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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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?
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).
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 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.
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.
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".
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not just incandescent filament bulbs, the original artificial light was literally incandescent - gas lamps, oil lamps, beef tallow, candles, tallow etc.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $2 light bulbs that burn out quickly, instead of just buying light fixtures that were properly engineered in the first place. With modern SMPSs, you're not going to get any kind of benefit by centralizing the power supply to drive individual LEDs, you're only going to get problems. LEDs need a driver circuit to provide constant current, and that means the power supply needs to be matched to the emitters and kept very close to it.
> I completely disagree. Where exactly are you going to put a power supply in a room? Make a special electrical box for it? Won't it be unsightly in many rooms, or need some huge special panel that looks like a breaker panel?
This sounds like a non-issue, specially considering the pervasive use of "unsightly" installations like air ducts, heating vents, radiators, electrical sockets, telecommunication service panels, routers, and even light fixtures.
If you intentionally dismiss obvious solutions, of course you only end up with problems without obvious solutions.
> It's supposed to be dismissive, because this whole discussion is (...)
Where exactly are you going to put a power supply in a room? Make a special electrical box for it?
Switched-mode power supplies can be as small as your average Arduino board. They can fit inside the space used for wall outlets or light fixtures. Or you can put the DC transformer inside the light switch.
It's not about DC vs AC, it's high-voltage vs low-voltage. The power dissipation by wire resistance scales with the square of the current ($P=RI^2$), and low line voltage means that you need large currents to transmit the same amount of power.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
> - 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
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).
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.
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.
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. B...
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadFirst, bans on incandescent bulbs are foolish because they encourage defeatist foolishness like this article (as far as I can tell, for the sake of virtue signaling and modest acceleration of a change that was already happening.)
The CFLs which preceded LEDs were really awful, especially for closets (where they'll linger for decades, given the low utilization of those bulbs,) but LEDs are fine, amd really nice if your 70 year old house gets retrofitted for AC and you need the reclaimed electrical capacity. This author just needs to pony up for dimmable LEDs, which aren't expensive except by comparison. Non-dimmable LEDs are right up there with running toilets and rodents in the pantheon of things to make homeowners lose their minds.
Really? I've never understood the affection for dimming lights. Essentially always I want lights on or off.
It also is a tad hyperbolic to include non-dimmable bulbs in the pantheon of things to make homeowners lose their minds.
I think the big surprise for most people would be that many LED bulbs are not dimmable, as that hasn’t been something they had to worry about with older bulbs (it was also an issue with CFLs, but people avoided them because of the harsh color)
I'm really miserable in a too-bright room. I have some sensory processing issues which contributes a lot to this admittedly, but when I talk about it with people who don't they often understand it immediately or admit to experiencing the same thing, though to a smaller extent.
But, dimmable bulbs are also an indicator of quality. Someone cared enough to make sure it worked in that situation, so there's evidence that someone was caring during the design.
Maybe. It could also be to avoid the situation in which the average consumer just picks up the cheapest bulb and, when he gets it home and it is flaky when used with the dimmer, returns it to the store.
Or maybe it's a low quality way of ticking a feature that a customer has been told to look for regardless of whether it is relevant to his situation.
It'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.
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.
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.
I also have a lot of "sunlight" LEDs which I'll describe as "white" and I LOVE them for big rooms and making daytime feel like daytime. Great for my office.
I recall blue being a big problem when LEDs for homes were new, but when I bought a house 3 years ago and revisited it, I was delighted to find so many very solid options. Dimmable, non-flicker, warm LED bulbs. The Canadian government also chipped in with my tax dollars so they were about 50 cents each.
My one complaint is that even the fancier, pricier ones seem to burn out too. In 3 years I've had to replace 4 ceiling bulbs of about 50 (the builder went nutty with recessed ceiling lights). I think they're just driven really harshly by the A/C.
This is what drives your "warm" lamps. No deep red at all, man.
By filtering out other wavelengths I’m left with all this warm light rather than nothing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35373754
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.
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.
Further, if you dare to mix bulbs you’ll often get different color/brightness behavior at different levels of dimming.
> 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.
https://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/09/27/1351242/selling-inc...
1. http://iskra.com.ua/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar...
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 read the "guarantee" when I buy new bulbs but who keeps receipts or track of light bulbs?
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.
And no, I am not happy about having to think about storing receipts for mundane things like light bulbs either, but it is the only thing that calms down my nerves when yet another bulb with 5 year warranty fails in a year.
a) you can choose not to trust them
b) you can choose to trust them
For a $3 item, most retailers would pick #b every time.
BigClive covers this issue a fair amount on his Youtube teardown videos. It's not exactly built-in obsolescence, so much as being built to cost.
The cheapest way to build an LED bulb is to minimize the number of components. Instead of spreading the light emission out over a couple of dozen LEDs, it's cheaper to use a handful of LEDs but really overdrive them with high currents.
The result is a bulb that's cheap to make, but in ordinary use the chips and phosphors inside will run at high temperatures and degrade much more quickly. This effect will be even more pronounced with enclosed fixtures (like ceiling lights) that have little to no ventilation.
Manufacturers could design their way out of this by increasing the component count (spreading the light generation over more LED chips at lower current), but that's an expense that doesn't translate well to a brand or marketing claim. As it stands, ordinary consumers are unlikely to try to exercise their warranty on a bulb that fails after 1,000 hours rather than a rated 3,000 or so; there's no reason to expect that "this bulb is more expensive but will last a really long time" would make it in the consumer-facing market.
As for the business rationale, I think it's less about consumer demand and more about the recurring revenue for the light manufacturers. Products like this exist where mandated - see his video on the Dubai LEDs - but aren't made broadly available.
Even if the producer expects absolutely zero return customers (and therefore no recurring revenue), having the more durable product be more expensive, and durability being hard to advertise, means there's a race to the bottom where the more durable product is competed out of existence.
If everybody is forced to make the durable product, the race to the bottom disappears.
(Alternatively, having better packaging regulations that make it easier to identify long-lasting products would also help)
So, if I want bulbs that are less likely to fail, would it help to always buy enclosure-rated ones, even for applications where they're not going to be enclosed? It seems like that could be a way to get the safety margin that manufacturers aren't bothering with.
> unlikely to try to exercise their warranty
I'm in this exact situation now, and it's because of the hassle. You must take the bulbs back to the store. There are various issues like waiting in line, and I haven't done it. I bought name-brand bulbs thinking they'd be good, but now I'm unhappy because the guarantee process is such a bother.
I wonder if a company could make a viable product by differentiating in this area. Make a truly no-cost, no-hassle return process. Allow me to print a pre-paid shipping label and just drop it in the mail. No in-person store visits, waiting on hold for customer support, etc. And really push this in marketing. Maybe even put some kind of hour meter on the bulbs as a visible sign that I am buying the one brand of LED bulb that takes reliability seriously. People might pay more just to be spared from the headache of LED bulbs that fail a lot.
How do you know this? Seems completely implausible. Source please.
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.
“The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours)..”
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.
It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage.
However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.
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".
It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.
Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.
Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.
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.
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.
I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.
Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.
But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.
One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.
I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban.
But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the production of inefficient ones.
If LEDs were exactly as efficient as incandescent bulbs there wouldn’t be a law that bans all lightbulbs. Also there’s no way a law would pass that sets the efficiency standard of incandescent bulbs because the law would do nothing.
It’s a ban on incandescent bulbs with the thinnest veneer of generalization.
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"?
That sounds like an ideal situation the free market should be fixing -- so why isn't it?
The article has a similar sentiment: it's hard to translate from what the box says to how it'll actually perform in the real world.
Like the others I want to buy an LED where the visible light cannot be meassured differently from a normal one, and with the guarantee that I can return it for a full refund if it fails before the 20k hours are up.
When I upgraded my house, I spent maybe 30 min reading some articles and then 30 more going through product listings [1]. To upgrade a core piece of infra for my whole house.
[1] I can already hear people saying "an HOUR???" But guess what now I know about LED bulbs forever.
I hope by "you" you are also including TFA and the comment I was replying to, right?
Your response directly contradicts TFA. I don't know who is right, I just know I'm not entirely satisfied with the LEDs I have. It's not my most pressing concern, but I'd rather not have to deal with 5 concepts when picking a lightbulb.
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.
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've seen high-quality incandescent bulbs however that do very well on my tests despite being "warm" but I think a lot of people like using daylight from out the north window for evaluating prints and it was was a revolution a few decades back when art museums realized that higher color temperature lights brought out colors better.
That’s what it’s good for. But do you want that lighting in your living room while you watch tv?
If I'm looking at color prints in a book or on the wall that is reflective light and it is dependent on the spectrum of the room. My main TV room has RGB Hue lights that can simulate "warm" or "cold" light but also specific colors. I think 100% green is the ideal light for hot summer days because a full spectrum is also coming in the windows and it gives the most light for the minimum amount of heat. I also find other colors fun sometimes. The guest room that also has a TV has sengled lights that can be tuned from cool to warm.
RGB lights that can produce saturated colors are not going to render reflective colors so well, see
https://blog.kasson.com/the-last-word/metameric-failure/
Personally I like high color temperature light but with the system we have we can have it any way we like. If I really need accurate color rendition I bring in high-performing spot incandescent and maybe someday LEDs. My work is all "born digital" so I spend at least 80% of my time looking at screens and looking at prints, handling paper and such is a small but essential fraction of that.
What I really gotta do though is set my system up so it can vary the room color together with what's on TV, that ought to be cool.
If you care that much about that, it would probably make more sense to get something like Philips Hue bulbs that can vary their color temperature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight
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).
> It is crucial to control upward-directed light, but we now know that the color of light is also very important. Both LED, and metal halide fixtures contain large amounts of blue light in their spectrum. Because blue light brightens the night sky more than any other color of light, it’s important to minimize the amount emitted. Exposure to blue light at night has also been shown to harm human health[1] and endanger wildlife[2]. IDA recommends[3] using lighting that has a color temperature of no more than 3000 Kelvins.
* https://www.darksky.org/our-work/lighting/lighting-for-citiz...
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?
> 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.
For daylight, people typically prefer daylight (5000K) bulbs.
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.
(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).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Candle-shows-different-c...
I'd imagine that the "warm" color temperature is modeled after candle and gas lighting but after reading some articles on the history of light bulbs it seems that all the folks working on it were trying to make the brightest, whitest light they possibly could. Today's "daylight" bulbs would probably be perceived as an engineering wonder by those folks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_li...
From my understanding, the ban will start somewhere around Q4 this year. Still, you'll always be able to buy them for "decoration purposes".
They are very efficient heat bulbs after all.
Unfortunately the market is swamped with cheap low quality ones that produce pretty crap quality light and burn out quickly. I learnt pretty quickly that it was a false economy to skimp on them.
I 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.
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.
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.
EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bgUy6zA0ts
- 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
For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.
Maybe I am missing something from this conversation, but all of my LED bulbs produce far _less_ heat than incandescent bulbs. The lamp in my bedroom no longer keeps me warm!
I think it's much easier to design entire fixtures than retrofit bulbs, as there's much more control over heat dissipation and so on. Finding trusted manufacturers (and supply chains that resist counterfeits) is also extremely important.
Can lights have historically been an issue for insulation of houses, as they provide a channel for the warm ceiling air to enter the plenum space between floors or the attic. Thats bad for insulation, but actually amazing for a retrofitted LED light, because it's the only fixture that will provide airflow to cool it!
On the other hand, faux-recessed LEDs can also be installed directly on top of the ceiling drywall, without any penetration. Thats the worst case scenario for heat build up, as heat rises and it's completely trapped by the dish of the light and the ceiling.
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.
LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.
> Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons
Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
There's the kicker; how can you tell when something is better quality anymore? Qualifiers like "is this device run at max capacity or is there leeway" are never listed on packaging or product features.
To accept the premise is to believe that anything made of quality will never get bought/used which is manifestly not the case. And it strangely completely ignores the incentives companies have to make things as shitty as possible, namely lower expenses and planned obsolescence.
I disagree. It is a ratio of quality to price. People have different opinions about what the acceptable minimum ratio is, and it varies by product, and by time. For example, many people find Costco to hit the right ratio most of the time.
For example, I have been using LEDs and dimmable LEDs from soft white (~2700K) to cool white (~4000K) with no problem, all purchased at Home Depot/Lowes/Costco. Some have failed earlier than anticipated, but nowhere near enough to cancel out the cost savings.
Some consumers will happily pay for business class seating on planes. Others will generally overlook inconvenience and less comfort if they can save $50.
There must be some kind of listing error on Amazon, maybe an old listing being repurposed without clearing the old reviews.
In other words, more efficient, but not longer lifespan.
I haven't contacted them for replacements yet, but seeing their comment makes me much more likely to purchase them in the future, despite my early issues.
Like if you were to drive your car in 2nd gear on the freeway, at 6000rpm. The engine would wear out much quicker than if you drove in 5th gear, at 1500rpm.
So the economics just drive cost down no matter what. And even a picky consumer is hard pressed to get what he wants when you go to the bulb aisle at Lowe’s. They literally went from 10 SKUs to 250, with no meaningful standards.
(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.)
But for going to sleep it's not a bad idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X-ZVOYwNLU
this is why more and more businesses only accept cards. :-P
Incandescent bulbs were very simple. Cheap vs name brand. White vs soft white. 120v vs 130v. LEDs have at least 7 attributes, some of which are not documented well or at all.
Tell me what LED bulb is ideal to produce 1500 lumens of output in an outdoor semi-enclosed fixure? It will take about 10 minutes of googling around if you are in the know. The average consumer doesn’t have a chance.
I would prefer incandescents though. The only thing I don't miss about them is the heat. Everything else was superior.
They're not terrible, but the low CRI keeps me coming back to halogen.
That the underlying issue might be the fixture, or in the older electrical system, is not always an intuitive jump.
And it says on the box.
I usually stick to the same brand too. All Phillips bulbs are 90+ CRI and some are 95+ so I just buy Phillips. Problem solved.
A Home Depot bulb is like $2.75.
I hate that you have to research bulbs but you’re making it out way harder than it is.
Unless you claim they are the same tier as the waveform bulbs?
Waveforms are even better but it’s like springing for the luxury item.
But unless you’re someone that could readily tell, it’s not with the price difference.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
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
Man I'd love me some indoor lightning, no matter the cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNisqZOAaAs
In a screw base, maybe. But compare:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i...
$25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30...
$3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.)
So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30.
Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast.
To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks.
I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it:
https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...
A lot of this topic smells like typical geek snobbery. They're lights, folks. Cheap consumer products have always been cheap. Halogen bulbs suck too.
This is also the same industry and the same players that were perfectly fine with agreeing to not improve incandescent light past 1000 lifetime hours, illegally. I have no doubt that there is a tacit agreement not to make good lighting, as that would extremely disrupt the industry.
No. I like the fixtures I have, and I have no desire to throw them in the landfill so that I can be “environmentally friendly.”
Otherwise, for probably at least 40 or so bulbs swapped for LEDs over the years, I've experienced maybe 4 or 5 failures. The vast majority of my bulbs have been Feit and GE. I never buy smart bulbs. My best experiences have usually been to just buy LED fixtures though, I replaced a lot of my flush mount ceiling fixtures and ceiling fans for ones with integrated LEDs and have not had a single failure so far after a few years, knock on wood.
I had some problems with my old dimmer switches, but upgrading dimmers to newer ones which advertised good LED dimming and ensuring I had bulbs which stated dimming compatibility it eliminated my noise and flicker issues. There's a recent standard out there, NEMA SSL 7A, which seeks to ensure good compatibility. I set my dimmers to this SSL 7A mode and I've had no problems since.
https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/asset/documen...
They're all in freestanding floor lamps installed in a horizontal orientation, which might have something to do with it. That seems like it'd dissipate heat a lot better than e.g. a pot light housing in the ceiling.
They produce great light at the temperature you want and I’ve yet to have one fail after nearly 10 years using them.
Not cheap, but given I’ve never had to replace one maybe in the end they are
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Hue-Bluetooth-compatible-Assi...
$45 a bulb! That's probably >$2000 to replace a house's worth.
The white, color-temp only ones are about half the price, which is better, but still not cheap:
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Ambiance-Hue-Equivalent-Assis...
* bulbs with the UK-standard bayonet fitting in light sockets that are suspended from cables from the ceiling with lampshades -- these I don't think I've ever had fail on me yet
* 4.6W bulbs with a GU10 fitting in recessed spotlights -- these fail on me more frequently (perhaps every few years to every five years)
My assumption is that this is all down to the spotlight-fitting bulbs being in a confined space and getting a lot hotter. I use Philips bulbs in both cases.
I don't know if there are any regulations around the 10-year claim, but if there are then I'd expect that it's either an average or something like a one-standard-deviation threshold, like 68% last past that but 32% don't.
"Guaranteed 10 years" doesn't actually say anything about expected lifetime at all, just that they'll do a warranty replacement if it fails sooner.
Personally I'd want a durability guarantee to be more like two standard deviations, on top of replacement in case of early failure.
With Edison-style bulbs, anyway, the orientation they're mounted in makes a huge amount of difference. They're last a lot longer if they're oriented upright (base down) than in any other orientation because it reduces the heat buildup in the power supply.
If there was a "DC" light socket in the house we could have LEDs outlasting owners, and for cheap. Nearly all the expense of LED bulbs is the power supply. Everything else is dirt cheap. A single home DC power supply with ~200W of output could light an entire house, flicker free.
What's even more frustrating is I think we could fix it. A national regulation for DC light sockets would fix it. Mandate a voltage, shape, and max amperage and BAM, you'll get 1000 different manufactures making standard compliant bulbs and home power supplies that will last an eternity.
It seems like there would be a market for cheap as possible 10 mbit switches with 802.3bt/802.3af support though.
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabit-802-3af-100Mbps-250Meter-Unma... is pretty cheap as is, I'm sure you could buy something in bulk for cheaper.
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.
Having multiple transformers is perfectly doable and commercially viable -- though I would appreciate more product availability for something easy to stash in the hollow space of a ceiling, like recessed lighting is installed.
Everyone here is complaining about ultra-cheap LEDs that don't last very long because they're poorly engineered, but that's exactly what you're all trying to do here by using a separate, shared power supply. You could get away with that in the 1980s using incandescent bulbs, but you can't do it now unless you want the same crappy lifespan and reliability you're all complaining about.
The solution is very simple: buy fixtures that are engineered well. Switch-mode power supply electronics are not expensive at all, but when mfgs cheap out or do a crappy job designing them, you get bad results, usually short lifetime of either the power supply or the LED. What you're trying to do here is buy a really expensive power supply, which has to be engineered to a far greater degree and for a far wider range of operating conditions (since they don't know what you're going to connect to it), just because you had a bad experience buying some $2 light bulb that had a crappy power supply built-in. This really makes no sense.
The constant current thing is true, but that's not a terribly difficult problem.
Depending on who you ask, the limit for low voltage DC might be 42 or 50 or maybe 60 or 120 or 1500.
USB-C PD is at a useful voltage & wattage level, and so is Ethernet POE. I wouldn't be surprised to see them start to be used for general power distribution in niche applications, like RV's and off-grid cabins.
I don't think we're going to ever get a bulb standard, though.
I could definitely see this becoming more common. Powering the ~100 watts of fixed lighting spread across my whole house on ten different 15A 120v circuits, each with their own arcfault breaker and 12 gauge copper electrical lines running back to the panel is fabulously expensive for what could be done with a bunch of CAT5 in each floor running to some conveniently located “POE injector” type devices.
You would want to be able to take a standard fixture and just push DC through it and use special bulbs with a standard A19 base, but that’s problematic when the next owner tries to screw in a standard bulb - what happens when it sees 48V DC?
I would guess if for safety reasons it has to be a non-A19 connector, then your light fixture choices get cut down to almost nothing and no one will make the switch?
It’s really interesting to think about, most everything I’m plugging into AC outlets in my house, the first step is converting it to DC. A lot of my outlets I’ve switched to include USB ports so I don’t need the wall warts. If you have solar and battery backup even more-so you start to question why we are wasting so much money moving everything back and forth between DC/AC/DC within a house.
Either it lights up or not? I don't see a problem here.
But I'm not sure moving part of power supply elsewhere will help that much, it needs current driver electronics anyway.
If by "standard" you mean a incandescent tungsten filament bulb, nothing at all.
For a true LED driver power supply, it would be constant current, so the tungsten filament would see 25mA (or whatever the constant current is set for) of DC, and nothing bad would happen (the filament also would not likely illuminate either).
Screwing in an LED bulb with integrated power supply, the external supply will still feed the constant current value, so what happens depends upon the design of the LED bulb's integrated power supply. If 25mA is enough to drive everything, the LED bulb might light up. If 25mA is not enough to drive everything, most likely nothing lights up.
For constant current, you'd need to drive at least 9 watts so it would be more like 250mA if not higher.
A 1600 lumen LED module might take as much or more current than a 60w incandescent. If your constant current supply can output between 0 volts and input volts, and it's set for a bulb with such a module, it would be able to power an incandescent bulb.
(Of course, they’re quite hot and radiative cooling increases like T^4, so this isn’t necessarily a show stopper. But it’s probably not helpful.)
LEDs are like 15% efficient and power supplies are >95%. They just need to be separated slightly so the LEDs aren't heating the power supply. Most recessed LED lighting now has a separate junction box with the power supply.
I think the biggest problem is that many cheap power supplies cycle at lower frequencies that cause flickering which is perceptible subconsciously. A modern switchmode power supply might operate in the 50-500khz range which will not cause perceivable flickers.
I'd say it's a very bad choice for a bedroom or living room light, but I have nothing against it for the outdoor lights, signage and a bunch of other applications where cost is king.
Just don’t use these devices, please.
But then, a wise entrepreneur would recognize paying extra to have non-flickering signage would attract some customers.
Flickering lights can induce migraines in susceptible people, so literally, saving a penny here actively drives away business.
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.
You can fudge it with resisters like in an LED strip, but you lose efficiency and dimming quality.
That being said, I expect that power supplies with 48VDC input or so would be cheaper.
Probably with some sort of current sensing system to make it compatible with dimmers.
Pair that with DC A19 LED bulbs that have no internal power systems.
Probably expensive to put together and to install, but if the goal was to have LEDs that last longer, that would do it.
The problem is that in 99.99% of homes outlets are on the same circuits as light fixtures, you would need to do some major rewiring.
Those bulbs would then have no internal switching systems to burn out and rely entirely on the module hidden behind the wall to handle their power needs.
I think the way to change it is to replace sockets with hardwired LED fixtures. This is easy for something like a standalone ceiling light. It may be harder for other devices like ceiling fans that integrate a light bulb socket, but converting those devices to take DC power as in your proposal isn't easy either (most would just get discarded and replaced).
Doing it well is more expensive in the short-term than screw-in bulbs. A quick look on Amazon suggests integrated ceiling lights are about 10x the price of LED bulbs, though I suspect the longer service life pays for itself.
Absolutely, the incandescent light bulbs have that shape for a reason: the screw is small because there is nothing to put in it and it doesn't heat, the bulb is large to dissipate all the light and heat it generates. And the LED light bulbs have exactly opposite problems: almost all of the heat is generated near the screw while the bulb itself generates almost none and the light-emitter doesn't even need the bulb that large around of it. Oh, and the casing around the screw is plastic so the thermal conductivity is horrible. Honestly, it's a profoundly terrible form-factor which we're now stuck with.
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
<https://www.designboom.com/technology/self-cooling-100-watt-...>
<https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b5/c2/c5/b5c2c5d69fb240a571ba...>
It's also helpful to recognise that existing lighting fixtures and lamps were designed around the constraints of incandescent bulbs. The first generation of LED bulbs and lamps largely conform to these. As LEDs mature, both fixtures and lamps which address the limitations and requirements of the technology (transformers, perhaps dedicated 12v circuits, heat dissipation for the transformer rather than lighting elements themselves, and better light-temperature and intensity regulation) should emerge.
We're presently in the somewhat-messy half-emerged state. Think horseless carriages, wireless, and the days of dual gas/electric lighting and lamping systems (yes, these existed, and yes, the failure modes were ... much as you might imagine).
24V is okay. 48V would be nicer for indoor use.
Also low voltage wiring can legally be done by anyone in NZ (a bonus when doing your own work, and a pitfall when buying a house?)
Other circuits must be 20A, e.g., kitchen outlets serving appliances.
A summary of standards here: <https://www.thespruce.com/common-electrical-codes-by-room-11...>
A 15A lighting circuit can serve up to 14 100W bulbs. Or 150 LEDs drawing 10W each....
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.
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.
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.
https://www.sansiled.com/blogs/learn/what-are-the-benefits-o...
Simple metal fins are more than sufficient along with a high efficiency power supply.
I live in Japan, and instead of just a pair of wires coming out of the ceiling, there is a standardized "ceiling socket" [0] which can also support the weight of a lamp. This means that swapping out light fixtures is plug and play, so the standard LED lamp is something like this [1] where you have a nice big flat metal plate backing the hardware is mounted to for heat-sinking.
I don't own any LED bulbs at all - all our lamps are of this type so I wouldn't have anywhere to put one.
It was the same when I lived in Sweden - a standard ceiling light outlet (IIRC there is a EU standard for this now called DCL) so that replacing light fixtures was easy. Moving into an apartment, often they wouldn't even come with light fixtures, you'd bring your own.
[0] https://www.e-connect.jp/images/to_quickB.jpg
[1] https://www.irisplaza.co.jp/IMAGE/HK/PRODUCT/H246902.jpg
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.
Not practical
And switch mode power supplies are relatively inexpensive and quite efficient.
I say this, because I was guilty of this exact shortcut thinking (in another comment). But I paused and thought to myself "I should run the numbers before just repeating the usual voltage drop criticism".
So I compared scenarios and it depends a lot on the topology, lengths, costs, and situation (new vs renovation).
Sure, a whole house system doesn't typically make sense, but I don't think that's what people are really talking about. I think people are interested in hybrid systems; e.g. DC power supply for each room.
I don't know if you meant it, but the sentence about "any sophomore level electrical engineering student can solve this" can easily come across as dismissive. I also think it gives too much credit to sophomore students. :)
I would have more confidence in an electrician apprentice on this one. I think they'd have more practical experience when it comes to figuring out what are the right questions to ask.
I did EE in college and do a fair bit of hands on residential electrical work.
P.S. How many sophomore level engineering students learn to do a sensitivity analysis?
I completely disagree. Where exactly are you going to put a power supply in a room? Make a special electrical box for it? Won't it be unsightly in many rooms, or need some huge special panel that looks like a breaker panel? The comments I see seem to be advocating a whole-house solution, where a power supply is mounted in the breaker panel to supply LVDC to the whole unit. But this makes no sense for several reasons, especially the voltage drop.
>I don't know if you meant it, but the sentence about "any sophomore level electrical engineering student can solve this" can easily come across as dismissive. I also think it gives too much credit to sophomore students. :)
It's supposed to be dismissive, because this whole discussion is a bunch of software people trying to make up solutions for a perceived problem when they obviously don't know one of the most basic things about electrical theory, which makes all of their solutions unworkable. It's like a bunch of people trying to make a new kind of personal vehicle to replace cars when they don't even understand Newton's Laws. It's really annoying, because I see this kind of discussion pop up every so often, over many many years.
I have another comment here I don't feel like copy-and-pasting, but basically this whole discussion is silly because people are trying to make a solution using a very expensive power supply to fix a problem they see because they're buying cheap $2 light bulbs that burn out quickly, instead of just buying light fixtures that were properly engineered in the first place. With modern SMPSs, you're not going to get any kind of benefit by centralizing the power supply to drive individual LEDs, you're only going to get problems. LEDs need a driver circuit to provide constant current, and that means the power supply needs to be matched to the emitters and kept very close to it.
This sounds like a non-issue, specially considering the pervasive use of "unsightly" installations like air ducts, heating vents, radiators, electrical sockets, telecommunication service panels, routers, and even light fixtures.
If you intentionally dismiss obvious solutions, of course you only end up with problems without obvious solutions.
> It's supposed to be dismissive, because this whole discussion is (...)
If you have nothing to add, please add nothing.
Switched-mode power supplies can be as small as your average Arduino board. They can fit inside the space used for wall outlets or light fixtures. Or you can put the DC transformer inside the light switch.
It's not about DC vs AC, it's high-voltage vs low-voltage. The power dissipation by wire resistance scales with the square of the current ($P=RI^2$), and low line voltage means that you need large currents to transmit the same amount of power.
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).
But what about the sub 100W or even 200W applications? That's where I think something like 48VDC would start to shine. Every light in a home, phone chargers, tablet chargers, computer monitors, televisions, computers? (maybe not gaming rigs, but certainly laptops and nucs).
How so? Exactly what benefit does it have over the current AC mains? With 48VDC, you'd still need to use DC-to-DC converters to power everything. I fail to see how that's any kind of improvement over the current switch-mode power supplies used. Instead, it'll just be less efficient because you'll get higher line losses in the power lines in the walls and all the way from wherever that 48VDC is coming from. If that's from a big SMPS in a closet somewhere, that's going to have its own losses. Overall, the entire system will have lower efficiency compared to the current system.
Exactly what problem are you trying to solve with this idea? If you think you're going to eliminate SMPSs in all your electronic equipment, you're not; that's a fantasy. Everything needs a power supply because electronics only work at very low voltages (5V, 3.3V, even 1.8V in places, now 20V with USB3) and most equipment has some kind of peculiar voltage requirements, and usually multiple different requirements inside the same device. There's no improvement in efficiency by running a computer, for instance, from 48VDC vs. 120VAC or 240VAC, in fact it's probably worse.
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.
How about power over ethernet?
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.
This is a great idea and I would love it if you would post a Youtube how-to video. It might encourage a bunch of hobbyists to do something useful with those dead bulbs.
I've had a number of LED's fail after only a year or two, in fact more quickly than the average incandescent bulb. Seems like it defeats the whole purpose of "upgrading" and in fact may be more of a downgrade.
LEDs are super cheap. I bought few hundred pre-covid for $3.
LEDs are indeed extremely cheap, but for me, the benefit is reducing the amount of electronic waste I produce, not cost-savings.
I have the exact opposite experience, virtually every single light bulb I have torn down - one LED (all in series) has a black dot, if I shorten it - it will 'work' again. The bulbs I have seen tend to drive the LEDs so hard that some of the latter fail, power supplies might have huge ripple but generally don't fail catastrophically.
Edit: now thinking, it can be a US thing, with the voltage being ~120. Lower AC voltages means worse efficiency for the power supply (and all of them tend to be universal, unless totally cheapen out on the primary capacitor [250V] for the US market). Generally speaking low AC voltages have mostly disadvantages.
I have had lamps that lived long enough to see LED failures (the "black dot of death") but that's not the most usual failure mode that I've personally encountered.
I've been considering following in the footsteps of Big Clive and modifying new LED bulbs to stop them from overdriving the LEDs, but my interest in doing that hasn't yet overcome my inherent laziness.
If the bulb dies but you notice that all of the elements are still just barely on (like a dim spot of light in the middle of each one) then that's a good indication that you have a dead LED.
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.
- Older LEDs house bulbs were much worse than newer ones; far more prone to failure from "things". I had many of them fail after only a few months because our power was "flickery" and their power supplies could not handle it. That's _far_ less common now.
- The power supply / controller circuitry is not a fan of heat. Don't mount them upside down (so the heat floats up to the circuit) and never mount them in a recessed mount. The heat buildup will destroy them a lot quicker. That being said, this advice can be ignored is you're paying attention... mounts that have a way to heat to escape; bulbs that are designed to go in upside-down mounts (maybe?), etc.
- While you certainly don't want to always buy the most expensive bulb, you also don't want to buy the cheap ones. They are far more likely to be made from poor, failure prone components.
It’s not my fixtures’ problem.
It’s these crappy bulbs.
You don't go buy offroad vehicle, then complain it doesn't drive as comfortably on the highway and say it's an objectively worse vehicle. It was designed for a different goal than the 4 door sedan you're comparing it to. It does better at that goal, and worse at others. And, over time, offroad vehicles have gotten better on highways; they'll just never be as good.
The way most people use lighting goes far beyond whatever the manufacturers want to foist.
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.
10 hours per day sounds like a crazy amount of time to use a light. I think we use some lights in our house maybe 4 hours per day on average max. Maybe I just have a lot of windows and don't live in Alaska in the winter.
I think the Alaska point is close. Yet even in (for example) southern Canada, the sun just doesn't get high over the horizon in winter. So you have 7 hour days, but those days are mostly dim and dark.
Even without clouds.
On the other hand, summers are spectacular.
A whole fixture with nice components like this is not cheap.
Sadly, with San Fran anywhere from 4.5x, or more than where I live (Quebec), and with LED products lastly barely longer than incandescent bulbs, it is typically a loss.
Maybe a 5 year warranty on LED bulbs should be a law, to ensure better quality control and build. The competitors can compete around that requirement.
I’ve had the dimmable coloured hue bulbs for a while and while expensive I can say none have ever died on me in ~5 years. Certainly no flickering.
The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.
Utilities don't have that. Everyone is stuck paying for both infrastructure and use, so it makes sense to charge them separately.
If each neighborhood had exactly one restaurant that everyone used for all their food, maybe it would make sense to split the burger flipper costs evenly.
"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...
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.
https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-...
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.
So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself:
> Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticis...
There are initiatives to come up with a better metric, but there doesn't seem to be much traction:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale
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.
An incandescent lightbulb is a piece of tungsten wire.
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.
They overheat and die really fast if used in something that's not vented/cooled. You need fixtures that fully expose the bulb so it doesn't burn itself out.
Amusing that LED bulbs, the energy savers, die from excess heat.
Other solutions to this include using much larger devices, but that costs proportionally more and has application issues because people want their light bulbs to act like either line or point sources, not as areal sources. So most lights on the market use a single small LED, unless they are targeted to a buyer demanding high efficiency and long life, like a city streetlight.
If you get an LED strip, the power supply itself can become warm; but even a LED with no voltage changing needed will warm up.
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.)
If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs.
About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC).
> - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
[0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen...
That there is a huge turn off for me, even if I don't have a smartphone handy ;)
They last for YEARS, and give a soft warm light - the bulbs I have a dim (but then 'Edison style squirrel cage bulbs have always been dim).
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
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).
A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.
An expensive bulb with a nice heat sink will fail just as quickly as a cheap one when you put it in a well-sealed can light or something else that traps all the hot air.
Funny enough most mains/350V DC, chips tend to have a limiting resistor for the current drive - lower resistance = high current. Most (if not all) have two resistors in parallel (for a better control, and less power per resistor) - desoldering one would greatly improve the lifespan for a minimal luminosity loss. So by picking a larger heatsink, they might picked a bit large value for the resistors as well.
For example https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php...
I ordered samples of a lot of LEDs and found that almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs.
Driving caps at well above their specs, at high temperature, basically ensures speedy failure. Not only that, but undersized smoothing capacitor causes visible 100Hz flicker.
What's even more interesting is at the price point putting better caps was almost inconsequential to the price of the product. I have ordered capacitors that should have been there in the first place and replaced the original ones with the new ones. Not only LEDs are flicker free now, I suspect they will be serving me for much longer.
Well, the LEDs themselves will last up to 20 years, so they have to make something in the bulb fail before that. Can't have people only buying replacement bulbs every other decade.
> How exactly did the cartel pull off this engineering feat? It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anybody could have done that. But to create one that reliably failed after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours took some doing over a number of years. The household lightbulb in 1924 was already technologically sophisticated: The light yield was considerable; the burning time was easily 2,500 hours or more. By striving for something less, the cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/technology/innovation/origin...
In some situations you want planned obsolescence, such as in parts which are critical yet should not be used beyond a certain time period (a filter in a medical device) and it is standard practice to design them to stop working in a controlled way before they become dangerous so that they will be replaced on a timely basis. I've also heard that one reason the Soviet Union failed is they relied heavily on standardized components. This meant that everything was easily replaceable, if your washing machine motor failed you could replace it with the same electric motor taken from an old car. But this also meant Soviet engineers had trouble designing new products since new products with new parts could not compete with those made from low cost and massively manufactured standardized parts. If you needed an inbetween motor size you were stuck with just the standard motor sizes. A higher performing motor that used less energy and lasted longer would have to compete on price with standardized massively produced motors. To some extent this limited the development of new technologies and products. The article linked above mentions that customers also drive product design; if people will always buy whatever is cheaper and pay no attention to product longevity then it is difficult for a manufacturer to compete with a long lasting product; the benefit is not immediately apparent to the purchaser and claims about longer life are hard to prove for the seller (many sellers lie). A lot depends on the specific type of product and peoples perceptions. Many people are willing to spend more on tools that last because they have seen poorly made tools wear out or had it demonstrated how much better a properly made tool works. They are not willing to pay more for long lasting LED light bulbs because the experience with incandescent bulbs is they always wear out so they are used to having to replace them and they are not going to track the individual lifetimes of each bulb type/maker, though that is starting to change as people notice LED bulbs not having the claimed lifetime (hence this discussion).
So some things need to have a limited lifetime, some things are more efficient in terms of manufacturing cost versus lifetime when designed with a limited lifetime, sometimes a limited lifetime leaves room for invention and improvement, and sometimes a longer lifetime uses less resources and is more efficient and makes life easier. Longevity and standardization can work both ways, for and against the minimization of resource use. Capitalism has flaws, and many of them are tied to profit motive, but it does improve some efficiencies and encourage invention. A lot of it is up to people who decide how much they are willing to pay for things. Not everyone can pay the price for longevity, a cheap screwdriver can be used to fix things right now while an expensive screwdriver may mean not also having the use of a cheap hammer right now. Do you live with the house falling apart or buy the cheap tools? Cheap cellphones meant everyone could have one, and replacing them every few years meant the design of cellphones could advance quickly. Once cellphones reached a plateau in design (remember when each new model had more sensors and cheap models had fewer sensors?) the focus should have shifted to longevity.
However, after saying all that, and considering the climate crisis, society and corporations need to be leaning more towards making things last than they are currently. Making things more easily recyclable, making parts reusable, making products last longer. It has to be approached on a product by product basis though, and affect designs where it makes sense. B...
Otherwise why exclude the california market in this case.
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.
- 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.
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.
They emit a pleasant looking spectrum, have good heat sinks for longevity, have high-quality ballasts, built-in dimmers and do not flicker.
They also blow out any alternative out of the water when it comes to pure brightness for precision work (soldering, painting minis, etc.)
They are also fairly cheap (can find some lights as low as 50c/watt on sale)
Oh and lastly - I can always just move them and use them to grow any kind of plants (wink wink, nudge)
Also, you never look at the light directly.
That being said, maybe it's a good idea to use a plexiglass UV filter when using it as a workshop light.
> If you had a strong emitter of UV in a relatively dim room
A 150 watt LED right above your head is the opposite of dim.
I happen to work with a lot of LED light sources nowadays and I can see most problems discussed are related to the light fixture, driver or psychology. More often than not it is the capacitors in these mains powered LEDs that fail first, because the circuit is designed to run at the highest temperature possible to lower the cost of the final product. The bulbs, or LED chips, looks quite innocent in this regard.
So consumers in hot climates who abstain from A/C cooling will suffer such failures disproportionately.
But maybe there's an argument that you have to pay a significant premium to get a bulb that doesn't have the issues you've run into and, once you factor that premium into account, LED bulbs aren't worth it. But some of the broad claims here, and in the article, about the allegedly poor performance of LED bulbs just don't cohere at all with my experience with them. I made a point of buying high quality bulbs that are dimmable, don't flicker, and have the color temperature and CRI that I want and...well...that's exactly what I got.
We can turn on every light in the house and it will use less than 200w. With incandescents and halogens (for gu10s) I'd be looking at more than that just to light the bathroom. The whole house would use about 1.5kw. Given that the lights are on a lot outside of summer (I'm in the UK) that's a pretty big saving.
But the ones that didn't fail have been fine, and lasted for years. Like CPUs, the yields aren't good but the ones that pass give good service for a long time.
As for the color reproduction issue... you do experience it, I imagine you haven't done color critical work under incandescent and then under LEDs?
I do have some stupidly expensive $29 D-50 compliant LEDs in my office that don't bother me at all. One failed after about 9 months, but the company replaced it for free.
Anyway, I'm highly sensitive to LED flicker, and my wife apparently can hear the buzz from rooms away.
At risk of sounding like a consistent theorist...The market factors that led to the lighting industry forming a "cartel" 100 years ago are certainly alive and well today. I think it's likely that these manufacturers are only selling energy efficient lightbulbs to make more money than they otherwise would -- it's certainly not to save the planet.
High quality LEDs with a good CRI are vastly better for that sort of work. You don't want to be doing anything like that under 2700k incandescent light.
I'm not an LED hater. But I do think the Lightbulb industry has taken advantage of us in not so honest ways, as expected by their shareholders.
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.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09H3VFG8B/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
This movement away from standard bulb-sockets to direct wiring is short-term-ism at its finest. Least of all because very time you rewire this, you're going to degrade or shorten the wires.
I've replaced a couple ceiling sockets with panel-type LED fixtures and they're going strong years later. Perhaps they'll fail eventually, but their lifespan has far exceeded anything I've screwed into a socket, so the increased replacement effort/cost has already paid for itself.
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.
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.
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