Ask HN: What do you use to replace incandescent lights?

Shop where? Surely not in your nearest retail, you'll have hard time to get consistent quality (flicker free, CRI, consistent color temperature, and perhaps most important, longevity)

no kidding. I just bought a set of them. 3 levels of brightness and 2 k levels and a few different colors. If you shop around more you can get stuff that is even more complex and programmable. I mostly wanted something a bit more yellow and dimmable. The trick is to look at the kelvin levels. Find the bulb you have find out its k level and pick an LED that is close to that or can do that.

They can look, to your eyes, "like anything."

The problem is that the spectrum, which impacts "how other things look to your eyes," can be a wide range of things, ranging from "quite decent" to "a hot, peaky mess." They look the same in terms of how your eyes perceive the bulb, but other things will look very different. If you've ever had a pure RGB LED, and wondered why things look "wrong" when it's set to white, that's the problem - it's three very peaky emissions, and while it looks white, everything else looks wrong in it.

CRI measures this, and as soon as you get the RGB emitters online, the multi-color bulb CRIs tend to head downhill in a hurry.

You can see spectrometer graphs from a Philips bulb I reviewed here: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/ - it's a good bit better than some of the other bulbs, but it's still easy to get it off the white emitter and into the peaky RGB emitters.

I just switched out some CFL for LED. A couple of them I go to switch them out and realized I had already switched them out and they color temp was exactly the same. I am now switching many of mine out for a more yellow dimmer color. The ones I got for free were good for work spaces but not living room/bed room lightning. But those CFL's are troopers only had one stop working in 15 years out of 20 and I still have a box of 20 of them that have never been opened plus the 20 or so LED ones that I got for free too. If anyone is wondering how I ended up with a bunch of free ones check out your power bill. Many times power companies will run a promotion and just ship you a box of them.

> Strangely the thing that I really noticed when we stopped using incandescent bulbs was that it felt a lot colder during winter nights, as the majority of the energy the old bulbs drew was converted to heat rather than light.

I swap in incandescent builds into a certain cold room in the winter, to deliberately exploit that effect, then I swap them out for LEDs during the summer.

IIRC, it wasn't uncommon to use incandescent builds as cheap heating elements. IIRC, early in the push to ban incandescent bulbs, some German tried to sell them as "heat bulbs," but got squashed by the regulators.

A side effect is really just an effect, and they can be useful. In the race to totally ban things, that often gets lost.

It's not just the waste heat. If you're well positioned, the radiant heat off an incandescent can heat a human body very effectively. Remember the "heat lamps" some bathrooms used to have? The same effect is found in regular lighting incandescents, especially if you're directly below an overhead fixture.

"Radiant heating of humans" is rather substantially more efficient, in terms of "human happiness per watt used," than heating the entire house. I've got some radiant heat panels that get used heavily in the winter, and there's nothing like a good radiant kerosene heater (mine is 10k BTU, about 3kW, almost entirely as heat) on a cold winter night.

> single-colour bulbs

Incandescent light isn't single-color, it's all of them. Evidently that matters to some people. Things that don't matter to you might legitimately matter to other people.

People's eyes and brains vary widely. Maybe it's reasonable to accept that people see light differently and maybe some people are much more sensitive to spectrum differences. That's certainly true for flicker tolerance -- I personally get almost physically ill around flickering cheap or failing LEDs when others seem to be unaffected.

Shame they enshittified their product:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23892761/philips-hue-app-...

Not an expert. The LED lamps require a driver circuit, which are generally poorly designed. Any gains in the possible lifespan of LEDs is offset by these, allowing manufacturers to sell LED lamps more often…not as often as older technologies, but it gets there sometimes. Poor drivers can also cause flickering and other issues.

So it's not going to be appropriate everywhere, but when I have a cursed light fixture [live in an old house, out in the boonies], I've had good luck with the ultra-fancy designer LED bulbs that try to look like old Edison bulbs.

They're usually not as bright as other bulbs, which isn't suitable for all applications [although desirable in others].

Heat. Almost all modern fixtures count as "enclosed" - and most LED bulbs, if you look closely on the case, aren't rated for "enclosed or recessed" use. Basically, they're fine, if they're upright in a table lamp or so.

Most modern fixtures are recessed, and the bulbs are "upside down" - so the heat builds up in the base of them, where the power electronics are, and simply fries them. There's a typical, handwaving, "For each 10C above design temperature, the lifetime halves" curve you can apply, and those power electronics are running way above design temperature in "almost all modern uses." So they die quickly.

An enclosed rated bulb is worth trying, if you can find one that does what you want. But good luck. They're cheap consumer devices at this point, built to a price point.

There's two main failure modes: thermal and interference.

Thermal should be obvious. The components in the bulb's internal power supply can only withstand so much heat.

Interference is harder to track down. Old dimmers designed for incandescent bulbs will destroy LEDs very quickly. Since the problem seems so endemic, I suspect you have a more serious issue with your electrical service. Your AC voltage may be too high or low, or there's some equipment nearby or in your house that's putting a bunch of noise into the AC lines. Likely causes are old, improperly filtered inductive loads. That'd be anything with a big motor in it: washer, dryer, fridge, HVAC, pumps and fans. If you have any old dimmers anywhere in your house, remove them. You can also call your electric utility to see if they can send someone to check it out. They're usually pretty serious about interference like this because it can spread.

I had the same problem and it's the light fixture.

LEDs (or actually their power electronics) can't stand nearly the same temperatures that incandescent lights can, so they get cooked. You'll notice brownish stuff coming out of the base when it happens.

My fixture was a series of thick, donut-shaped aluminium rings connected via spacers forming a sphere around the bulb approximately the size of a melon. Three such spheres in total.

The damn thing destroyed two whole sets of lights before I:

-Disassembled one of the fixtures so that only the top is left, exposing the ceramic base.

-Replaced the other two with "efficient mood lighting" 2W 2700K bulbs - those with a transparent head mimicking a glass bulb.

It's not particularly beautiful, but hadn't had any problems since.

flickering: all them use switching power supply, which if wrong ones or in wrong conditions, usualy die in few months. Not only because of heat, but also close-to-limits voltages and such. And because they put $0.15 capacitors ones instead of $0.25 ones.

And this is not only (cheap) home stuff, you can see this effect walking around in parks or streets, where a lamp is $100..

i have 7-8 long-fluorescent-substitues doing this at home, replaced capacitors in 2 of them, then replaced whole power supplies in 2 others.. then replaced the rest with whole new lamps as the price vs hassle/time-waste did not make sense..

Edit: but as sibling in thread says, if it soo repeatable, something is wrong in your electricity network at home. There is some source of disturbance, maybe even at neighbours. Long ago one bad laptop switching power supply was making an LCD display go crazy 4 rooms away.

I've had great LED longevity. Early in 2017 my electric company was doing some kind of instant rebate deal with retailers so that the rebate was taken off automatically at the register. It brought Walmart's "Great Value" brand non-dimmable 800 and 450 lumen bulbs down to $0.17.

I went around the house counting bulbs, found that I had something like 26 incandescent 60 W or 40 W bulbs, and bought enough Walmart bulbs to replace them, plus another dozen to have spares. Since then all my non-smart bulbs other than the small incandescents in some appliances, two incandescents used as heaters in my well shed, and two that are in places I don't go (attic and crawlspace) have been those Great Value bulbs.

I've only had one fail in the 6.5 years since then. That was one in the garage that I dropped onto the concrete floor when screwing it in. They are plastic, not glass, so it didn't shatter like a glass bulb would, but it did not work afterwards.

I gave it to someone at work who was interested in taking it apart to see what broke. If I recall correctly there is an inductor on the PCB is just attached by some thing wire leads and one of those leads broke.

Personally I've had way better luck going with the next-to-cheapest brand versus the cheapest brand.

Since you've tried numerous brands, that implies to me (and my tiny sample size) that the problem for you is not the bulb quality, FWIW.

I did some testing a few years ago of the dimming of a handful of "smart" bulbs.

My test was to put the bulbs into a desk lamp that was aimed straight down at the desk. On the desk was a lux meter. The meter was 41 cm away from the bulb. I was in a closed room with blackout curtains on the window and it was night. I'd turn out all other lights before measuring a bulb.

Here are the bulbs I tested and the labels for their columns in the tables below:

  Label  Bulb
  TP     TP-Link Kasa white bulb
  MIW    Merkury Innovations white bulb
  HW     Hue white bulb
  MIC    Merkury Innovations color bulb set to white
  HCX    Hue color bulb set to X, where X can be
           CW cool white
           DW daylight white
           W  white
           SW soft white
           WW warm white

The various whites were set using Amazon's Alexa app rather than the Hue app.

For each of these bulbs here are the lux readings I got at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 75, and 100%:

       TP  MIW  HW   MIC  HCCW HCDW HCW HCSW HCWW
   1%  14   135  64   135  10   7   10  5    3
   2%  14   149  64   162  10   7   10  6    3
   3%  26   162  65   170  11   8   11  6    4
   4%  43   180  65   182  11   8   11  7    4
   5%  58   190  66   200  13   9   13  7    5
  10%  128  246  77   255  20   15  20  12   8
  15%  196  303  91   322  34   25  34  21   13
  20%  261  364  112  388  54   40  54  34   21
  25%  325  428  143  451  74   67  74  46   29
  50%  630  725  400  776  282  218 282 184  118
  75%  909  1008 820  1099 650  483 650 410  263
  100% 1160 1283 1382 1408 1146 850 1146 725 463

Here is the same data except for each bulb it is as a percentage of that bulb's 100% lux:

       TP     MIW    HW     MIC    HCCW   HCDW   HCW    HCSW   HCWW
  1%   1.2%   10.5%  4.6%   9.6%   0.9%   0.8%   0.9%   0.7%   0.6%
  2%   1.2%   11.6%  4.6%   11.5%  0.9%   0.8%   0.9%   0.8%   0.6%
  3%   2.2%   12.6%  4.7%   12.1%  1.0%   0.9%   1.0%   0.8%   0.9%
  4%   3.7%   14.0%  4.7%   12.9%  1.0%   0.9%   1.0%   1.0%   0.9%
  5%   5.0%   14.8%  4.8%   14.2%  1.1%   1.1%   1.1%   1.0%   1.1%
  10%  11.0%  19.2%  5.6%   18.1%  1.7%   1.8%   1.7%   1.7%   1.7%
  15%  16.9%  23.6%  6.6%   22.9%  3.0%   2.9%   3.0%   2.9%   2.8%
  20%  22.5%  28.4%  8.1%   27.6%  4.7%   4.7%   4.7%   4.7%   4.5%
  25%  28.0%  33.4%  10.3%  32.0%  6.5%   7.9%   6.5%   6.3%   6.3%
  50%  54.3%  56.5%  28.9%  55.1%  24.6%  25.6%  24.6%  25.4%  25.5%
  75%  78.4%  78.6%  59.3%  78.1%  56.7%  56.8%  56.7%  56.6%  56.8%
  100% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%

Huh, prices have come down on them recently. They're only about $20/bulb now. They used to be a good bit higher.

Waveform is a good example of a company that's trying to do it right - you can get photometric reports on their bulbs, with detailed spectrums, the full CRI chart (R1-R15, not just R1-R8, and, yes, their R9 values are quite good), etc.

None of that is true. But thinking makes it so.

TIL.

Every dark corner... of your yard. I can read outdoors by some people's lighting that's well over 1/4 mile away on an otherwise dark night.

Get a cold blast kerosene lantern (Dietz Blizzard is my go-to lantern these days), run some kerosene substitute in it, and you'll have a clean burning lamp that doesn't put out nearly the particulates of a candle with any slight air movement.

Any kind of fire will spread "bad chemicals" around it. You just get to choose what variety of them you want.