to use.
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.
What’s an example of what you consider to be a high quality led? I’m pretty happy with everything that I have in my home but I’m curious what you’re talking about
I can't imagine paying $150 for a six pack, when Home Depot's private label LEDs are $12 for a six pack. I could replace it 10 times before I hit that mark - not sure it's worth that.
And this is the exact reason that the market for good quality LEDs is so small. You care about price but not light quality (primarily CRI but also flicker and dimmability). That's fine, it's totally your decision to make. But the two products are incredibly far from equivalent.
I mean there’s gotta be some reasonable price limit where you stop blaming the consumer. If each supposedly higher-quality LED bulb is $50,000 are you still blaming the consumer? Especially when the consumer has can’t realistically even know if they’re going to get a higher quality bulb or just a $5 bulb resold for $50,000.
If you told me you could make one room of my house consistently color-balanced with LED lighting that I would have no reason to hate, I would ball up a couple hundred dollar bills and throw them at you.
(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.)
I have a few Hues and they are great, and last much longer. But in this house I cannot justify even that. In my kitchen/breakfast nook alone I have 10 lightbulbs plus an overhead flushmount.
Keep in mind: all LEDs leak blue light even the warm ones (color is achieved by average so you can have high red and high blue and it looks balanced visually). These bright blue leaking LEDs are great during the day — especially those with high CRI and R9 values. But not at night when you’re trying to go to bed! Switch to incandescent only in the evenings until they figure out blue-less dimmable LEDs
Not all, only white LEDs. You can use any cheap LED RGB strip without white components and set it to yellow/orange light with blue completely off. It has poor CRI though.
That’s the problem - sometimes they are great. They are more complex devices that use parts from random Chinese suppliers.
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.
In the 6 years I've been in my current house, having installed these everywhere in the house upon moving in (total around 80 bulbs), I've had less than ten to flicker or otherwise go bad. Maybe I'm just lucky.
I would prefer incandescents though. The only thing I don't miss about them is the heat. Everything else was superior.
I hear you, but I bought two waveforms just to try them out, and they're absolutely incredible. It's a shockingly better light than the $2 home depot light. It's the equivalent of going from an underpowered computer to one that's up to the job - you don't really notice how bad the old one was until you get something up to the task.
I bought many of the Home Depot private label LEDs...and had to replace every single one of them. Outright failure, buzzing, flickering. They're just terrible. I've replaced them with Philips.
I had one room that had a flicker problem. Replaced the fixture (was going to do this anyway because The Wife Said So) and it went away. I guess that's why some of the complaints seem foreign to me.
In contrast to the other child comment of this... Thank You!! Any additional suggestions for high quality LED's would be super appreciated. I'm still on mostly halogen lighting in my home. I keep trying to switch the LED's but for some reason with my vision, the low CRI of even "decent" LED bulbs make it so I feel like I can't actually see anything.
I recently replaced all my bulbs with Waveform Lighting bulbs. They're good but IMO overrated and overpriced, and their shipping prices are absurd. You can get high-CRI bulbs at Home Depot, it's just a matter of trying a couple until you find one that doesn't flicker (use your phone's slow motion camera) if you don't want to go the route of specialty bulbs. My Cree bulbs all flickered but my Philips bulbs did not; to my eye, there's no difference between the cheaper Philips bulbs and the much more expensive Waveform Lighting bulbs.
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 didn't hit many of these issues (our house has 100% LED bulbs, from different manufacturers).
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.
Primarily it is the E27 bulbs that are the problem. Designed to ease people into simple replacement into the old light sockets 10+ years ago. Now in 2023 the new LED products with the well designed power supplies work much better and efficiency. The author mentions renovations, but still using ancient fixtures, wiring and switches. A new house, or partial renovation, should now be wired with 24v for all wall and ceiling lights.
The same topic about LEDs has so many entries on HN in the recent years. I have posted about it a lot. To add to the list
- 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
OTOH, constant (not over)driven LEDs with dedicated power supplies (pref. isolated, so safer), with decent area, aluminum PCBs can last long.
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.
We're mostly on the same page, but there are some caveats to buying the heavier bulbs, even assuming the weight is all heat sink- because that won't matter if the heated air has no where to go!
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.
If one bothers to care about heat sinking, they might actually test the thing and opted not overdrive it. It's just a good totally layman indicator.
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.
Simpler and better light, but bad energy efficiency.
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!
Yes, but incandescent bulbs don't need to be cooled at all because they're just tungsten and glass. High powered LEDs require a heat sink to not damage the diode.
By cooling the issue is that LEDs and the driving electronics will become damaged with heat, while an incandescent has simple parts which can easily survive inside an oven. This matters when used in fixtures like recessed ceiling cans where there’s no ventilation. The LEDs just cook themselves while incandescents don’t care.
When my garage+office was built a few years ago, the electrician used a bunch of faux-recessed LED fixtures (the brand name is "I Can't Believe It's Not Recessed!", which is certainly memorable). They surface-mount over standard ceiling junction boxes, but appear similar to recessed lights once installed. We have ~20 of these fixtures, both interior and exterior. They're quiet, flicker-free, and have a great dimming curve (with the standard Z-wave dimmers I've used). We've had no failures so far after almost four years, so they've passed the leading edge of the bathtub curve.
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.
The faux-recessed LED fixtures are a really interesting case because they're either going to be the most reliable LED in your house, or one of the least! This is because heat is the LED diode killer (as well as the power supplies driving the diodes)
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.
You will find that you will need to search a bit harder to find an LED light that is rated to work with enclosed fixtures. Enclosed fixtures don't allow the same amount of cooling as a normal lamp.
I've moved three times with one set of cheap LED bulbs without having to replace a single one. I'd have gone thorough dozens of incandescent bulbs in the same time period. I'd have also burned my hand on a few.
LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.
- 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
These are all features from the producers POV. Planned obsolescence.
- Poor CRI and SSRI
This is true for all cheap lights, you gotta pay for that.
I replaced nearly all bulps with WiZ bulps more than 2 years ago.
- 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.
There are YouTube channels dedicated to repairing non-functional LED bulbs. In every case the issue is usually that one of n leds has failed, and if you solder a bypass then the remaining leds work fine. After that the only real problem is that all the adhesives used in the construction of the bulb more or less require that you destroy the bulb in order to get to the point you can repair or bypass the one LED.
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.
That page is also why the popular depiction of the Phoebus cartel (as in: they intentionally made 1000h bulbs, but could have made 3000h bulbs instead that were otherwise identical, like e.g. Veritasiums popular video) is wrong. For classic incandescent bulbs, color temperature and lifetime limit each other. It is not possible to make a 2500K incandescent bulb that lasts longer than about 1000 hours, and a 3000 hour bulb will always have a dim and warm output. Because that's how it gets to 3000 hours.
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).
How much of this is driven by the actual cost of properly provisioning emitters and fielding a good power supply vs the inability of consumers to hold manufacturers accountable?
Does the average person remember the brand of lightbulb they purchased at Walmart or the hardware store? I would hope the buyers at stores would have better sense to buy half decent brand vs utter trash available through 3rd party sellers online. Not much hope though.
> - It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal
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
> 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.
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.
At the limits of their ratings. They could make LED bulbs last many orders of magnitude longer and be more efficient, but they don't (unless forced to[1]) because they prefer planned obsolescence.
Or because, as with many products and services, many people go into Home Depot or wherever and buy whatever is cheapest--especially in a world where higher price does not necessarily equate to higher quality or longer life.
> especially in a world where higher price does not necessarily equate to higher quality or longer life.
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.
It's often hard to know, especially for items you're not going to individually research in great depth, whether you're actually paying for quality or for a name on the package even though it actually came off the same assembly line in China as any number of knock-offs. And, even if it is higher quality by some standard, does that really affect consumer outcomes?
I do not, nor will I ever, excuse penny-pinching by companies by agreeing that they’re forced to do it because people will always buy the cheapest thing they can. It’s trotted out as the lame excuse for bag check fees and other declining flying services, cheap consumer goods, cheap electronics, you name it.
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.
>To accept the premise is to believe that anything made of quality will never get bought/used which is manifestly not the case.
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.
And it's a matter of individual consumer priorities.
Some consumers will happily pay for business class seating on planes. Others will generally overlook inconvenience and less comfort if they can save $50.
Yes, another example is clothing. I have no interest in buying high quality clothing that I have to spend time taking care of. I want whatever lasts longest, while still being able to throw in the washer and dryer on default settings without having to separate colors.
The problem is evaluating quality before purchase. There's not a great way of expressing the sorts of factors that differentiate between good and bad LED bulbs that consumers can easily understand, let alone anything to encourage different manufacturers to use the same measurements. If the consumer can't tell what is quality, what's to get them to spend the money for it?
More recently Philips has started selling the Dubai-style bulbs worldwide, branded as the "Ultra Efficient" range. They're expensive though, as you'd expect.
I believe BigClive did a video on those, and while they did indeed use more LEDs for improved efficiency, they also had a more complex and thus failure-prone driver than the original Dubai ones.
In other words, more efficient, but not longer lifespan.
Are you sure those are the same bulbs? The ultra efficient versions sold on Amazon have reviews going back to 2017. Supposedly the Dubai-style bulbs were only available in Dubai even a few years ago.
I've been installing Kauf brand smart-bulbs, which come pre-flashed with ESPHome for integration with Home Assistant. Some of my earlier bulbs failed, and I recently noticed that the founder of the company commented on the issue and said he specced a more robust capacitor after early failures: https://github.com/KaufHA/kauf-rgbww-bulbs/issues/31#issueco...
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.
Thank you for making me aware those exist. I have a mix of Hue & cheap Walmart color wifi bulbs. The Hue bulbs are undoubtedly much high quality (in both output & reliability) but you pay for it. The Walmart ones are 1/5 the cost, but very hit & miss on whether you can easily flash tasmota/esphome - and there is no way of knowing until you try because of newer firmwares being shipped in the same packaging.
Placed under operating conditions very close to their specified limits.
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.
100 years of training make most people think of light bulbs as a trivial purchase. And now a product that cost $0.50 20 years ago is $10, and often performs worse for its purpose.
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.
This is my biggest barrier to finding decent bulbs. The search engines on sites like homedepot.com offer very little help, especially since they always show promoted items higher in the results, even if they don't match any keywords I put in my search. Then, if I do find what looks like the right thing, they're invariably out of stock everywhere.
I agree on most point but dim to warm is pretty undesirable in my point of view. I'd like to just be able to set the color temperature independently of brightness. Which I can do with my zigbee lights.
I have every single light bulb in my house (and outside my house) as an LED RGB Alexa-addressible light, and I love it.
"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...
Add to that spiky spectrum. Incandescent bulbs give black body radiation, a solid spectrum. Regular LED lights spike in RGB to achieve a neutral color. Can cause metamerism in photos and just looks bad IMO.
A bunch of this is driven by power efficiency requirements, creating a flickering low quality mess. Like no-flicker LED lights usually have a worse power factor.
A bulb gets a burst of power every 120Hz, so it would only use about .075 joules per cycle. Half the time is spent above 110v, and half is under 110v, so we need to store less than 1/240th of a second of power to have a perfect output and a perfect power factor.
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.
Everybody already knows these things. Like, why do democrats (not politicians, I mean you people) have a need to enact new regulations everytime they get a chance?
A misspelling of "SSI", Spectral Similarity Index, another color accuracy metric.
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.
The irony of this article is that the author is suffering from “too much choice”. LEDs have so much more capability than fluorescent and halogen bulbs that the burden has fallen on the consumer to sort out what dimmability, temperature, and lumens they need. It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.
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.
> I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs
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.
In practice yes. However, someone might also just say "No more ICE" and that is semantically different. Sure, in the real world, no practical difference.
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.
The thing is, a simple carbon tax is already designed to handle both of these cases. Burning coal/gas would have a cost proportional to the long term effects it has, and at the end of the day customers just see a price of electricity. If someone wants to pay 10x more for energy to power their lightbulbs, let them. As long as the energy they buy is sustainably sourced, who gives a shit how they use it?
They contain mercury - that alone makes them a terrible idea. I suspect they are also less efficient and more expensive to make than LED bulbs, while also having a shorter lifespan and various other drawbacks like not liking quick cycling, not being instant-on, etc.
So far I've had better experiences with integrated lighting than individual bulbs. Normally the integrated lighting means they've got more space to try and cram things like power supplies in there and can use a lot of the actual fixture to cool down the electronics. Meanwhile, fixtures designed to not care about the bulbs getting hot roast the LED bulbs and can cause early failure.
Maybe we've just had bad luck. Our integrated lights all failed in less than a year, whereas our bulbs have all lasted a few years at least so far without any failures or apparent changes.
I've had very good luck with the integrated fixtures. I have a number of them in my house and only one has failed (of maybe a dozen). This is a lot lower than the failure rate of LED bulbs. They are far brighter than the lights they replaced, and I personally like their lower profile. I also installed a number of the integrated fixtures in my father's house, and the increased brightness helps him quite a bit (he's 80).
On the other hand, the integrated bulb/fixtures in our house at least use separate driver units, and seem to be lasting much better than the average mains-voltage LED bulb (the oldest is 8 years old, used every day and still going strong, touch wood).
It is quite interesting that 2700K is often considered to be a "normal" color temperature, even though it is much yellower than sunlight (around 5000K, depending on atmospheric scattering). This stems purely from a technological limitation of incandescent bulbs. The bulb filaments simply cannot withstand a temperature significantly above 2700K. Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen.
There is another benefit to <3000K indoor lighting: lighting is usually used in the evening, close to bed time. So a warmer light helps with people's circadian rhythm in preparing for sleep. Remember that light at sunset also becomes warmer.
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).
I believe this is more folklore than science. A significant color shift happens only for a couple of minutes during sunrise and sunset. The change in brightness is probably significant, but it is hard to believe that the color has a significant physiological effect (but the placebo could be very strong!). In my experience, f.lux and co. make it pretty difficult to read text due to the low contrast, and simply changing the screen brightness is much more effective.
> 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.
> A significant color shift happens only for a couple of minutes during sunrise and sunset.
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?
What's true for outdoor lighting is just as true for indoor lighting:
> 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.
Most people have an expectation that residential lighting is on the "warm" (low color temperature!) side. I have a lot of Hue and Sengled bulbs in the house which are tunable and my son complains that they look "harsh" when they are set to a high color temperature. Myself I do art projects that require making fine sensory distinctions and it clear to me that I can do that better with more blue light.
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.
The TV is a good example because the light from TV is transmitted light, like a stained glass window. The TV can create the widest range of perceptual experience if it has R, G and B colors that are precise spectral lines.
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
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.
For this reason I think it's great to connect different temperature bulbs to each light switch in your house and switch between them during the day. I keep all of my bulbs on during the daytime and then switch to just the warm ones at night.
> For this reason I think it's great to connect different temperature bulbs to each light switch in your house and switch between them during the day. I keep all of my bulbs on during the daytime and then switch to just the warm ones at night.
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.
I have hue builds in my house and have them programmed to warm their color temperature as the day progresses into the evening, and dim themselves down significantly as it gets later.
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.
Humans have used fire probably for their entire evolutionary history. Before language and but after stone tools. The desire for a light spectrum at night similar to what a fire gives off surely comes mostly from that long genetic history.
Nowadays the situation is better, but for years after incandescents were banned in California, the only LED bulbs available in stores had a huge spike in the blue part of the spectrum, which I experienced as painful and now know probably caused the death of some of the cones in my retina through oxidative stress.
(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).
Not just incandescent filament bulbs, the original artificial light was literally incandescent - gas lamps, oil lamps, beef tallow, candles, tallow etc.
> Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of only 2700K is often chosen.
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.
It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it.
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".
I highly disagree about it being good enough. Those bulbs got hot and were expensive to run over the life of the bulb. I like a lot of light, so I'd often end up buying lots of 100W lightbulbs throughout my house. My kitchen would have like 6x100W lightbulbs on for several hours a day, so ~3.6kWh/day. At $0.11/kWh that's $11.88/mo just lighting my kitchen. $142.56/year to light one room one quarter of the day. And that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year.
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.
I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.
Power supplies in all GE bulbs are total horseshit.
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.
And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.
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.
Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.
For a "lifetime" bulb that doesn't make me crazy, I'd gladly pay $100. Well, maybe not quite, but certainly more than whatever I pay now for mid-grade (by HD/Lowes standards) bulbs.
I think it was worse in the past. I had to chose a daylight, warm or soft bulb. Now I buy one bulb capable of changing color temp and brightness from my couch and it lasts way longer. This is exactly the kinda thing sci fi had when I was a kid and now its in every room of my house.
What if you don't want to become an expert, which is something that wouldn't scale for every piece of tech and equipment? (Maybe you enjoy tweaking with lights, but what about chairs, tabletop materials, woods, wall paints, and yes -- electronic gadgets?).
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 totally agree- that's why I think we need better branding and marketing in stores. I personally like the Costco model of "do the research for the consumer and give them limited choices" but it's easy to see how this could go wrong too.
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.
I think it does? I go into a home improvement store, grab a dimmable bulb on the warmer side, and screw it in. That's pretty much the sum total of my dealing with LED bulbs.
Because EU banned the free market. The ideal would have been a slow transition where LEDs would have had to compete with bulbs.
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.
I generally buy the lamps that say "warm white". They're usually the 2700k variety. I've literally never had an LED light go out and the colours look fine. Philips lamps seem like a good bet, though I remember seeing an in depth YouTube review that showed that IKEA actually had better colour representation (many brands add an extra dose of red light to boost the warm colours).
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.
why are you acting like you need a college credit in an LED survey course in order to buy incandescent-replacement LEDs? It's like a new vocabulary of like 5 terms/concepts that can all be summarized in a sentence or two.
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.
> why are you acting like you need a college credit in an LED survey course in order to buy incandescent-replacement LEDs? It's like a new vocabulary of like 5 terms/concepts that can all be summarized in a sentence or two.
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.
Some people seem to have different memories than I do of what it was like buying lightbulbs before LEDs came out. I remember incandescents also having a variety of color quality, lifespan, and decorative options. I remember having the choice between bargain bin bulbs and luxurious options, making sure to outfit a room with a single brand so everything looked the same, realizing it's more difficult to read with this one or that, keeping receipts in the box in case they don't live up to the "double life" (2000 hours!) branding, the annoyance of having a regular bulb in a 3-way lamp, or a faulty circuit causing lights to flicker, not to mention the fire hazard of having something too close to an exposed bulb.
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.
I do have different memories than you about buying lightbulbs. I remember thinking 60-watt bulbs are frustratingly dim, 75 watt bulbs are a minimum, but what I really wanted every time was a 100 watt bulb, it just improves visual acuity tremendously. And my frustration with LED and flourescents, etc is that I can't find the equivalent of my good old 100 watt bulb; whatever the new rating systems are, it's all an excuse for "it's a little dimmer"
(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.)
It's really not that hard to find 15w LEDs with CRI95+. 15w will be approximately equivalent to a 100 watt bulb. A quick Amazon search pulls up multiple options.
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.
15W should approximate a 100W incandescent bulb - but IME it's hard to find 15W LEDs that do; I've tried several (at a variety of price points), and none were as bright as the 100W.
I ended up buying adaptors that turn a light socket into two sockets. Then you can achieve something approaching 100W, or better, with a couple of averagely dim LEDs.
>>"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."
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.
i had a similar view, until i found COB LED stripes (with dimmers), with 20W per m (LED W, not equivalent, i have mounted a few of those 3-10m (!), and now can have dimmed 1% background lights and hospital style brightness as well.
I've had good luck finding 100w equivalents at my local big box store. Only in the bright white color format though which looks terrible indoors. So those get used on outdoor fixtures and in my utility room and garage.
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.
I had been unaware of measurement according to "moles of photons", though I suppose it's not surprising. I've never really understood what a mole is other than "we decided to pick this number as a constant multiplier when doing small calculations".
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.
It's very important in chemistry to deal with molecular weights and convert them into usable masses. You could try to deal with uholy powers of 10, but mole makes everything easier by turning 1 molecular weight into 1 gram.
I'd been dealing with flickering CFL bulbs for some time already. My fovea is about 10hz slower than the rest of my retina. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 58hz versus 68hz (70Hz CRT displays were a goddamned revelation for me, when I could finally afford them. Thank you Iiyama.)
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.
Philips has "SceneSwitch" bulbs which are NOT 3-way lamps, but sort of approximate the 3-way behavior: When you toggle the power off and back on again within <1s, they'll cycle between bright, medium, and dim. (With color temperature becoming lower as you dim.)
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.)
>If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher
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.
I read a lot of the other comments here before yours and they all seemed to describe a reality very different from my own experience. Then I saw yours and it suddenly makes sense. I am also in the Europe, most other commenters seem to be from the US.
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.
> I am also in the Europe, most other commenters seem to be from the US.
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...
Greater than 95 or including 95? Most of the Philips brand dimmable LEDs have a CRI of 95. The eco smart is crap at 80 and that’s to be excepted from the cheap house brand.
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.
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.
I'm in the US and every single LED bulb I've ever bought - some ten years old - still work fine.
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.
I'm not sure if this is the norm in Europe, the only chain store I know that sells high CRI (>90) bulbs is IKEA. If I go to my local home store or supermarket, they are all junk Chinese bulbs that I doubt are really even 80 CRI.
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.
As much as I like EU, the new bulbs are flickery shit.
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..
I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. We know how to mass-produce rectifiers pretty much ever since diodes existed. We know how to cool mass-produced objects in compact spaces. But because we apparently can't have nice things, we don't get the product of all that knowledge; instead we get whatever cost optimized bullshit gets shat out of a factory run by MBAs.
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
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.
The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality?
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?
One guy bought over 4 thousands LED lamps over years, meticulously measured their actual specs and made a huge online catalog https://lamptest.ru/
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
Great site. I wish he had an English translation. But I forgive him. This is what the Internet should be! Individual people who do one thing really well. So happy to see that this still exists online.
Guess what. Lamptest guy from my comment above tests batteries as well. Here are his websites for this project (same data but different design):
https://battest.ru/https://batterytest.ru/
That would be the benevolent Engelbart version of AI, wouldn’t it?
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.
There have been attempts to reboot webrings for indie site discovery. With AI harvesting and monetizing indie sites, there is some risk of future content being gated by pay/auth/bot walls. Another approach could be private overlay P2P VPNs where participants are invited/vetted by the social contract of a small community.
The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time?
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 possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners
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.
> 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.
An also should add that color temperature on incandescent lamps play a role on its lifespan, want long lasting lamps? Lower the current (or increase the resistance).
incandescent light bulbs efficiency increases with their temperature/current. At low enough current they will last long enough but waste a lot energy as well.
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).
Thankfully, LED lighting will probably be gone within 20 years, while incandescent will be coming back more efficient than LED could dream. Already bumping up against theoretical maximum efficiency, LED lighting can't get any more efficient, and the better LED is at color rendition, the less efficient it is. But there are vast amounts of improvement available for incandescent lighting, and a group at MIT has already created incandescent light that is twice as efficient as LED.[1]
> Exciting, but that article is from 2016 and here we are in 2023 with no commercial availability.
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.
The concept is interesting, and reading the article reversed my initial response to treat this as a crank concept.
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.
Most of the capital invested in incandescent technology was related to the Phoebus cartel. The pressure to make incandescent efficient was just never there until very recently. 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 it's 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 messing with circadian rhythms, 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 we mitigate these issues with LED, 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 best LED can ever achieve is to perfectly match what incan does with little to no development, What it looks like, if the trend can be detected, is that as we fully mitigate the problems with LED, the more expensive it becomes until its cost and durability nearly reaches parity with what we already had with incandescent. It's becoming a wash.
Most of the capital invested in incandescent technology was related to the Phoebus cartel. The pressure to make incandescent efficient was just never there until very recently.
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.
It seems like this could be done differently, and perhaps more cost-effectively. Can't give cites right now, but here's a path I'd explore if I were in the field.
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.
Perhaps the planned obsolescence helped the consumer, because perhaps there would have been no willing producers if producing the lightbulbs at a price the users were willing to pay for wasn't going to turn out to be profitable, with respect to setting up production in the first place and then producing until the investment was paid back.
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?
Yes, but this is exactly what I'm asking. How do I find the ones designed in a buy it for life way? Or at least ones designed to last longer than the crap on the Home Depot shelves.
You can't buy a bulb that is rated to last a lifetime, but you can buy ones rated to last for 10+ years if used 8 hours a day (i.e. 35,000 life hours).
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.
Just another thumbs up for 1000bulbs. I've made a small order through there, but I like my bulbs. It seems to get very expensive quickly going beyond 93 CRI.
If you don’t trust the manufacturers, you’ll have to find an expert to trust, or tear down the bulbs and examine them yourself. The best way to know for sure is to measure the current being driven through the LEDs and compare it to their maximum rated current. The ones that don’t last long are usually being run at their maximum current, producing a lot of excess heat which shortens their lives dramatically.
I don't think it's untrustworthy in a sense you are deliberately lied to. I think more likely problem is that there is quality control issues and entire batch of particular bulb is compromised, like can happen with anything else - hard drives, RAM, pencils.
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?
I imagine light consumption could be regulated like food could be. As a smoker paying about 20 times more than 40 years ago I feel entitled to say that approach was a good idea.
I've noticed that LED bulb packages say they'll last several years, but so many of them die after just a year or so. I should start tracking this precisely, but I've just gotten the sense that they often die prematurely.
Assuming that the retailer can actually get a refund or replacement from the manufacturer (for some products, only the consumer can actually do that), usually they just replace the item or the wholesale price. They don't replace the retailer's gross margin. Thus the retailer ends up eating the cost of things like stocking and actually processing the warranty. For e.g. a one-person operation, that means extra work for zero profit.
It's usually not that much, but I can see why they might eventually be upset about it.
> 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.
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”.
Some bulbs will give you information on their CRI which ideally should be required to be labeled on the bulbs packaging the way calorie information is required on food packaging (but I don't think it is.) That will tell you roughly how good the quality of the light is by proxy of the spectrum of light it covers. On the other hand, there is no equivalent afaik for knowing how well the power supply is designed or how hard the LEDs are driven. I guess for that, the consumer can turn to the trusted source for this kind of information, bigclivedotcom. (Sarcasm; but seriously, this is a problem.)
Can't wait to become a mini-expert in fucking LED lightbulbs just to have decent lighting in my house. I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful. Computer? Better keep up to date on all of the CPU, GPU, etc. info. That doesn't even include the insanity of monitors. Cars? Better spend multiple weekends doing research before spending more weekends being ready to walk away from any dealership just to play the stupid negotiation game.
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.
> I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful.
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.
Want to have a decent quality of life at the end of your career? Better spend a large portion of your youth becoming an expert in finance and monetary policy, and hope you don't make a fatal mistake like buying long-term government debt right before inflation starts to run.
> I hate that the vast information of the internet has basically required us mere mortals to try and become experts in literally anything and everything just to be able to buy something that isn't awful.
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.
I'm in the same boat. For the sake of simplicity find some good brands and stick to them. Where I live its simple, get all your bulbs at IKEA. Most of them are 90 CRI and other parameters are good too. There are better ones on the market, but I dont want to go on a product hunt if my supplier is out
An important point in the article is that CRI for LED bulbs does not meaningfully map to the light quality.
>Oh, but: Experts agree that the color-rendering index doesn’t really index how colors are rendered. Some bulbs with a 90 CRI make things look wan; some with an 80 are passable. There are better, more useful metrics, but you can’t have them. Nobody puts them on the packaging. One lighting professional — an LED advocate, no less — told me he sometimes calls up the manufacturer and asks to talk to an engineer to get the real specs.
Yes that's a good point, there's definitely more to it than just CRI. That said, a bulb with very poor CRI definitely sucks, so it's not entirely useless. This seems like one of those things that will suck until it doesn't.
It's interesting how the led datasheets have all the useful information (spectrum, CRI, angular spread). But once manufacturers put them on a bulb, they will refuse to tell even what leds they used.
At this point I believe companies are willfully refusing to inform their customers.
That could be because putting it on the box creates a liability that the LEDs are meeting those specifications -- just because the source LEDs claim to meet those specifications doesn't mean that the enclosure being sold using them as a component will actually produce that. Additionally, any change to LED suppliers/etc now means that the box also has to be changed.
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).
CRI has to do the hard job of describing a spectrum using a single number. It's like looking at the entire menu of a restaurant and having to say how healthy the food there is. (heck, there's probably way better metaphors).
It does! And it seems that CRI is simply not a useful way to characterize LED light sources, as (i assume) it was established when incandescent and other non-semiconductor light sources were the only option.
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.
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.
Yeah there's not much you could personally do, other than maybe report it to the California Energy Commission. Bulbs need to be lab tested and the results submitted to the CEC, but I'm not sure how the lifespan testing is actually done, how accurate it is, or how easily it could be manipulated.
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.
It's crazy to me that in 2023, Amazon still refuses to offer meaningful product filtering. The miscategorization of items has been written about many times, and the best explanation for why they're not fixing it is basically "people like digging through piles of trash to find the good stuff". It's an infuriating experience and these days I typically use Google to search Amazon because their basic search will many times fail to show the product when I search for the exact product name or model designation, even when they do in fact carry it. On Google it'll be the first result. Google obviously can't filter Amazon products by category, let alone other parameters, but it's just so frustrating vs using other sites like McMaster-Carr, DigiKey, etc.
> Light source in combination with specified control shall provide “reduced flicker operation” when tested at full light output as specified in JA10, where reduced flicker operation is defined as having percent amplitude modulation (percent flicker) less than 30 percent at frequencies less than 200Hz.
Philips is generally a safe bet, and G.E. + Osram are as well. The generic crap at Home Depot and Amazon and Walmart that costs 1/4 as much will probably perform awful, but could be a hidden gem. Some dead giveaways are total lack of heatsinks and low price, but higher price does not necessarily equal good quality.
Look at the fixtures you're putting them in and consider if they're getting adequate cooling. If your average "long lasting" (they all claim this, but not at what temperature...) LED bulb is uncomfortably hot to touch, it's on the fast track to failure.
Mine are hanging in thin air over my bathroom mirror. The GE Reveal bulbs say they're good for bathrooms, but I suspect they don't like the humidity. I have four at a time in the fixture and six of them have died in the last two years. Once this box is empty I'll get something else.
I had similar issues with Phillips. I bought six over a year for the relatively excellent quality of the light, but they'd start flickering after a month or two. I had first suspected an electrical problem, but then tried them at entirely different locations in entirely different sockets and found the same. Haven't considered buying Phillips since and won't, ever. Nice light, shit construction.
The Phillips bulbs I bought have a ridiculously high failure rate. About half have failed within 6 months. Much worse than the supermarket own brands, or cheaper ones from Amazon.
Meanwhile I replaced around 40 halogen bulbs with Philips branded bulbs around 5 years ago, and have not had a single failure.
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...
The Philips Hue bulbs somehow never burn out. I have about 30 of them in my house, and the oldest ones (5+ years old now) are working as well as the new ones that I have bought recently. They are the only "smart" thing that I have in my house, because they're the only thing I've ever hooked up that worked with 100% reliability. They don't require an internet connection, etc. I never have connection problems, never have to reboot the hub, the switches work for me 100% of the time.
If the warranty expires, buy the same ones from $BIG_BOX_STORE and return the broken ones. The companies send them back to the mfgs for credit. They'll get the hint eventually.
That’s the current problem is knowing when a “Brand” which was a marker for quality cashes in.
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.
> The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality?
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.
> The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality ${PRODUCT} that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality?
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)
I was going to dismiss your comment as being naive. Because every generation before us had to deal with the problem of "how do I know that I'm getting quality item X from supplier Y?" See the clay tablet complaining about the quality of a bronze shipment. The answer really is "you have to test it" and frankly return policies at stores generally support purchase, test, and decide to keep or return. An option that many of our ancestors did not have, and yes not everyone can do this.
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
> Because every generation before us had to deal with the problem of "how do I know that I'm getting quality item X from supplier Y?"
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.
I really wish i could find a brand that would reliably tick all the boxes:
- 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.
Not sure where you are located, but if you have ceiling halogens to replace, there are two options - to use a low voltage bulb + separate PSU or the 'all in one' bulbs. Here in the UK they are designated GU10 for mains voltage and MR16 for 12v. If you go with 12v bulbs, you can invest in a decent power supply for them, and hence also avoid the poor quality bulb problem.
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.
The only bulbs I've found that work in tight enclosures without overheating and failing are a design that's probably 90% aluminum heatsink by weight and over 50% by volume, with a relatively small dome diffuser on top. I couldn't find a US distributor, so bought a box direct from the manufacturer on Alibaba. They were $20+ per bulb even from the factory, so not cheap. Beyond the crazy cooling, they have a thermal shutoff feature to prevent failure if they get too hot. Generally it's better to find an appropriately breathable fixture for LED bulbs, or even better, ditch retrofit bulbs and get something with a separate DC power supply.
That's not entirely true. I guarantee that someone at Philips is tuning their drivers not just on manufacturing cost, but also to "optimize" lifetime. That you can pay a premium for less "optimized" drivers is as much about market segmentation as it is about BOM costs.
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.
In SaaS this is considered normal. At least 15% of systems cost is the complexity of having different tiers of service, and selectively turning them on and off, and making sure the system is still coherent when intentionally crippled. These are real engineering expenses to make the product deliberately less functional.
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.
As consumers are we really supposed to do a ton of research on light bulbs and accept that we can't run down to Home Depot and get some new bulbs when they go out in our house?
This is the tragedy of modern times in the West. Hard to get anything quality without tons of research. Not even about the money, there's just too much noise
Yes, exactly. It’s one thing to need to be an expert to find a diamond in the rough. It’s another to not be able to guarantee you’ll get a premium product by going to a reputable retailer and picking out an expensive whatever. That’s the really frustrating part.
I think the issue is that there are no more reputable retailers. Just amazon, which more than half the time isn’t even amazon.
No, the lightbulbs at home depot are inexpensive and they work fine. On the other hand, if you care about CRI, then you can also google for high-quality bulbs with a good CRI. I don't really see a problem here?
The problem is I used to be able to spend a couple dollars on lightbulbs that consistently looked great and didn’t require a ton of research or money. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of high-end LED lightbulbs since moving into my new place last year, and the lighting here still looks like crap. Even with budget it’s hard to get something that looks good. Finding something that dims without flickering, the issue with dimming not actually warming like mentioned in the article, trying to match color temperatures to actually look good, so many issues. I’ve tried to splurge and get good lights and good dimmers but I’m still not happy with how it’s turned out. And if you go in any home or restaurant where they haven’t dedicated substantial time and money into good lighting, things are downright painful these days. I desperately miss incandescent bulbs. I’ve been told by several people that I seem oddly sensitive to this, but it’s a huge deal as far as I’m concerned.
Check out WAC lighting. You'll pay for the quality, but it's there. Work with a local lighting store to guarantee results. There are other high-end brands too, but WAC are very popular and what many high-end hotels and restaurants use.
Thats the kind of fixtures you find in the homes of people who got their wealth by robbing the poor.
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.
The problem is that previously the low-effort default option was great, and now the low-effort default option is bad and to get the equivalent of the previous great default you must now spend a bunch of extra time and money. "Caring about CRI" is basically just caring about the human visual system working correctly, that shouldn't be some weird niche.
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).
I bought Feit lightbulbs at a big box home store (not the cheapest option). Half of the 6 I bought failed in 6 months. The rest seem to be going strong at least…
THD by me doesn't even stock the CREE bulbs anymore, just the crappy FEIT generics.
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.)
If you want nice things that engineers spent thousands of hours researching, designing, and tuning, you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them.
Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.
> 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).
I mean… just here in this comment section are suggestions for suppliers of premium LEDs that I would trust based on the karma rating of the people who posted the links.
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.
The comment section is great , but if I need to find out quality of a random consumer product, what is the chance I will find it in this comment section? like 1%?
I feel like I’ve been able to make decently informed choices without too much hassle…
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.
Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you.
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.
Waveform Lighting bulbs have a great CRI and no camera visible flicker, but even they are overdriven/undercooled. I've already had one fail because of the PFC chip (I did an autopsy). They also don't have enough bulk capacitance to not flicker when other nasty loads are on the line.
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:
In my experience, Halogen seems to come closest to the warm calm of natural sunlight. Seems like this article helps to confirm that. Been trying to find the best halogen in an A19 bulb form factor so I can deploy them all around my house. So far I have come up short and the best I can find is Halogen floodlight which is just not the same.
Maybe I should just give up and install a bunch of these "sun tunnels" in my house.
As a side point, the bulbs from the link you shared might be of good quality but very, very low power by my standards. In order to work comfortably I need "200W replacements", not 40W-60W. This has enormous influence on my mood in winter months, probably people in warmer climates care less.
The "VIVID" line by SORAA are also high-quality high-CRI LEDs with good cooling solutions, and they're available in things like MR16 GU10 for desk lamps with the "weird" bulbs with two little prongs. I got a cheap GU10 desk clamp lamp on Amazon and spent twice as much as the lamp itself (which came with a functional bulb) on the nicer bulb. The exact model was SM16GA-09-60D-930-03 if anyone is curious -- fabulous super-bright desk lamp that is very flood-y and covers a large area with a very small lamp head.
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.
This is why i do most of my shopping online. its not about price or laziness, but about selection. retail stores usually only stock the worst brands of anything.
I used to buy Cree bulbs. But they they sold the brand and were changed to be the same mass market schlock as the other bulbs, except with a name brand that implies quality.
I use https://www.1000bulbs.com/ because they have godzillion bulbs in stock and it's possible to filter by CRI and color temperature. I just get highest CRI in required color temp, and it's good. More expensive, but well worth it.
Budgetlightforum.com is the best source for flashlights and bulbs. Everyone there knows the metrics of what makes good light.
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
I believe I tried to buy from them when I lived in SF, but their bulbs were at that time (and possibly still today) illegal in the state of California! I don't remember which regulation it was, possibly one around efficiency or maybe they needed to undergo some test. I think they even had a lab somewhere on the peninsula, too... I was so angry at the state of California for forcing me to have shit quality lights that I gave thought to becoming an illegal bulb runner.
> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period.
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.
You can, but as GP comment said, "Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford." When you're poor, are you going to cough up $18 for a single bulb, or get a 16-pack for $24 at Home Depot? $288 vs $24.
So "is now something" implies that incandescent was affordable.
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.
This is not how poor people are able to manage money. When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you don't buy $18 bulbs, ever. That $18 is needed for rent, food, and utilities.
> That $18 is needed for rent, food, and utilities.
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.
99% of white LEDs on the market arhave anything but full, smooth spectrums. Most of my lighting is from waveform lighting but you have to pay the premium for full spectrum, plus you have to shell out for expensive dimmers if you don't want flickering.
Thanks for the tip! Just ordered a light bulb from them to check them out against the standard crap I have around my house. Curious to see the results.
just because somebody decides to geek out about LED bulbs, does't mean all those stats that are theoretically measurable actually make a difference.
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 second the A19 and other bulbs from Ikea. I live right next to an Ikea and it turns out their bulbs are pretty good. Even the housing feels better than Phillips or others.
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.
>which flicker, and I proved it by just using my smartphone camera even
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.
No, if you spend money on a good LED and get a photodiode hooked up to an oscilloscope, you can quantify the flicker. The good LEDs will have absolutely zero.
rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer
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.
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.
> This seems like an excellent business opportunity.
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.
I expect the 'premium' light bulb market is similar to the mechanical keyboard market. Good products and good prices will find a small but dedicated market and build a good rep.
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.
> Even still, it's common to see homes with temperature-mismatched lighting.
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.
I would argue most consumers don't really understand the metrics. People will compare which computer has more GB of RAM, but fail to take into account which type it is or how necessary it is for their use case. It's especially common in the food industry- it's funny how often some products are market "gluten free" even though nobody who knows what gluten is would think to find it in a can of tomatoes. It's pervasiveness surely means it's effective.
Ideally? Something like RMS and peak-to-peak amplitudes below 120Hz and below 1kHz, when fed with good AC power. The former would be potentially noticeable in peripheral vision or with eye movement, and the latter could affect filming, particularly with a rolling shutter.
I can sell a million devices that cost me $4 apiece, or I can sell 1.5 million devices that cost me $3 apiece. That only stops if I have a competitor selling $4.60 bulbs that take away all of my customers.
As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.
This is a trend that has spread into every aspect of specifically American society.
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.
> the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer
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.
"cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer." that's just this stage of capitalism unfortunately. Take an airplane trip and you will experience similar effects.
It’s not MBAs place to set public policy though is it? If it’s the MBA’s fault at all it’s because they’re doing their job which is optimising the product to the market. If the markets not optimising the right things then that’s a failure in the market. Maybe the market is being manipulated somehow has it was for the old incandescent bulbs - but that’s not necessarily the fault of the management tier … some economise regulate for consumer value … some for profit
The problem is that people have a limited amount of caring and markets are really good at taking advantage of consumer ignorance. If you care about color rendering but don't know what color rendering is, you can't shop for it (and if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet).
> if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet
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.
Yeah, I'm back to wanting a curated shopping experience. I don't want the cheapest thing. I don't want multiple options- thats worse than nothing. I don't want to worry about counterfeits or knockoffs. I don't want to do research, consult the relevant /r and then look through comment history to see who is paid to say what. I want a store to have an opinion and stock high quality stuff. I would happily pay a premium to offload decision making.
Instead of force, maybe voluntary? Publish/promote a set of standard measurements for consumers, then let consumers drive the manufacturers. "The Market" will follow the consumer if the consumer is strongly inclined about its desires - I think we have seen this play out in other consumer electronics niches...
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...
It remains the case that you don't discard your identity as a person or personal responsibility when taking a job somewhere, and the purpose of an MBA for the last 40 years has been to produce crappier products for less money while charging consumers the same amount. It's not the MBAs place to set public policy, but it's also broadly an admission of some kind of serious cultural failure to say we need public policy to prevent a large group of people from stripping everything they get their hands on down to the studs for short-term gain, and it doesn't say great things about that group of people, either.
How does that work? The head of engineering gets a unit cost reduction target and then they call some shareholders to come review some proposals for which option works best? Do they show up with a printed certificate showing they own at least one share?
Public companies are required to hold annual meetings with shareholders where they vote for board members and bring up proposals. Shareholders may choose to vote for board member with views about managing the business that they agree with.
It’s your job to decide whether to make the world slightly worse and make an extra dollar, or maintain/improve quality while finding efficiencies elsewhere.
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.
Cost optimization IS the limits of the technology. All the nice things you mention are the result of large amounts of work by exceptional people. This costs money. Most of them require higher-spec components, or more design time, or more complicated fabrication and assembly. These things also cost money.
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).
I've had the opposite experience. I find that LIFX bulbs fail far too often considering the price tag, however I've yet to find anything else that can match up to them when they work. So I just keep buying them.
Save on their electric bill with cheap LEDs that get the job done, while worrying about more important things than if the bulb flickers sometimes when you dim it?
I had an epiphany this year that I don't need to conform to the lightbulb socket interface any longer, now that things like straight-wired LED modules [1] are available. They waste a lot less space on unnecessary hardware, and can therefore fill more space with useful light producing material. I've been slowly converting my big round ceiling fixtures and the light and dimming performance is nothing short of miraculous.
So now changing the "lightbulb" becomes an infinitely harder task, and in some areas requires you to pull a permit and or hire an electrician (e.g. do you think a retiree is going to change this themselves?). This seems nice predicated that LEDs last 10-years or longer, which per the article and elsewhere isn't the case.
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 remember watching a documentary long ago about the history of computing. In it, someone expressed skepticism of transistor-based integrated circuits because unlike vacuum tubes, the transistors in an IC couldn't be replaced when they failed.
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.
The direct wiring is of course not as easy as changing a lightbulb. However I find the trade worth the improved light quality and we can agree to disagree about the short-termism of it.
Is it just me or is there something off about this article? It reads quite incoherent.
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.
Well, I'd guess for most people it doesn't matter whether the LED-chips themselves, capacitors, or some other part of the circuitry fails. If cost-cut cheap LED bulbs with components driven to the max are the norm, consumers will obviously associate LED bulbs with the kind of problems that causes and not with what LED tech could be if it'd be given more budget to breathe.
This article and comment section is bizarre to me. It's like travelling back in time to the 2000s.
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.
I guess you can't tell the difference? For me it's huge. I recently changed my bathroom downlights from dimmable LEDs to dimmable halogens, and it's so much nicer. The colour temperature was the same, so I guess it's not that. It's something else about the way they work. I don't profess to know why, but I can absolutely tell the difference, and I have a very clear preference now. And this is after a decade of me being very bullish on LEDs for environmental reasons and proudly fitting LEDs everywhere possible (expensive, carefully chosen ones too, with appropriate colour temperature). At the end of the day, LED light is just horrible for some reason.
I think it's the flicker. Pulse width modulation is evil. I'm not aware of a single instance where it's preferable over an analogue adjustment. It's a horrible and thoroughly "non-human" solution to a problem. The most annoying thing for me is that car headlights are now PWM LEDs. I can see the flicker, especially in my peripheral vision. It's highly distracting and annoying.
Flicker in smartphone displays has a different impact from flicker in lighting. One typically holds a smartphone fairly still while viewing it, but flickery lighting becomes evident when things illuminated by it move, or when the viewer moves their head or eyes relative to the light source.
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.
They sound different and that’s the point. There’s a whole genre of music that sounds like vinyl or staticy tapes. Clearly people like it.
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.
Fair! Although I'm just reporting my preference and not making any contestable claims, other than that I can tell the difference. If someone can make an LED bulb where I can't tell the difference, then I'd fit my house with them, but it seems like this must be impossible or someone would have done it.
Just came to say I agree with your assessment 100%. I think it's about the fact that incandescent light is a broader spectrum. It seems to affect the say shadows are cast etc. It's just not as nice as incandescent.
There are three factors: tint, flicker, and color rendering.
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).
I also have the ikea home smart bubls. They're dimmable and can change color.
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.
I had literally the exact opposite experience when swapping mine out. Both the incandescent and halogen replacements resulted in a _way_ better quality of lighting. And these were just like "first ones off the shelf" from the Home Depot or something- I'm not exactly sure it was maybe 10 years ago. But I vividly remember thinking how much better the lighting quality was, and I had far more options in terms of color temp, which was great.
You're right that the colour temperature isn't the whole story - it's a single number trying to represent a spectrum which is a line graph. So you can have wildly different spectra with the same CRI.
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.
I have bought almost exclusively LED bulbs over the last 10-15 years. As a nerd, I always look fairly carefully at the specs, and I choose good ones. If, when I buy off-brand halogens one time without really looking into the technical details and it's like "Oh yeah, this is how artificial light is supposed to look", then that's a problem with LEDs, not with me not looking hard enough for good ones, because I look much harder than a typical consumer would.
Seriously. I always thought I was very picky, both to flickering and color temp(3000k FTW). Sure, the >3000K bulbs look like death, and I've had issues with some bulbs flickering, but overall I'm really happy with the light output of my LEDs(color temp, CRI, stability, longevity). I'm in the US too. Not sure what folks are complaining about.
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.
One example is my living room. Sometimes I'm hosting people over, and I just want the whole room to be really bright as we're all gathering around, talking, maybe playing games, etc. I want that room practically as bright as I can get it during those times.
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.
I have a lot of dimmers in my house because they were there. It's nice to turn the hall lights down at night when I'm the last one awake (but not if they get too flickery; older dimmers built for incandescent don't always work with dimmable leds), and very nice when watching or starting a movie, etc.
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.
> 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.
Many people complain about sleep problems. Light exposure is essential to regulating sleep cycles, and going from full brightness to full darkness at night can easily contribute to those problems. Dimmers allow finer control of exposure.
A very large portion of lamps purchased at home goods stores have dimmer switches (a knob that you turn instead of flipping a switch), and dimmers have been widely available at home improvement stores for decades. This idea is not some niche thing limited only to smart home tech people. It doesn’t have to be automated—one can just get up and set the brightness to their liking.
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 agree that it's probably still niche, but judging by the expanding section of smart lighting at my local Home Depot, my guess is it has gone beyond techies at this point. Home Depot definitely doesn't cater to tech folks.
For me it's like if the sound on your computer was either on or off. I adjust the light to the specific task, time of day, my mood & energy level, and what the natural light is doing to the room which also varies by season, time and weather.
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.
Sorry, I wasn't clear at all. The non-dimmable ones seem prone to flickering with changing voltage, and all grids have varying voltage. And then, at least if you're like me, you start thinking of all the broken things that might manifest in flickering lights.
> I've never understood the affection for dimming lights. Essentially always I want lights on or off.
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.
Since the electricity they use is basically free, and there is (almost) no practical constraint on heat emissions, LEDs are generally too bright.
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.
It’s not ass simple as dimmable or not dimmable. Not all dimmable leds work with all dimmers, some do and make a horrible hum but are still highly recommended in reviews by people who don’t have those issues. The situation is a nightmare for someone just wanting to go to a local store and buy a bunch of bulbs for the room where they eat.
Further, if you dare to mix bulbs you’ll often get different color/brightness behavior at different levels of dimming.
Non-dimmableness is only one of the problems. For me the biggest problem is that all LEDs are blue, despite of any light-filters. I can not use it in bedroom when I use to read books before sleep and in bathroom when my aestetical needs of seing bare body have been not met. I have even changed my place of living since Sodium lamps have been replaced with LEDs on my old street. And if I need a really bright light or really high CRI then I'm going to use MHL. My point is that LED is not really a good source of light except of if I need energy-efficient source and/or with high tolerance to often on/off.
My home is full of bright, warm yellow/orange LEDs.
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.
> For me the biggest problem is that all LEDs are blue, despite of any light-filters.
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.
For reading in the bedroom I use RGB strip behind furniture, preset to yellow. Diffuse light, no blue at all. Of course poor color rendering but I don't mind for this use case.
That is true only for white LEDs. The RGB strip does not have them (there are some that include white LEDs but not this one). If you set it to yellow, only pure red and green elements are on, blue elements are completely off.
There is no such thing as a pure red LED. Those are blue ones but with light
filters. If you don't see blue which is actually present and you see deep red which is actually absent then maybe consider yourself as brainwashed by marketologists.
I think you misunderstand the fundamental difference between "white" LEDs which are generally a blue LED associated with various phosphors that convert the monochromatic blue light into a mostly continuous spectrum going from blue to red, and the monochromatic R, G and B LEDs that each emit a fairly narrow band that is either red (with no blue or green at all) green (no blue or red) or blue (no red or green).
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.
LED lights are unfortunately a big marketing scam. Remember when they promised that the will last up to 20 years? Well, when I renovated my house 5 years ago I installed LED lights over my kitchen island - they were so bright that you couldn't look directly at them and it was too hard to see somebody on the other side of the island.. This is no longer true - they are visibly dimmer. In a few more years they will probably have to be replaced.. The problem is that since they don't use bulbs, I will have to replace the whole fixture.. and the current lamps will end up in the trash. We're not going to save our environment this way.
I've trashed over 30 flush-mount LED lights in my house and its 2018 construction. It wouldn't be so offensive if we didn't buy into our own marketing bullshit so much. Pretending like 20 years is a realistic timeframe for a semiconductor to survive in that kind of environment is fantasy, but then you go about constructing homes and businesses like it's true.
This kind of scam is getting really old for me. LED lighting isn't the only one being pushed on us.
I think LED lights will lose some of their brightness in the short term, but maintain a useful plateau much longer. At least, that's how LED projectors work, vs lamp projectors, which steadily decline until they're unusable.
However, I would always buy standard socket LEDs unless you're really committed to that lighting style.
OTOH, my original Cree retrofit can lights from about 2014 are still going strong. They seem to have the electronics separate from the LED itself which keeps the heat under control. I've definitely noticed that some less expensive designs don't bother with that, and it really lowers the longevity of the fixture.
"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.
"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:
That's funny, I remember going through incandescent bulbs pretty quickly. I always knew where the extra light bulbs were in the house and they were a not-uncommon grocery list item.
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.
My experience is opposite of yours. I have not yet had to change an LED light in the last 8-9 years since I started using them and replacing incandescent ones in my apartment. On the other hand I remember changing incandescent ones quite often and using up all the surplus ones I had after I started the transition to LED.
Yeah ~10 years of LED bulbs and I've never replaced one. I've moved multiple times and brought my bulbs with me. Used to have a drawer with a bunch of incandescent ones ready to go because it was a regular occurrence.
> I've never seen more than 15000 hours from an LED bulb at best.
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.
This is where the idea meets the real world implementation. Yes, LED's can last longer, but the additional electrics used to convert from house-hold AC power can't.
gjsman-1000's point and yours make sense and somewhere on the page it was suggested to start running DC power just for LED lighting in homes. Until then, our new plan is to use LED light strips and stop buying LED bulbs. The idea is that the strips have an external power supply so I'm hoping the LED's will have the lifetime they deserve.
The lifespan on incandescent isn’t a conspiracy. Cheap bright incandescents don’t last very long.
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!
It's still happening to LEDs as well. Big brands are over driving LED chips, degrading their lifespan significantly.
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.
My understanding - which may be wrong - was that long-life bulbs used more electricity to operate and that the efficiency gains of a 1,000/hr bulb reduced the overall cost.
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.
For me, LED bulbs have a failure curve like any other electronic device: high level initially and quickly levelling off to zero. I've probably had... 10% of my bulbs purchased in the last decade or so go back to the store because they've either failed or started flickering. Outside of that, I have zero failures after having the bulb for a month or two. I have a box of bulbs and some of them are bulbs I bought years ago and pulled out of my house when I moved, and I've used them at various apartments since. Still going great.
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.
You're buying terrible bulbs if you've never seen one last 15k hours. Just buy some reputable branded bulbs (e.g. Phillips) rather than no-name cheapo crap from Amazon.
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.
US here. Light quality in my house went up noticeably when I switched to LEDs about a decade ago, probably due to having way more/better options for color temperature. Haven't had to replace a bulb since. I have zero clue what the author is talking about.
I think just like CFLs and incandescents before, quality is going vary and people will need to stick to a brand that works. I've had a lot of success with Cree light bulbs. They seem to have much better light quality than some of the hardware store brands.
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.
Wanted to give a tentative endorsement to Cree. I bought a box of LEDs at the hardware store and about a third of them failed early. I wanted to spend good money on good product; Cree is well-regarded, and so far (a few months) I've been way happier with their bulbs than the cheap stuff.
Cree has been good to me so far. Haven't actually had one fail yet, though I've had a few of the lesser brand ones (Feit, from Costco, mostly) fail. As they go, I replace with Cree.
I have "Is It Snappy?" on my phone, and before I buy any bulbs or fixtures I check to see how badly they flicker. Walking down the Home Depot or Menards lighting isle and taking video of each fixture, there is infinite variation, and not always tied to price.
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.
It went like this in the EU: "Bulk purchasing of incandescent bulbs was reported ahead of the EU lightbulb ban. Many retailers in Britain, Poland, Austria, Germany and Hungary have reported bulk purchasing,[126][127][132][133][134] and in Germany, sales rose by up to 150% in 2009 in comparison to 2008.[125] Two-thirds of Austrians surveyed stated they believe the phase-out to be "nonsensical", with 53.6% believing their health to be at risk of mercury poisoning.[135] 72% of Americans believe the government has no right to dictate which light bulb they may use.[136] Czech Republic President Václav Klaus urged people to stockpile enough incandescent bulbs to last their lifetime.[137]"
Back then LEDs were still quite a bit worse, so I got some spare incandescents too. I still have about 20 bulbs somewhere that I got for cheap as retailers were emptying their inventories. I have switched almost all lights to Ikea Tradfri bulbs that are controlled via Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant and I wouldn't go back. I still have an incandescent bulb in one lamp, but the Ikea ones set to the right temperature are so close I don't think I could tell them apart.
LED bulbs suck. CFLs suck. The light is poor and though they cost an order of magnitude more than incandescents did, they are built so cheaply that they don't last any longer. And they qualify as hazardous waste when they need to be disposed of. At times I've seriously considered trying oil lamps.
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.
It feels weird to me to see this kind of comment on HN. I’m sure somewhere out there on the internet there are people complaining that computers suck because they bought a few cheap computers and didn’t have a good experience, so they’re assuming all computers are bad.
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.
The regular consumer, like us, don't give a rats ass about the technology behind the light, we just want them to work well. The light is much, much worse than incandescents for the typical consumer. That's what the article is about. Your comment if anything is the weird one.
What? What is weird about that comment? An LED light from a random brand purchased from a random grocery store is very likely to work just fine, and that is many people's experience, so if your experience is different, you should provide concrete evidence instead of hand waving or using words like "worse" with no substance whatsoever.
Nothing hand-wavy about it. The article that this thread is based on provides the evidence, and you are refuting it. I am refuting your refutation. My experience aligns exactly with the article, that nothing really got better, and especially not the light in my rooms.
Whatever brands in the major stores. WalMart, Target, Lowes. They all suck. I don't care to keep notes and do research on light bulbs, for fuck's sake. My spare time is worth more to me than that.
I have heard that newer LED Bulbs now have some kind of built in obsolescence. This is from someone I know who is an engineer working for the US military.
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.
> I have heard that newer LED Bulbs now have some kind of built in obsolescence. This is from someone I know who is an engineer working for the US military.
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.
Glad to see someone referencing BigClive's teardowns and explanations.
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.
I think GP's explanation is compatible with "Products like this exist where mandated".
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)
> 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.
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.
I tried to make a warranty claim since I had a whole batch of bulbs die within a few months. GE required me to ship them the bulbs. I abandoned the claim, switched to another manufacturer, and don't put stock in those warranties at all anymore. I doubt they get very many claims and surely someone there is using that as proof of customer satisfaction.
They are almost certainly referring to the use of 85°C capacitors. These are much cheaper and die quicker compared to their pricier counterparts.
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 think the european commission was considering something like this with right-to-repair laws? Having a "durability score" on the package, or something like that.
I'm finding this true with the bulbs I've bought in the past 5 or so years. The first one I bought about 15 years ago is still going, but most, if not all more recent LEDs have died. Even the ones in the basement that are mounted with no case to increase the heat around them.
I read the "guarantee" when I buy new bulbs but who keeps receipts or track of light bulbs?
You can write the install date (and store name) on the bulb housing with a sharpie when you put it in the socket. It's not a receipt but it at least gives you a shot at getting a return when it fails early.
You could also just write an arbitrary date and the name of the most convenient shop when it fails, so I really don't see what good that does, it's very far from a receipt.
At the very least, it gives you an idea which receipt to look for in your box of receipts/warranties.
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.
If you run a store, and a customer comes in and says "I bought this item on $x date; I don't have the receipt but this is how I know", you have two choices:
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.
I'm starting to suspect that it's not the LEDs themselves that are failing but the transformer packed inside the base. I haven't really dug in though.
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've read that it is the controller circuit which is cheaply made. The LED would continue to work fine if the current source hadn't failed. I had a lot of trouble with GU10 LED lamps, finding ones that last as long as a halogen.
Not exactly "the transformer", but yeah. See the afore-mentioned videos by Big Clive on YouTube to find out how to hack your bulbs to make them last indefinitely (albeit at a reduced light output).
I am sensitive to low refresh rates - back in the crt days I would visibly notice low refresh monitors and it would give me headaches. Some (low cost?) led bulbs give me the same effect- I can see the rapid flicker. Some hotel rooms are notorious for this.
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.
A lot of cheap LED retrofits on older halogen headlights do this. The only thing worse than being tailgated by a F-150 with ultra-blaster highbeams is an old junker with cheap flickering LEDs. I've even noticed a lot of DRLs flickering lately as well. We need stricter laws on headlight brightness and intensity in North America, and we need them yesterday.
Not mentioned in the article are the LED replacements for full-size fluorescent tubes (i.e. 48in tubes). I got a bunch for my basement. The LED tubes really are a million times better than the fluorescents. For one, they aren't enormous fragile glass tubes filled with toxic mercury vapor, and two, they give off good light (for a basement work area) with very little power.
Can you place those bulbs in the regular fluorescent "socket"? I bought a house and have a few burned out fluorescent looking long bulbs and I don't want to replace them with toxic bulbs.
Yes, but check the bulb. Some are compatible with the fluorescent ballast, but some expect you to use a fixture that has had the ballast removed. The trend is towards the latter, because they are more efficient.
A CFL ballast can be modified with a bypass by snipping a couple of wires and tying them to other wires. It takes 10 minutes and it’s reversible. I did it myself after watching a YouTube video. The LED t8 replacement was cheaper and brighter and used less electricity.
Interesting. I have some of those fluorescents in a storage room and I hadn't even thought about there being an LED replacement option. Thanks for posting that.
Feels like a different world to my experiences: while the cheaper lights we have are a bit more dim compared to what I'd like, we also have stupidly bright LED lights installed (really need to do a clean sweep and get all the sockets onto 1 kind), We also have dimmable downlights (some of the first LEDs in the house, due to water damage messing up the prior lights) which are dimmer than I'd like, but they were bought very early so I find that reasonable.
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!)
> 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.
>But I really can't think of more than 1 or 2 failures over more than enough years.
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.
There is a problem with LED lamps: they need their own power supply to convert AC to DC. This is where a lot of the issues happen. Low quality filtering caps, or just circuit designs with a lot of ripple lead to pulsing. When the filtering cap fails, the bulb often does as well.
For this reason I think that LED filament bulbs are the best choice now. The cheap ones can have flicker issues, though. But otherwise they're a nice step up from the last generation of LED bulbs.
Cheap LED bulbs generate the worst light I’ve ever experienced. But after some research I found that there are options that make a nice warm light with no perceptible flickering.
Personally I prefer the phillips warm glow dimmable bulbs
Yeah this is one of those things where quality really makes the difference. If you buy cheap LED bulbs, you'll hate LED bulbs. Buy goods ones, and you love them. The dichotomy is really stark in the overall HN discussion.
Have you had any lifetime issues with these? I bought a dozen and a significant number started emitting warm color while at full brightness instead of just dimmed.
I don't understand any of this at all. I got the cheap 2700K LED bulbs from a big box store (~$3 for a pack/bulb, I don't remember) and they are wonderful, they're just as good as they were when I got them, and the spectrum feels the same as an incandescent bulb. I literally put no thought into the purchasing process and it couldn't be more ideal.
Agree completely. I bought a bunch of LED bulbs maybe a decade ago to replace my incandescent ones. Lighting quality was immediately better, and I have never had to replace a single one. They have made multiple moves with me. Previously I was replacing bulbs maybe annually, or every 2 years.
I genuinely have no idea what people in this thread are talking about.
> "'Hungarian-made GE Básica bulbs ... with a bold stamp on the side reading, NOT FOR SALE FOR USE IN THE UNITED STATES."
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!
The EU regulations were against sales of incandescent bulbs. But in most countries they are still available rebranded as "heat bulbs" or "workshop bulbs" with a large "NOT INTENDED FOR HOUSEHOLD USAGE" 'warning' sign.
The sun's spectrum is relatively smooth, whereas there are some grow lights that have a narrow, intense spike of UV designed to match chlorophyll B's absorption. Not all grow lights have this spectrum, but it's worth being careful. It's one of the reasons why some grow lights come with a warning about using eye protection.
My understanding is outside, your pupils will dilate as the light increases, protecting your retina from increased UV. If you had a strong emitter of UV in a relatively dim room, your pupils wouldn't shrink and would allow more damaging UV to hit your retinas.
I'm not sure where you got this understanding from, but the LED lights I'm talking about (grow lights) are definitely bright enough to make your pupils shrink.
> 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.
Here’s an additional piece of nuance that these conversations always overlook: how much waste heat is actually waste heat? Where I am in Quebec, we have hydroelectric electricity in spades and since it is so cheap many homes have electric baseboard heating. Couple that with the fact that in Quebec we run our heaters for 7 months of the year, and that means that 60% of the time your waste heat is not entirely wasted. Assuming at least 75% of the infrared radiation from the bulb remains within your home, then on average year-round 45% of the thermal energy is not wasted and your 90% efficiency improvement of LEDs suddenly only looks like a 50% improvement.
As we continue to shift our primary motivation for creating products away from what is best for the consumer towards what is best for an artificially determined goal we will increasingly see the compounding secondary effects of those choices.
I believe that "not creating an uninhabitable environment" is probably best for the consumer, yes? Surely, if you are posting on hn, you are aware that people do not always make the best decisions for themselves in the long term, and that putting guard rails in place is a good mechanism to prevent us from accruing (technical|environmental) debt?
The "artificially determined goal" here is not roasting ourselves alive in 50 years, which I for one think is a better goal than "satisfying consumer preferences."
My pool pump and AC will cost me about $700 US this month. Switching from incandescent to LED bulbs might have saved me a few dollars. And for what? For expensive bulbs that flicker, don't reproduce colors well, last less than a year, and undulate and buzz when dimmed (yes, the dimmable ones)? I think we've been bamboozled by the light bulb industry.
Wow, what kind of awful bulbs are you buying? I have literally a house full of LED bulbs, some of which are on dimmers, and have experienced literally none of these problems. Just for starters, I haven't had a single LED bulb fail in the 8-odd years I've been using them in my home.
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.
I'm reading these comments and thinking the same. While I have had a handful fail quicker than I think they should, on the whole ours are great. A bunch of them are dimmable, most are warm-white for a cosier light.
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.
I've had plenty fail, stuff from the grocery store, Home Depot, Lowes. Actually the fan-size bulbs I ordered from Amazon were the worst ones, which I expected since it was almost the cheapest. Interestingly, the generic ones I got from a state-sponsored efficiency program have been the best.
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.
Perhaps it's the 50 year old house I live in, but lots of Phillips brand, also whatever the Lowes and Home Depot in-house brands are. I bought Kree in bulk for my last house about 10 years ago and that was a huge mistake.
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.
> 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?
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.
Well yeah, that's why I said I have $29 D-50 compliant LEDs in my office. Though CRI, to an extent is more important than color temperature, since with high CRI under warm light you can still get a great sense for relative colors and contrast, but not so much with a mediocre CRI under a daylight bulb.
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.
> The impetus is on you to decide when things have started to look uncanny. “I wish that would be addressed by the industry — like, maybe if it reached a certain light-loss factor, it would just shut down, you know?” Nelson said. “Or if it shifted in color past a certain point, it went into failure mode.”
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.
I'm still waiting for the FCC or ITU to define a band for electrodeless plasma lamps.
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.
This article discusses indoor lighting, but it's worth noting that cheap, efficient outdoor LED lighting is destroying our night sky, bathing everyone nearby (including animals!) in light that screws up their circadian rhythms, and makes the city at night a harsher place.
?" 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
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.
This is weird. I buy the most basic Dollar Tree LED bulbs for every outlet in my home and I haven't had any of the problems in the article (for about 4 years so far). Occasionally one will blow then I just toss in another dollar bulb (maybe 4-5 so far). The light color and "quality" is perfect too. Granted, I don't have any fancy dimmer switches or anything but hey, maybe try the basic Dollar Tree bulbs :)
I was about to post the exact same thing. They even had a couple of warmth options and the 2700K ones seem to work just fine in lamps that I use every day around the house.
Of course, the incandescent bulb spectrum is different from the sun's daylight spectrum. You can imagine people making similar arguments 100+ years ago as the incandescent bulb grew in use.
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.
I'd guess that the arguments 100+ years ago over incandescent bulbs would have compared them to candles, fireplaces, torches, kerosene lamps, and whatever else people use when sunlight was not available since that would be what incandescent bulbs would be competing with.
That works really well! Tried it on a cheap LED that I notice the flicker on some times and it really showed up. Also tried an expensive one that I don’t notice any flicker from and there was a very fast flicker on slow mo. Tried daylight as a control and there’s no flicker.
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.
> Granted, we used 4100k lights which are much bluer than 2700k.
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.
I've set up Kelvin[1] to lower the colour temperature of my LED bulbs in the evening, and reduce their brightness. In fact, they end up pretty deep red when doing middle of the night bathroom runs.
The light temperature plays a lot into it. It's why those industrial edison bulbs are so trendy and popular. The warmer the light, the cozier at night. Warm being color and not tempurature. 2700k being the ideal.
Hmm. I'm pretty picky about CRI but for me the last few years' LED lights are really great. Much better than any fluorescent source. Much brighter than any incandescent. Very reliable. Dimmable too.
Who sponsored this terrible article? Should we also go back to 25" console tv's that sit on the floor, with decorative brass handles just so this author can avoid ever having anything be different in their life? I've never, not even once, had an LED bulb misbehave as described in this article. They are at least as reliable as CFLs were, and although there are tradeoffs with other bulb types both good and bad, LEDs consume effectively no power compared to incandescent.
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.
Some of my LEDs continue to glow faintly when off. I assume the efficiency of the bulbs is converting a small trickle of power into light. Has anyone experienced this? Anything to be done?
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.
I have an old floor lamp that I converted from halogen to LED. It has a dimmer knob but even when off it didn't turn off the light it was very faint. I thought it was the potentiometer/knob leaking current. I think I also had the issue on a room that also had a dimmer switch, an actual light in the ceiling not a lamp. So it seems to be the dimmer feature that is the issue for me.
For how long? LEDs produce broad-spectrum light using phosphorescence activated by discrete-spectrum light. Those phosphors will glow for a few seconds after you turn them off, or if you're really sensitive you may see a glow-in-the-dark phenomenon. When you unplug a lamp or turn off a true switch, there should be no residual current.
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.
Yes! This is fairly common. It usually happens when the power leads pick up a small amount of electricity via induction. You can place a compensator near the fixture to take care of it. (Basically a high voltage capacitor)
Can you go into more detail about this compensator? Is this a consumer product you can buy to fix a misbehaving light or a component that the manufacturer needs to include in the bulb?
While my led bulbs last much longer Incandescent, and end probably save money and energy, they consistently fail very long before their stated lifetime.
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.
For me, the biggest issue with LED bulbs is flicker. And there's a lot of variation between different bulbs, even ones that claim to be flicker-free. There are metrics for quantifying flicker [1], and hopefully they'll be required to print this on the packaging at some point.
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.
LED lighting is just another victim of the general malaise of consumer goods that is just unbounded race to the bottom, and making it impossible for consumers to make informed choices and instead having market flooded with lemons all around.
Just some notes on LEDs for anyone having problems with dimmer switches:-
- 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
> 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.
I have found that there can be huge quality differences between cheap and more expensive LED bulbs as well. Specifically the ones that use a cheap rectifier. Sometimes I think that I can see them flickering out of the corner of my eye.
This is a big part of it. I tend to pay a reasonable amount for my LEDs and I've yet to be disappointed. I very rarely replace bulbs despite having dozens of fixtures, and the quality of the light is good because I made a point of buying the right colour temp and getting dimmable ones where it makes sense.
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.
My biggest gripe about LEDs is the trend towards fixtures that use them as non-replaceable bulbs. The claim is that they will last X number of decades so there will be no need to change the bulb. This is bullshit, in my experience.
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.
The super bright light I bought from Home Depot for my garage has 4 arms full of LEDs. But it screws into a standard socket, so when I need to replace it (long before its time I'm sure) I'll just unscrew it and screw in a new 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 post reads awfully whiny to me. Who cares if the new bulb that's 90% more energy efficient than your old incandescent is not exactly the same color as the totally unnatural electric light you grew up with? Sure, there are some niche areas like the gallery mentioned, where the color and evenness of the light is quite important to display a work of art properly, but the bulb in your downstairs toilet not being yellow enough is not something to get worked up over.
This is as vapid and facile an argument as petrol heads complaining that electric cars don't sound right.
And even if you are… I use Wi-Fi smart bulbs that cost less than $10 each, full then as well as a white temperature adjustable from an extreme warm orange to piercing blue. 90+ CRI too.
Strange. I live in Australia, where incandescents were banned years ago. I have noticed literally none of these supposed issues. I never see LED lights flickering or making weird colours or humming or anything.
I replace the standard size LED bulbs more than any other bulb. Of all new bulbs in a new construction home from 2016, I do not have any original standard size LED bulbs (mix of open, enclosed and outdoor applications).
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 put LEDs in about 10 years ago and have never replaced one. I used to have a big drawer full of incandescent ones because they would fail pretty regularly
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.
I've noticed that my LEDs seem to have a bimodal lifespan. In parts of the house where we have many of the same kind, we went through a period early on where a few lasted much less time than I expected and had to be replaced, but now I've not had to replace any for several years.
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.
In failure engineering this is called the "bathtub curve." Those early failures are called "infant mortality" and are typically due to errors in the factory. In 20-30 years you'll get wear out failures, as the components hit the end of thier designed lifespans. Generally in manufacturing any new product/process has a pretty high infant mortality rate which then gets worked out over years of improvements to design and manufacturing process. You can either do factory testing (probably what high quality LED brands are doing) or just ship the product and let the customer handle it.
I’ve never had a problem with my Phillips Hue bulbs and I’ve owned the same 4 bulbs for 5 years now. I’ve got them scheduled to start brightening at sunset, change to a warmer colour closer to bed time, then start dimming and warming up before bed time.
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.
Ok but in the UK (and Europe im guessing) we had the ban on the old bulbs ages ago and yeah it was weird at first and the early LED bulbs were awful blueish white. But the bulbs are the correct color, the packaging has what tint the bulb is. Some people have smart bulbs that can change color completely and dim from apps and voice assistants.
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.
I'm not a fan of the dome shaped LED bulbs like the one in the picture, maybe i just tried the wrong colour temperature, or it is something about how the light is distributed.
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.
One thing that really, really annoys me, that isn't mentioned is that practically all LED bulbs have a warning (in fine print) that you shouldn't use them in enclosed spaces. If you do use them in enclosed spaces some components overheat, and it dramatically reduces the lifetime of the bulb. In my home, like many, probably most, home in the area, most of the light fixtures are enclosed. And finding bulbs designed to work in enclosed spaces is practically impossible.
I haven't seen a 'normal' bulb in over 10 years. I only have LED lights and they are great. They used to be a bit shit yes, but over the past 5 years they have surpassed my expectations. I can't even find any that don't have a nice color profile and are spec'ed to some temperature etc.
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
I was just staying in a hotel where it was obvious that the hallway lighting was all LED.
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.
Is there something different about smart bulbs? My oldest hue is at least 6 years old, but probably older (as I can't find the order confirmation for the bridge, so I'm guessing I bought it offline), no flickering, no getting darker.
Logically, I'm thinking that the pure LED components are a much smaller part of the price, and that maybe there is less skimping?
A funny thing my power electronics TA pointed out at a lab class was that, while incandescents radiate heat and waste a lot of power to just heat the space below them, we still need to heat our classrooms. When the university went from incandescent to fluorescent and, later LED lighting, the only thing that changed was the power usage shifting from lighting to heating.
Granted, heating can be more efficient when handled by the systems designed to heat, not to illuminate, but at the scale of a reasonably big, cold-war era building with moderately inappropriate insulation, the gain in efficiency is minuscule.
It all made me think that we're solving a lot of problems by shifting the issue away from us, in this case from the bulbs to the radiators. It's comparable to EVs in my opinion: "if we take all the pollution and put it in SE Asia, we can cargo cult ourselves into thinking that driving that 20yo beater is worse than generating new waste"
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.
We wire our homes with a whole bunch of AC circuits. These are basically busses, right? Why not add more kinds of busses? Why not a DC bus? Every light in my home is an LED, and most appliances (by count) are DC.
I understand that moving DC long distances can be problematic. But is 100-300 feet too long? Am I completely off on this?
DC actually tends to be more efficient at long distances at the same voltage. DC lighting does exist in the commercial space where lighting costs actually start to add up more than household use. The main barrier to DC systems in homes is simply that it would require houses to be rewired and a whole new standard for plugs and such. The benefit is also hard to describe to the customer.
The limitations you describe make sense. But they seem like we can overcome them.
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).
It's definitely a path dependency issue. Last mile neighborhood distribution is still done with traditional transformers, so trying to push in this direction you'd ultimately just be adding another conversion step in homes. IMO the only time it makes (individual) sense is if your home has a huge bank of storage batteries for off-grid operation.
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.
So POE lighting is something that is taking off for businesses but could also be more easily retrofitted into a house. This would put the conversion from AC to DC in a centralized area which allows for more efficient hardware to be used.
Ubiquiti for a while had hardware you can order not sure if they still do.
I recently bought EcoSmart bulbs from Home Depot (they're a HD brand) that have a color temperature selector on the side (2700k to 5000k). But it also has an option called DuoBright, which will change the temperature in response to the standard cheap Lutron Diva dimmer I have.
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.
One thing that bothers me is that our current wiring is not well-suited for LEDs. Each lamp has to have a rectifier, and there's only so much you can do to squeeze in enough circuitry into the LED base.
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".
I'm still looking for an ideal LED bulb for use everywhere. I've mostly settled on Hyperikon. My desired specs:
* 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)
The irony is that there is a deep flashlight enthusiast community that focus on all of these specs (except maybe the high dynamic range), but when you look for A19 bulbs, they're all just using whatever is at Home Depot. :/
It's perhaps worth mentioning that metal halide bulbs are an alternative to LEDs that are efficient and produce high quality light. They use an electric arc in an inert gas between tungsten electrodes. The old high pressure sodium lights used in street lights and gymnasiums are basically the same technology, but by using a different gas mixture you get a more normal color temperature.
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 fucking hate LEDs. Turned my back on them years ago because the tech and its salesmen turned their back on me. Nothing but lies.
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.
I have gradually replaced every light bulb in my house since 2017 with Philips Hue bulbs (most color, but some white only) and not one of them has flickered, become more dim, or failed. On the other hand, the "cheap $10" LED bulbs that I originally installed when first moving in - because I could not afford $50 a bulb - have all died and were part of my motivation for upgrading to Hue. This has also happened with the cheaper LED bulbs that my mother and in-laws installed, which lasted about a year. I wonder why the Hue bulbs last so much longer? They have been well worth the money and have become a staple of my home automation.
They just put in some new townhomes near me. The architecture is beautiful but all the exterior lighting is cold LED light and it looks so strange and frightening at night. Just... off. Amazing how the quality and temperature of light matters.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere is that the energy savings of LEDs may not actually be what you expect. We heat our home something like 330 days of the year. If we use LED bulbs instead of incandescents, we just have to run the gas furnace more to make up for the "saved" heat energy.
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.
Can’t relate at all. Maybe it’s regional. In EU conventional light bulb have been phased out more than ten years ago. In the first few years there were some crappy LED bulbs until manufactures solved issues of basically completely new product. I don’t remember any LED bulb I ever bought breaking until now. And ones I bought in last 5 years (when moving to a new place) also have nice warm colour and don’t flicker. Good bulbs used to be around 5-10€ per piece, now more due to inflation. But I don’t mind since they last forever. And way more efficient, wonder how long it takes before cost is made up my savings in electricity bill.
What are folks doing that are killing all these LED lights, causing flicker, etc.? We've got a mix of LED fixtures and Edison based replacements and don't have anything worth complaining about.
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.
Incandescent generate heat, they're great if you need heat and one tone of light and that's 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. (-:
I was an LED early adopter and many more of them have failed early than I expected, even if I followed the rules of not putting them inside an enclosure not open to the air, etc.
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.
I'm not really into the details like this post was, I liked the cfl bulbs bright white. I've been trying to find bulbs like that color in the led space. My go to is the home Depot branded led that have the coils in them, and I try to do bright white. They cost more then what the cfl bulbs did which sucks. The led lights also seem to not last as long, but I do think it's been getting better. I do have two wifi wiz bulbs and they have not died, been with them for 3 years. I say bring back the spiral bulbs and let the consumers choose.
I've been surprised several times the past decade by how many people just don't notice the poor quality of light with low CRI, that the light is "hollow" and missing a chunk in the red/yellow part of the spectrum. Thankfully LED bulbs are getting better, and a lot of affordable offerings these days hover around 90 CRI. Same goes for the problem with indirect flickering, which the past few years have mostly gone away thanks to producers finally spending two cents more per bulb to fit them with adequate capacitors.
Has anyone noticed that warmer light LEDs causing blurrier text. I did a test and found that my cool light LEDs made small text stable and readable while the same text under warm light was blurry.
It's probably just lowers the effective perceptual contrast between a page and the printed text. It's pretty understood that cooler light is better for visibility.
No less that half my led can lights are unusable - either they "burned out" (whatever that means for an led light, but they did), or they flicker too much or buzz too loudly. I gave up on replacing them and am just living with the ones that work. I don't know where to buy good ones - the led market 99% scammers. The crap at the big box hardware stores is not worth it. I've probably spent more money in one year on defective leds lights than I spent on incandescent bulbs in 40 years.
LEDs are sensitive to heat. It might be that recessed lighting is causing your bulbs to overheat and fail early because they don't have enough ventilation.
Lightbulbs are infuriating now-a-days. I want poe-driven wired IoT bulbs (and downlights, and I suppose zigbee/zwave where poe can't be added in) that dim and color change on the white spectrum (no rgb silliness I will never need to make my lightbulbs green or purple or whatever), with no flicker and high CRI / full spectrum.
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.
Focusing on reliability, quality and performance I've had nothing but an excellent run with LEDs, both retro and built into the home for 10 years. Never replaced anything on any of them. And not just me proud I've talked with as well.
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
The piece lost me when it mentioned the LED flaking out with a dimmer. That's a well-known shortcoming of "average" LED bulbs (whose drivers cannot cope with the decreased peaks that come with a standard dimmer).
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.
The claims don’t match reality; the issue with so many products. The failure mechanism always happens on the most difficult dimension to prove - here it is longevity.
If your power is coming from renewables anyway, you're probably far more eco-friendly using incandescent bulbs.
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.
Incandescent bulbs are used for other things than light. Like heating sometimes. Specific applications but I wonder if you'll still be able to get them?
We have a pet tortoise that we use incandescent flood bulbs to heat and provide light. The only consistent place we can find them is at a small mom and pop hardware store (similar to the reference in the article). I just checked our supply and they have a weird import sticker and have text in multiple languages.
ISKRA [1] in Ukraine still makes incandescent lights and there are places in EU that import them, but they have to be labeled as for non-home use only (factories, manufacturing etc.), but you can still buy them. 100w E27 light is around 50c. EU banned incandescent lights like a decade ago, but I still have some spot halogens in the kitchen and corridor and remember my small desk lamp with a 40w bulb that I've read so many books with. Something really feels off with LEDs and I can't put my finger on it, maybe it's the CRI, maybe the shadows, maybe the lack of heat that is cozy in the winter. Philips Hue are passable and convenient but very expensive in comparison and I still miss the feeling of making some tea and flicking on my incandescent desk lamp to read a book after school.
You can still buy the "IR" red light bulbs. Search under chicken heating. Also there are "non-bulb" things now that fit into a light bulb socket but are just resistive heaters. Also search under chicken coop supplies.
one application where led's won't work at all is oven lights. Nobody makes an led oven light because they're required to withstand really high temperatures, glass enclosed incandescents can handle the heat just fine while led's just melt.
I don't finish reading the article because it seems the author is very unlucky with LEDs, but LEDs really that bad?
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?
> The two in my youngest son’s bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them.
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.
I saw a linked article on that site that gives their LED bulb recommendations. Brightness, CRI, color temp, and value are all considered for various applications.
Even the cheapest, crappiest (though you shouldn't compromise on colour rendition) LED bulbs are better for your wallet than incandescents. Simply because of the huge amount of power they save.
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.
I pay attention to colour temperature. Lights at home are usually lighten during evening, so it should be not more then 3000K - (for melatonin). I use mostly 2700K, tried even 2000K but that was too reddish for my taste.
Keep in mind that after sunset in nature there is only moon light that has blue spectrum. Fire, as light source is about 1700K.
We can only imagine what the lightbulb world would look like if the Phoebus cartel didn't hamstring R&D.
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.
We've gone from incandescent bulbs that were shit because a cartel[1] said so, to LED bulbs that are shit because we demand that they be cheaper than they can reasonably be.
I think most people in this audience are aware but in case some are not, the other thing with LED is that it is not possible to dim them. So dimming works by making them flash at a higher frequency than what the human eye can see. Which is ok-ish for humans, but will drive dogs crazy as they see at a much higher frame rate.
That's not fundamental. They could flicker the individual LEDs at different phases. A typical bulb contains many LEDs. This would cost money, of course.
There’s a bit of a basilisk with the cheaper LEDs (though sometimes also the ones permanently installed on ceiling fans, sometimes luxury brand car accent lighting) where once your learn you can see flickering trails following movement, you can’t avoid seeing it again. Plenty of people don’t notice, don’t tell them.
Yeah, cheaper LEDs explain most of the complaints I'm reading here. Spend a few extra bulbs and you get a far better experience. I have no flickering LEDs, I won't tolerate them in my house.
I don't know why anybody's surprised by white LEDs not aging gracefully. They're generally made by using a combination of a blue LED and a yellow phosphor. The thing about phosphors is they don't age well - they get dimmer with age. So your white LED will gradually get bluer.
I hear all these horror stories but I have bought about 10 Hue bulbs in as many years and I still use each one. Also, im extremely sensitive to flickering and temp and I notice nothing at all.
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.
So much of the problem with LED lights is from the integrated power supplies. Why is it not more common by now to just wire up indoor lights with 48v DC supplied from a PSU in your wiring cabinet and the lights can be just plain LEDs? Lower overall cost, more reliable, safer.
In my personal experience the LED bulbs at Home Depot are extremely expensive compared to traditional bulbs we used to buy. Don’t list anywhere near the advertised long lives. And are difficult to recycle and worse in landfill than the historical bit of glass and metal bulbs.
That article really needs the date at the top. I found in the bottom, published March 27, 2023. The EU banned incandescent bulbs back in 2009. I thought he was writing about first generation LEDs, until I could confirm the date.
That article was feverish. I think the author is making it a bit too complicated. Also, there's much talk about the Met and their art collection. Even with the challenges of LED bulbs, they wouldn't go back. Damaging UV is no longer a problem with LEDs.
I know everybody here is a democrat (or a pseudo democrat) so I’ll ask here, when are you people gonna stop finding new regulations to get police to implement?
Like, it really just seems like you people don’t have anything else to do besides mind other peoples business.
LED bulbs that have a similar color as old incandescent bulbs are widely available now for in-home use. It's no longer limited to fancy bulbs like Philips Hue.
That being said, I am not a fan of the white LED streetlights. Streetlight LED's should be orange.
Remember back when texting and calling cost decent money? People used to differentiate cell plans based on the amount you got. Now it's a free unlimited or practically unlimited inclusion in just about every mobile phone plan and people care about other things.
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.
My peeve is with intermediate base bulbs. They forced ceiling fans to use them but it's nigh impossible to find suitable dimmable LEDs for them. I had a candelabra adapter short out and destroy a dimmer so that isn't an option either.
I do not really use LED light bulbs. I use already made LED lamps. Big round ones for ceiling and some long strips in my office on bottom side of shelves. All cheap China made stuff. Works for years not a single problem. Color temp is ok.
If you don't have a home heat pump, isn't incandescent actually more efficient than LED in winter? Assuming you turn lights off when you leave rooms, all generated heat will be concentrated in the room you are actually in.
IKEA is acting as Apple in this space IMO. They hide all the details about their LED bulbs, but they are kind of the best you can find on the market if you search for more details about their tech, or at least AFAIK.
I really like LED bulbs and use them everywhere I can. Unfortunately they suffer the same as anything that is forced by congress rather than evolving at the natural pace and replacing standard lighting sources when the technology is mature enough. Take for instance cell phones. They replaced landlines and were adopted by users because the technology was ready and they were better than the product they replaced. Imagine if congress had outlawed landlines. Same can be said for EV’s. IC vehicles are better in almost every aspect yet congress is doing everything it can to force their obsolescence before their time. The problem with that is that every time they do something like that they chip away at their credibility and when some real emergency comes along we the people aren’t so easily fooled.
There's a forum/community of people who get migraines / severe eyestrain from LED bulbs at LEDStrain.org. It's likely related to any LEDs that flicker (PWM).
I've started keeping the receipts and boxes and marking the bulbs so I can get my money back under warranty if (when) they die early. Make it not worth it for the companies to skimp on quality.
I don't recognise any of the issues mentioned in this article at all and there must be a hundred odd LED bulbs in my house. I'm wondering if this is a US-specific thing, I'm in the UK.
> I'm wondering if this is a US-specific thing, I'm in the UK.
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.
I can go to Home Depot and still buy a box of 16 standard incandescent bulbs. I just got another box a few weeks ago. Is this unusual or something? I’ve seen no signs of a ban.
I still can't find decent G4 LED bulbs.. Tried several from Amazon, they where alle terrible at color rendering (even if nominal CRI was ok-ish). Any suggestions?
LEDs also cause interference with WiFi and other radio signals. Found out after putting a LED bulb in my smart garage door opener.. which immediately went offline.
wow great article and even in the article and comments no mention of PAR1789! It's the IEEE standard for limiting flicker in bulbs! The Department of Energy has a great presentation on this, https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/articles/flicker-understandi...
I find that with LED bulbs you need to read the box carefully. Putting an LED bulb not rated for enclosures into an enclosure often results in early failures.
Sure you can. My wife yells at me all the time. I says they are LED stop complaining. She says they are still wasting energy, doesn’t matter the amount.
I still reflexively tend to turn off lights. Even though I intellectually know that, besides some halogen track lights I still have, my LED bulbs don't really move the power needle for my house.
I think the problem is ultimately that LED retrofit bulbs are a fundamentally terrible idea.
They offer terrible thermal performance, require the power supply to be in a tiny case together with the hot LEDs, don't make good use of the directional nature of LEDs, and perhaps worst of all they compress most of the technical complexity of lighting into a tiny and super cost sensitive commodity item that is then put into some cheap fixture.
Lighting is a complex thing and LEDs in properly designed lights can be fantastic but we need to get to a point where there are good offerings of purpose made lamps that integrate LEDs in a sensible fashion rather than crappy retrofits that are barely good enough because they use an amazing technology and then squander it's potential entirely.
and no having the LEDs be integrated doesn't necessarily mean they are not replaceable. COB LEDs come in standardized sizes that have solder free sockets so you could totally make a lamp where the light source could be replaced when it dies or, much more likely, be upgraded when an even nicer one comes around.
Lots of people here are arguing about whether LEDs actually look worse. Who cares? Even a modest environmental benefit is worth it. If you want nice-looking light, just go outside - it's free.
Outdoor light is pleasant (to me at least) even when it's overcast. And, yeah, if you live in an area with polar night or whatever I don't think society should begrudge you an incandescent bulb if that's what gets you through the winter.
- 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