- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poor CRI and SSRI
- Flickering
- Dim-to-warm is uncommon
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
- The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford.
- It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal
- Retrofits generally work poorly on principle
- LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
In a screw base, maybe. But compare:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i...
$25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30...
$3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.)
So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30.
Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast.
To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks.
I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it:
https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...
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.
If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs.
About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC).
> - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive
I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
They 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.
So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself:
> Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticis...
There are initiatives to come up with a better metric, but there doesn't seem to be much traction:
The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.
I made sure they were all the same color temperature, and also all >> 90 CRI.
The main issue I've seen is that dimmer switches are usually not compatible with the electronics in high-end fixtures, and that high-end fixtures often take a long time to power on. (Like, walk across the room and open the fridge amounts of time.)
They should choose a standard way of dimming bulbs that doesn't result in noticeable 60hz flicker, and that dictates a max 100ms turn on latency, then ban the sale of "dimmer compatible" LED bulbs, or "LED compatible" dimmer switches that are not compliant with that standard.
Also, bulb reliability should be tracked, and any product with a > 5% failure rate in the first 5 years should either be banned, or the company should have to put replacement funds into escrow.
(Current bulbs have a ~ 5-10% failure rate from what I've seen.)
Yeah, I love Alec's Technology Connections video on some bulbs with that feature, but he pointed it partly because some of the few bulbs that offered it seemed to be getting phased out.
Its much like a bunch of other points on the list. There are a fair few that would only add a small amount of additional cost, but because the companies can save money by not doing it, they don't.
It does not actually cost all that much more to add a few more diodes, to avoid severely overdriving the ones on the board, or to improve the power supply circuitry so that it will likely last longer.
But it really sucks that even if you chose to buy the more premium tier bulbs being offered at the big box store, they often don't fix some of these issues. They may have a better CRI, but are still often overdriven, with questionable power supply designs.
- low power factor (usually 50%).
- cheap passives, caps/coils
- terrible heat dissipation, e27/e14 are no good target, but see overdriven again
- close to no input protection (see power supplies, again), so motors totally wreck them with their induction kickback
A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.
For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.
Man I'd love me some indoor lightning, no matter the cost.
- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly
- Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly
- Poor CRI and SSRI
- I don't see flicker on any of my cameras. The light is actually really nice for filming too.
- The price is way less than hue (I own a few, and don't think they are any better)
- I get way more light per watt than with any other bulp type. Not sure what you mean with luxury.
- I love that each of them has an independent API on their own IP. Works perfectly for my smart home design.
I've had several cheap (in build quality, not price) bulps fail on me meanwhile. Not a single WiZ had failed so far. As said I own some hue too, but I wasn't willing to spend over $1000 just on bulps for my house but then I found the WiZ brand.
Not sure if am just lucky. But I really enjoy multicolour plus warm and cold LEDs in the whole house.
I wanted to upgrade the super faint positional lights in my two garage openers, and I need to stay <= 10W, so I tried some LEDs. But they kill the 433 MHz remote signal, sadly. Tried 3 different brands, a couple of which don't actually fully turn off, or give off a loud hum to boot.
The openers use rear car light bulbs, for some reason (BA15s).
I'm going through this again now. At one point I found Philips EyeComfort bulbs on Amazon which checked all my boxes (2700-3000K, 60W, dimmable, almost non-existent flicker). I've had a couple bulbs die on me now, and I cannot for the life of me find replacements, it's like they stopped manufacturing them. I have no clue what to replace them with now
Where? How? I can no longer buy quality LED lighting at any price. I have a bunch of Sylvania Ultra Sunset Effects bulbs purchased ~15 years or so ago that nothing since even comes close to.
> Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons
Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.
For example https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php...
"Set all the lights to red" and every single bulb in my house and porch and walkway and garage etc, all turn red.
"Turn on/off all the light"
Set kitchen to firebrick...
Etc.
I LOVE IT.
During the day I rarely have any lights on at all - but at night I have precise control over every bulb in my house with alexa voice.
I initially would never have put alexa in my home, but now that I have it and all bulbs on it, as well as several alexa-fied power outlets, its just a very nice thing to have.
Im not too concerned over "lighting quality" - as I get exactly what I want.
The bulbs I bought were from Costco, where they had them on sale for $5 for a (2) pack. so I replaced all CFLs with RGB Wifi LEDs with alexa, and it was ~$70 to do the whole house (27) bulbs.
EDIT: Dimmability "Alexa Set Kitchen to 10%" --> I can dim or brighten all the lights at once "Alexa set house to 100%" etc...
They last for YEARS, and give a soft warm light - the bulbs I have a dim (but then 'Edison style squirrel cage bulbs have always been dim).
That there is a huge turn off for me, even if I don't have a smartphone handy ;)
An incandescent lightbulb is a piece of tungsten wire.
Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We should not fault the technology for now giving us too many options, but instead improve the branding and advertising.
I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs but vastly prefer LEDs and have no desire to go back to them.
Using LEDs was a shock to me initially mostly because, as you point out, with traditional household incandescents there wasn't a whole lot of options. So suddenly when I had to pay attention to color profiles and so forth more carefully, I wasn't expecting it.
But I don't see that as a bad thing, I really love all the options, and the better precision in labeling color versus power versus brightness.
One problem I've noted, that others in the thread are pointing to, is that a lot of shoddy manufacturing has taken advantage of many of the claims of LED technology to push unacceptable products. One of my pet peeves is how I've suddenly seen fixtures with integrated bulbs take over lighting departments, poorly constructed and forcing you to remove the entire fixture rather than just the bulb, when it dies after a year, much earlier than promised. But I guess even there it's just moved me to more selective lighting stores where I can still buy better fixtures separately from the bulbs.
I do think there's something to be said about declines or fraud in lightbulb manufacturing quality compared to what is possible, but I see that as a scourge of our age and not something unique to LEDs. I have as much trouble finding a quality lightbulb as I do a quality pair of pants.
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".
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"?
It's unfortunate many of us are not used to terms like lumens that are objectively better than using terms like wattage.
However I do feel over the past few years they have become much better at displaying the important terms on the front of the package.
Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.
(don't get me wrong, I like dim lighting, I prefer it, I don't turn lights on when I get up in the morning, I make coffee, I take showers in the dark, people come into spaces that I'm in and always snap the lights on and it drives me crazy. I'm simply saying, when I want to turn a light on to see, I want it to cast a good amount of light.)
(oh, let me add on, I also know that 1 tiny little blue or white LED power indicator on each of a few gadgets I buy seem able to bathe my bedroom in light when I'm trying sleep.)
Things flickering in the corner of your vision is distracting af.
But then my partner started complaining about headaches reading, but only in certain rooms in the house. I put two and two together and stopped buying a brand of CFL (I might have upgraded to LEDs at this point, I don't recall).
More recent advice was to go to the hardware store and record a slow motion video of the demo bulbs, to see if you can detect flicker during playback, but I think I've only succeeded in that one time and so I'm not sure if it doesn't work as well as advertised or if retailers have gotten better vendors.
(Yes, I know I could search online and order them. It's not that important.)
EU has banned incandescent lights years ago and the situation for LED buyers is much different here. My local drug store chain (Rossmann in Germany) sells 1000lm E27 bulbs under their own Rubin brand with CRI>97 for 4.99€. No flickering and available as 2700K or 4000K. My Opple Light Master 3 even reads CRI 100. So for me right now, it's just going to the drug store and buying a bulb, like before the ban.
Here I find it is very easy to find good LED bulbs with the strength and color profile of my choice and I have used LED in all rooms of my house for the last 10+ years without any failing so far.
I bought a stockpile of 150W incandescent bulbs marked as 'shock resistant' (they are definitely not) and they give decent light. The 100W LEDs give more like 50W and flicker too..
This same reasoning is why I'm not bullish on AI; what the potential is and what we peasants get to use are vastly different
Here is one common vendor: https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/a19-bulbs/
The issue isn’t that MBAs have cost reduced bulbs for no reason. The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period. As a result, that’s what gets produced at scale.
> We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things.
They’re not the same thing. Displays are optimized for specific R, G, and B color points. White LEDs are optimized for full, smooth spectrums.
the 4-for-$10 A19 LED bulbs from amazon or ikea are flicker free to my eyes. i've bought some fancy bulbs with big metal heatsink bases, supposed "high CRI" ratings, equivalently high price tags. to my eyes, i can't see the difference. the super-cheap bulbs from one of those amazon marketplace sellers with a randomly generated name are flickery, but just going up to anything other than the absolute bare minimum of quality is good enough. "what the peasants get to use" is because that's actually probably good enough for what us peasants need. if you want to geek out about super high-end LEDs, you're not going to find that in consumer-grade products and that's probably fine.
Apathy towards the consumer, or by the consumer? I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I just buy name brand LED bulbs (usually Phillips) in the color temperature of my choice and am completely satisfied with them. Color rendition is fine, no noticeable flicker, long lifetime. In the past 7 years I haven’t had any fail prematurely, though I’ve replaced some early to change color temperature.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>
Discussed numerous times on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=market%20for%20lemons>
To get a market for lemons, the following characteristics are required:
- Nonuniform products or services with widely-varying quality.
- Expensive quality assessment.
- Poor information on relative quality, whether by distortions by sellers or lack of sophistication of buyers, or both.
You find this all over the place, with one notable example being tech recruiting (which appears multiple times in the HN/Algolia search above).
This is also a characteristic which leads to worsening product quality as formerly niche markets expand. Bicycles, audio equipment, and electronics are classic instances of these. A larger market is inherently less sophisticated, and more easily distracted by spurious or irrelevant characteristics of products.
Another tendency is for cargo-culting and fads to develop. That is, as products or services become more complex, a follow-the-herd mentality appears, where (apparently successful) influencers drive follow-on behaviour. Often, of course, the influencers and early-adopters themselves have a poor understanding or capability of distinguishing between high- and low-quality offerings. Given random selection, some will emerge as either successful or lucky over others.
There are some mitigations. In the case of used-car markets, for example, the emergence of vehicle history services (e.g., CarFax), reduces informational asymmetries. In the case of appliances, certification services (e.g., Underwriters Laboratories) and review organisations (e.g., Consumer Reports) aided greatly, as did uniform trade practices such as implied warrantee of fitness and generous return policies (both of which reduce buyers' risk).
As for your assessment of AI's future market, that seems highly probable to me, and would greatly dampen actual positive prospects within the field.
As long as we're all shoveling shit, nobody gets a whiff of fresh air.
It's not peasants who's gonna use AI, it's the elite. Peasants are gonna get nothing.
"Good old-fashioned" incandescents were also subject to a multi-decade scam to limit their lifetime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
It's manifesting slightly differently this time around, but it's the same principle.
Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence.
Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials.
Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave.
Late stage capitalism started in the 80s.
aka capitalism? People prioritize price over quality, but you can't make something better the cheaper it gets. So in an open and "fair" competitive market, all goods and services get shittier over time. It's a race to the bottom.
Nobody's denying you nice things at low prices just out of spite. Nice things just cost more. To put a positive spin on it, our innate sense of 'nice' is a well tuned heuristic for good engineering (and/or whatever the Joneses can't afford).
[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 happen to work with a lot of LED light sources nowadays and I can see most problems discussed are related to the light fixture, driver or psychology. More often than not it is the capacitors in these mains powered LEDs that fail first, because the circuit is designed to run at the highest temperature possible to lower the cost of the final product. The bulbs, or LED chips, looks quite innocent in this regard.
So consumers in hot climates who abstain from A/C cooling will suffer such failures disproportionately.
We've only used LEDs in my country for, what, 15 years now? They are perfectly fine, no issues really, much cheaper than incandescent bulbs of course. We just buy the ones in IKEA and they haven't really failed us so far.
That's because it is. George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the incandescent bulb in the US in 2007. Incandescent bulbs are a niche product in the US, LEDs have been the mainstream choice for years.
First, bans on incandescent bulbs are foolish because they encourage defeatist foolishness like this article (as far as I can tell, for the sake of virtue signaling and modest acceleration of a change that was already happening.)
The CFLs which preceded LEDs were really awful, especially for closets (where they'll linger for decades, given the low utilization of those bulbs,) but LEDs are fine, amd really nice if your 70 year old house gets retrofitted for AC and you need the reclaimed electrical capacity. This author just needs to pony up for dimmable LEDs, which aren't expensive except by comparison. Non-dimmable LEDs are right up there with running toilets and rodents in the pantheon of things to make homeowners lose their minds.
Really? I've never understood the affection for dimming lights. Essentially always I want lights on or off.
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.
This kind of scam is getting really old for me. LED lighting isn't the only one being pushed on us.
However, I would always buy standard socket LEDs unless you're really committed to that lighting style.
"New LEDs can last 50,000 to 100,000 hours or more. The typical lifespan for an incandescent bulb, by comparison, is 1-5% as long at best (roughly 1,200 hours)."
I've never seen more than 15000 hours from an LED bulb at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb
"The chart below lists values of luminous efficacy and efficiency for some general service, 120-volt, 1000-hour lifespan incandescent bulb"
I spent most of my life in incandescent bulb lighting and rarely remember changing a light bulb. LED bulbs I can remember changing multiple times in the last few years since we started using them.
It's almost like there's a conspiracy to convince consumers incandescent lighting didn't last long which is odd given the following:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light#:~:text=The%2....
"The Centennial Light is the world's longest-lasting light bulb, burning since 1901, and almost never turned off."
It's been a long time since I thought of that. I don't keep spare bulbs around anymore and can't remember the last time an LED bulb burnt out.
With the LED bulbs at our home (many of which have failed!), the problem is always the inverter. They just start flickering wildly and inconsistently one day, which is never pleasant, and they need to be replaced. It's frustrating because when the LEDs have stable power, they can produce just as much brightness as before, but their integrated power-conversion circuitry sucks in reliability.
The centennial light was neither cheap or bright - presently it’s about the strength of a 4-watt nightlight. You put enough power through a thick filament it will glow for a very very long time, but no one wants to illuminate their house that way!
The 1200h are slightly above the 1000h target put in place by the cartel.
Edit: one other thing, I'm also sensitive to the cooling needs of LEDs, so maybe that helps. At my last apartment, I had the 'ceiling boob' style built-in fixtures which didn't allow proper airflow for the LED. I built a little spacer and got a longer mounting rod to allow a 1/8" gap around the bottom, central hole and the top edge of the glass. That kept the LEDs cool and wasn't noticeable.
My house came with installed LED bulbs that were absolute shit. Within a year all the can lights eventually would turn a purpley dim color and slowly all started to fail within the same time and would fail to turn on. Same thing with the smaller fixtures - all started to fail around the same time.
Each time one failed I replaced it with a higher quality LED and every bulb has now been replaced. Most lights I've only replaced once and it's been 6-7 years at least for many of them without any problems.
Previously I used to use incandescent lights and replacing them was a frequent occurrence and just an expected thing to maintain.
I can't really remember how long incandescent bulbs lasted, given that it's been over a decade since anyone in the EU used them... But good LED bulbs last plenty long enough.
The EU forbid terribly inefficient light around a decade ago. Yes, we had plenty of debates. Yes, people were concerned about all kinds of things. Most of them were entirely made up, some were exaggerated out of proportion.
I can say that we still have lights, the debate mostly vanished and no, it's not blue everywhere.
> The EU forbid terribly inefficient light around a decade ago.
So did we. Very few incandescent bulbs are on the market here since they were basically banned a decade ago. There are some niche options, you could still find expensive halogens, but that's it.
They definitely cost a bit more, but I had one fail 5 years out and I was able to call Cree up for a replacement. The rep collected a few questions - model, when it was bought and what type of room and fixture it was installed - and then sent me a new one. Despite being a different model, it matched the temp and tone of the old set of bulbs.
I empathize with the author, but at the end of the day, a lot of people seem completely unaware of lighting to begin with. Walk down a US street at night and look inside, you'll see clashing warm and cold color temperatures in the same room, sterile cold bulbs in entryways and living rooms, dreaded boob light everywhere.
By being conscious and careful, I believe I've managed to have a pretty flicker free house. Cree has always been my go to non smart bulb, but I have not purchased any (I guess other than dimmable cans) since their acquisition. I was not impressed with their smart ecosystem and returned all of it. The software wasn't ready and the firmware was glitchy.
Another thing mentioned not mentioned in the article, is how bad light looks to pets. Dogs can see the flickering, and with one previous fixture that is now gone, I noticed the dogs getting more anxious when the light was on. They didn't like me moving at them suddenly. I can only imagine how choppy the light made the world to them. Imagine a world where to everyone else things look fine, but to you everything is strobing.
A small link dump of resources I found on hn over the years.
https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database
https://www.lutron.com/en-US/Pages/LEDCompatibilityTool/Comp...
https://www.derlichtpeter.de/en/light-flicker/market-tests/
http://fastvoice.net/led-testberichte/
https://gembared.com/blogs/musings/the-best-daytime-white-li...
And Light Brands / Shopping
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_li...
From my understanding, the ban will start somewhere around Q4 this year. Still, you'll always be able to buy them for "decoration purposes".
They are very efficient heat bulbs after all.
The only LED bulbs I buy now are the "filament" types. Their bulbs are filled with helium so heat transfer is good, and they have a close-to-incandescent warm light color. I have had good luck with their longevity so far, but haven't really used them long enough to judge.
Without any sort of detail about what brand or what it was used for and why it was a bad experience, it’s really not adding anything to the conversation. It’s just a blanket judgement on a technology that has a great deal of variation and options and uses.
You do want to consider kerosine lamps - check out https://www.sevarg.net/2022/10/09/keropunk-part-1-kerosene-l... - browse around and he does some spectrum analysis of LED bulbs, too - https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/26/feit-electric-wifi-rgb-bul...
I told him I had bought some LEDs (started moving over 2 years ago) and that is when he mentioned that. I guess I will find out, so far so good.
I did stock up on 100 watt incandescent years ago and have a many left just in case. I found LEDs cause me eye strain, but I experimented and found if I use a Lamp Shade with a slight yellow tinge, I can deal with them.
BigClive covers this issue a fair amount on his Youtube teardown videos. It's not exactly built-in obsolescence, so much as being built to cost.
The cheapest way to build an LED bulb is to minimize the number of components. Instead of spreading the light emission out over a couple of dozen LEDs, it's cheaper to use a handful of LEDs but really overdrive them with high currents.
The result is a bulb that's cheap to make, but in ordinary use the chips and phosphors inside will run at high temperatures and degrade much more quickly. This effect will be even more pronounced with enclosed fixtures (like ceiling lights) that have little to no ventilation.
Manufacturers could design their way out of this by increasing the component count (spreading the light generation over more LED chips at lower current), but that's an expense that doesn't translate well to a brand or marketing claim. As it stands, ordinary consumers are unlikely to try to exercise their warranty on a bulb that fails after 1,000 hours rather than a rated 3,000 or so; there's no reason to expect that "this bulb is more expensive but will last a really long time" would make it in the consumer-facing market.
“The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours)..”
It's not so much "planned obsolescence" as it is "consumers shop on price primarily". And its even harder because there really isn't much benefit to putting specs on your bulbs because 99.9% of consumers won't understand them anyway.
What should happen is a mandated "nutrition facts" that gets put on all bulbs so people can familiarize themselves with a standard fact sheet.
I read the "guarantee" when I buy new bulbs but who keeps receipts or track of light bulbs?
I have led bulbs everywhere (new build, recessed lights). Thankfully they don’t have the flicker effect I’ve seen on other bulbs. And I’ve found that I actually prefer the more “daylight” bulbs in certain areas such as kitchens. The cans do have adjustable color temperature (a physical switch) so it’s not too bad if I decide I’d like a warmer light down the road.
But I really can't think of more than 1 or 2 failures over more than enough years.
We still have florescent and incandescent, but I get the most useful lighting in a room with 5 LED lights and nothing else (and most of the time its actually kinda painful with how bright they are!)
If I cared much about the flicker, I'd get a https://www.crowdsupply.com/test-equipment?sort=latest OpticSpy or Labrador, or something cheaper, and just go into a store with a light display and check each one.
- - -
> Apple’s software will convert the image according to what it has machine-learned that white ought to be
My old lexam camera apparently has machine learning built in too?
Unlike my frustrating old camera, iPhones should be able to lock the white balance, exposure, et al, right? through which, comparisons can still be made.
It's bad luck for us. We've had at least 10 bulbs die within the past two years, at least half of which had been installed just months before. I'd guess they were a poor quality batch in the box we bought at Costco.
Meanwhile, the Philips Hue led lights we bought ages ago are still working perfectly.
Personally I prefer the phillips warm glow dimmable bulbs
I genuinely have no idea what people in this thread are talking about.
This seems odd considering they surely can't be used in Hungary either. The EU started phasing out incandescent bulbs more than a decade ago!
Don't miss them, personally. LED lighting is excellent if you buy good quality ones. And I certainly don't miss having to periodically go around the house changing blown bulbs!
They emit a pleasant looking spectrum, have good heat sinks for longevity, have high-quality ballasts, built-in dimmers and do not flicker.
They also blow out any alternative out of the water when it comes to pure brightness for precision work (soldering, painting minis, etc.)
They are also fairly cheap (can find some lights as low as 50c/watt on sale)
Oh and lastly - I can always just move them and use them to grow any kind of plants (wink wink, nudge)
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.
This is complicated, and I don't think the consumer knows what they're asking for. From my understanding (and watching a lot of Big Clive lightbulb teardowns on YouTube), this would require an active sensor in the bulb. Most of the circuits in these bulbs are embarrassingly simple - 3-4 mostly passive components, and 1-2 silicon based chips or raw transistors. If you add an active sensor to that system, your cost balloons significantly. Then you have to calibrate the sensors. Then we get into the "printer cartridge" problem, where "my light bulb won't turn on because it's insufficiently cyan, but I only want a red light."
We didn't know that we wanted things when we had incandescent bulbs. Now that we're being forced to switch away from incandescent bulbs and use a new technology, users are able to ask for things. I think that's partially exciting (users having preferences is good!), but it's also potentially complicated by companies not providing low-cost solutions that are as good as the old thing. So, overall, good and bad.
For the uninitiated, these are microwave-driven light sources that are about half as efficient as the best LEDs, but still way more efficient than incandescent. The light output spectrum is continuous and single-peaked, and in the case of sulfur lamps, so close to solar that they are routinely used as a "synthetic sunlight" for testing solar panels.
The MW band used in existing appliances is generally the 2.45 GHz Bluetooth and microwave oven band, because it's unregulated, but the high output power and the need for a transparent housing means that they can interfere with other consumer electronics. There is virtually no risk of two bulbs interfering with each other, so even a relatively narrow dedicated band should work fine. As I understand it, the light output is continuous — no flicker — and anyway the beam power of a circularly polarized microwave should be continuous.
Usually, microwaves are created using magnetrons — vacuum tubes — which have a high minimum power output (think floodlight). Microwave diodes do exist, although they haven't yet been applied to electrodeless lamps, because consumers won't be interested in using a light bulb that kills Bluetooth.
But it is physically possible for us to enjoy an efficient light source that looks nice. There are just a few kinks to work out.
savingourstars.org
https://www.redrivercatalog.com/browse/60lb-polar-matte.html
?" and I'd say that LED bulbs do OK when I set them on the high color temperature (blueish) settings and poorly on the warm color temperature side. This company
https://www.solux.net/cgi-bin/tlistore/index.html
became famous for high color temperature lights for art museums also used to make an advanced incandescent bulb that had something like a halogen bulb inside of it. Those bulbs do really well on my test, I still have a stock of them, and I use them when I need to make fine color distinctions. I've seen bulbs with a similar construction for sale at Dollar General but I haven't tested them.
Note there is a tradeoff between an RGB bulb that gives really saturated colors and one that gives good color rendition. If saturation was what mattered you'd want laser-like spectral lines, for color rendition you want each component to have a broad spectrum.
There's no reason why LED light can't have excellent quality however anyone defines quality because you're not limited to the raw output of the LED but you can tune the output with a phosphor. Consumers have to demand something better though and the market has to respond.
I wonder how much of this color quality complaint is due to familiarity and comfort with what you grew up with?
At the same time, I find fluorescent lighting unbearable over long time periods, so I completely appreciate that these differences can be important.
https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/11/how-your-leds-are-killing-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902429
After reading it, I realized that having overhead led lights in our home were possibly contributing to my worsening sleep and general tiredness over the past few years. Granted, we used 4100k lights which are much bluer than 2700k.
We swapped all our leds back to incandescents and halogens (which were a bit tricky to find, but not impossible). Anecdotally, I've been sleeping so much better since, finally feeling well rested and far less stressed. I just feel a tremendous amount of relief after not sleeping well for years.
Also, while we had leds, I had to replace a surprising number of them for burnout/failure, and also experienced flickering, dimming issues, buzzing and more.
You had this realization and yet still went the route of switching back to all incandescents?
It's trivially-easy to find 2700K LED bulbs. The ones I have look just as good as the old incandescent. And despite the article making it sound like you need a PhD to sort it out, you don't: most medium-end 60W-equivalent, 2700K LED bulbs look good and are easily available in any hardware store.
From the article: ``` I’d put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome. ```
What? And then they go on to talk about how hard it is to illegally find incandescent bulbs. This screams cognitive dissonance. An incandescent bulb's normal way of responding after several months to a year was to just not work anymore at all. That was just 'normal' and you would swap them out. If you went to any room in the country and looked at the light fixtures, you had a very good chance of finding bulbs that were burned out. It was normal to hear or say "we really need to replace the bulb in the pantry" but in the meantime not be able to see in there very well. Finding one led bulb that fails early is not an indictment of the technology, even if it was defective. For all we know his kid might have been throwing water balloons at it.
LED bulbs are great, they are now incredibly cheap and there is no reason to keep producing CO2 because of misoneic propaganda. If we want to reduce carbon emissions, we either have to pass the true cost of carbon to consumers, which would mean dramatically increasing energy costs to people who likely can't afford that, or we need to make it less likely to consume all that artificially cheap electricity wastefully. LED bulbs are a great way to do this.
Could be a number of reasons but the most common is either its wired to a dimmer or similar which is leaking some current when its "switched off" or its switched on the netural side and the wiring is acting as a capacitor and letting some current flow.
If you are using the bulb itself to adjust the power level, like with some smart bulbs that you are supposed to leave switched on, it's possible that they never turn off the power completely for some reason. LEDs are dimmed using PWM so they may have an off setting that is like 1% of duty cycle or something, who knows.
I believe this is due to the poor quality of the electronics that comprise the base of the bulb and control the LEDs. The same issue with compact fluorescent bulbs I had opened up some of those cf. bulbs when they burned out prematurely and found burnt ou components.
I haven’t bothered to do this with LED bulbs because I have every reason to assume they’re the same manufactures that need the CF bulbs and are making the LED bulbs are pulling the same trick.
It was a race to the bottom to make the cheapest bulb stand compete on price may have resulted in bulbs that are far more faulty than they need to be.
Do you mean the stated lifetime of a specific LED or the lifetime promises generally assigned to LEDs. In my experience you get what you pay for.
For now, I always go to see bulbs in person before buying them, and record them in slow-motion video on my phone. This makes it easy to tell which ones flicker badly and which don't.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/articles/flicker-understandi...
- Make sure your dimmer switch is compatible with LEDs - ideally only compatible with LEDs, as sometimes the ones that also handle halogen bulbs can buzz
- Make sure your bulbs are dimmable
- The LED and dimmer switch need to either both be leading edge, or both be trailing edge (but almost all are trailing edge now)
- If your bulbs are too dim, read the manual for your dimmer switch - there will be a series of pushes and twists to configure it and/or manufacture reset
- Lights starting up slower than a normal on/off switch is normal - it's the bulb and dimmer "negotiating", and it makes them both last longer
Negotiating? Some dimmers might “adapt” and choose which style to be (leading or trailing edge), but most don’t. I think the real issue is the startup time of the power supply, especially when starting dimmed and therefore getting a horrible waveform.
Unfortunately the market is swamped with cheap low quality ones that produce pretty crap quality light and burn out quickly. I learnt pretty quickly that it was a false economy to skimp on them.
I bought two light fixtures like this that claimed to last "up to 40 years". Almost all have weasel words like "up to". Both were dead within a year. Instead a quick operstion to swap out the bulb I had to find whole new units and re-hardwire them in.
More recently I needed a new garage light and Home Depot didn't cary a single option with replaceable bulbs. Not one.
I had an over-the-stove microwave with an overhead light. When the bulb burned out I replaced it with a LED. The new bulb outlasted the microwave.
This is as vapid and facile an argument as petrol heads complaining that electric cars don't sound right.
- The issue is not that they are "not the same color", but that they have a low CRI which means that they make look everything bland and greyscale.
- That they use some shitty low frequency PWM to drive the light causing eye fatigue and headaches
- That they use low quality electronics causing your bulb to fail as fast as an iridescent one that costs 5 times less.
What you are saying sounds a bit like someone complaining why people want to move on from CRT monitors.
I still have original incandescent bulbs, fluorescents and in-ceiling LED can bulbs in place. I'm not sure what makes the flood-style LED can bulbs so much better. I have not replaced a single one indoors. Same mfr. as the standard size LED bulbs (Fleir, sp?). I have not found a good brand of the standard size LED replacement bulbs.
I think there just might be more of a spectrum with LED bulbs, since they are more complicated than incandescent ones. The worst ones are much worse, but the best ones are far better.
There seems to be an element of luck with the cheaper ones. The ones in a batch that work well just keep going, while a small number fail relatively quickly. Once you've gone through a few replacements you are left with just good ones that just keep going.
If I want to feel more awake I ask Siri to change the colours of the bulbs to white. If I went to go to bed earlier I ask Siri for the colour tan and to dim the lights by 30%.
At this point I can’t imagine not having control over the colour or brightness of my lights. These things are essential for a good sleep.
The idea that the old bulbs shouldn’t be banned is ridiculous. You only have to look at other countries than the US to see yes it can be done and yes the world doesn’t end.
Luckily there are LED fillament bulbs that are awfully similar to the old incandesant bulbs, except they last far, far longer and have the same energy savings as standard LED bulbs.
I buy those now.
imo, modern led lights are much, much, much better then the incandessent bulbs & these power-saving lamps we used to have. Both in durabillity & color etc
It had that harsh, strange white hue to it and I found it incredibly distracting and unattractive.
I'm no expert in the field, and I assume there are bulbs that put out a more natural spectrum, but clearly this hotel didn't buy those bulbs. It felt strange to walk down that hallway, just something "off" about it.
Logically, I'm thinking that the pure LED components are a much smaller part of the price, and that maybe there is less skimping?
Like... I was used to the GE Reveal 100W Incandescent Bulbs. For comparison, the light bulbs with like a slight blue tint to them that just worked great.
I had them all over my house.
But then when I did my remodel, I put in can lights. LEDs.
And the can LEDs are really great.
They're bright, they're the right color, they give off plenty of consistent light. I went with 6" cans, and I used about 50% more than they said to use... so like on the box it said, "Use 4 for a room that's X by Y feet..." And I put in 6. No more than 1 every 8 feet, no less than 1 every 5 feet.
The cans have this little color toggle on the back, the only thing I wish I had done is I wish they were all wifi lights... so that I could use a different warmth after sundown.
But hey, that'll be my next house. (=
I think it's becoming more of an easy option for most contractors to set up.
I understand that moving DC long distances can be problematic. But is 100-300 feet too long? Am I completely off on this?
This feels like a legacy inefficiency issue.
It works *perfectly*! I can max the dimmer and it's bright white daylight, or I can dim it down to a very dim 2000k. There's no buzzing, no weird high-temp/low-light weirdness. It works magically. And it's the cheap option!
I replaced all BR30 & BR40 bulbs with it. I wish it came in more shapes! I'd replace every lightbulb in the house with them. I paid $5-$13 per bulb.
No one seems to know about them, not even the guy at Home Depot who worked in the aisle. He was surprised how much I raved about them.
So I shopped around for alternatives. It turns out that we're now standardizing on 24V DC wiring for lighting for commercial buildings, which makes sense. 24V can be directly used by LEDs wired in series, and the wiring cross-section is similar to 120V lamps.
I even found some dim-to-warm 24V LEDs. But so far they are all kinda niche. I don't want to risk buying hardware from a supplier that can go out of business in a couple of years, leaving me with a slowly degrading system.
If you want to try, then search Google for "tunable-white lighting".
* A19 base
* 2700K
* 7-11W (at typical efficiencies, not sure about lumens)
* dimmable with very high dynamic range (fully dimmed should be just barely lit)
* good color rendering (high CRI / R9)
* good PSU design for long life
* flicker free under all circumstances
* cheapish (< $10/bulb)
They aren't generally used in residential buildings. You could install them, but it tends to be kind of expensive and complicated because they require a ballast. Also, they tend to be most efficient at high wattages, and most people don't want their house lit like the surface of the sun.
I've been using 15-25 watt traditional incandescents in a bunch of lamps around the house and they're absolutely amazing. Consistent light, cheap, and comfy as hell - the warm fire-like glow appeals to my caveman sensibilities. So much better than soulless, flickering, sun-bright but ice-cold LEDs. I feel better, see better, sleep better, my house is just so cozy.
Thankfully, the low-watt appliance bulbs that I use seem to be exempt under the coming ban. And if they were banned, I'd find a way to make them on my own - I'm never parting with them.
Add in the fact that LEDs have a much higher embedded energy of manufacture, and the fact that they seem to last a lot less than the 10 years they're specced for, and switching my house to LEDs appears to have increased our carbon footprint. Plus now we're using more heavy metals and such in circuit boards. Aaaaand the light sucks.
I think in the seven years we've owned this house I've replaced two of them that got cooked in the weird enclosed recessed light in the living room. I did have a (commercial, hardwired) strip light fail in the basement shop, and disassembled it to find a cold solder joint on the bulk filter capacitor -- easy fix for me, probably not for most homeowners.
We don't have any dimmer switches, I suspect that may have something to do with it.
LEDs are part of a progression to everything being addressable, think of them as pixels. There's a decreasing incentive to not make everything addressable and support not just dimming but also colour. This is ultimately a completely different approach to environments. Transitioning from "the lights are on and I can easily see my broccoli" to very fine relationships between sources and qualities of light and their interpretation. Some of the benefits will be emergent, which sounds like hand-waving, and sometimes it is. (-:
Regarding the color criticism(s), it's wonderfully subjective and it's definitely a case of "once you see it, you can't unsee it". Early bulbs were too blue in color temperature; later ones finally got the color temperature right (at least technically) but something else still seems "off" sometimes.
There needs to be a way to read reviews of these, AND people need to be willing to spend more money on quality.
And a black box controller that matches output to exterior conditions automatically. No app, just a black box with a wired light sensor.
You can rip my halogen reading lamps cold dead hands.
The only issue I have with LED is the light isn't as nice as incandescent and although I'm not certain it may not be as good for your health.
Be interesting to know more about the context is the authors experience doesn't seem to be the same for everyone
Most of it felt like what things would be like if you had frequent brownouts or just a bad electrical setup.
[edit]: tried again and stopped when it mentioned painting LED bulbs in amber varnish. I have RGBW LED strips, getting a "beautiful" tone is a solved problem.
Someone tell me why I'm wrong, but I feel like a coil of wire in a milk bottle with all the air sucked out that you could make in a blacksmith's forge is going to be cleaner overall than 100g of plastic, fibreglass, epoxy, copper, gallium arsenide, phosphor, and a billion-dollar factory to build it in.
Ketra used to make a good smart bulb, like Hue but much better quality light. Bought out by Lutron, who disabled the open Restful API
RAB now makes a decent warm-dim, comparable to the Phillips warm-dim.
You know that thing where you didn't notice anything wrong until someone mention it and suddenly you notice it too? It doesn't happen to me after reading the article. What should I pay attention to my LED bulbs so I can be on the same page with the author?
That's a warranty case; if people send them back to the producer often enough, they have to up their quality. If enough people also make sure to complain, consumer protection organizations may start a class action lawsuit and/or get the federal whatsits to demand better quality.
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-led-light-bulbs.ht...
I'm not sure yet about the light fixtures that have non-replaceable LEDs in them. Generally these are heatsinked well and use higher quality power supplies though.
Keep in mind that after sunset in nature there is only moon light that has blue spectrum. Fire, as light source is about 1700K.
Some might be tempted to believe that we'd have discovered what technology they suppressed, but they are insufficiently pessimistic. Technology gets worse all the time, and lightbulbs are a great example of that happening on purpose.
Im sure if I spent 10 dollars per instead of 30-40 I could find bad ones, but I didn’t and I haven’t.
Like, it really just seems like you people don’t have anything else to do besides mind other peoples business.
That being said, I am not a fan of the white LED streetlights. Streetlight LED's should be orange.
The same thing happened to lighting.
Back in "the day" nobody cared about light color or light temperature. You bought whatever was cost effective for the amount of light you needed. Nobody cared that sodium bulb lighting was orange and that arc lamps were bright white. They were the economically viable options for their use cases.
Heck, nobody "liked" the florescent lights, especially the early ones but they did the right job at the right price so they got bought in droves.
Now that we have LEDs for everything and the affording the amount of light being scattered is not the primary hurdle anymore so consumers suddenly care about using other performance metrics to differentiate products.
Governments (or other non-profit organizations) should create light bulbs, for the people, and not for the stockholders.
Also a PhDs website: www.FlickerSense.org
I don't take issue with LED bulbs, but I would rather have a choice nonetheless.
https://www.waveformlighting.com/
No flickering, high CRI.
1) smart LED bulbs? (I have CREE, which keep disconnecting.)
2) bright as the Sun LED bulbs? (My office is very dark and I'd like something close to 10k LUX.)
Cute.