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What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

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Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#81

Post by davedx »

umvi wrote: post #37

This makes me wonder if we shouldn't have an AC and DC circuits in the house. I mean, it could be all AC coming in, but at the box it splits into (at least) two different circuits (an AC one and a DC one). AC circuit would still be used for things that have motors, but everything else uses DC. Imagine how simple LED lighting could be on a DC circuit. Just an LED and resistor. I only took a few electrical engineering…

I guess I could wire up my lighting circuits to my solar panels, but it would be pretty dark in our house at night :)

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#82

Post by baybal2 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #64
Steltek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every so often, I come back to the "I should have DC power on demand in my house!" until I'm reminded that DC power loss over a distance can hurt bad, even 48VDC telecom power. Perhaps USB-C PD might help? USB power adapters are compact and PD offers standard, useful high power DC. If the adapters become ubiquitous, you could see "USB-C lightbulbs".

Slight tangent but "in-building DC" exists, and is rapidly gaining popularity but not via the medium many assumed: Power Over Ethernet. You can buy PoE LED light fixtures now, which are both powered and controlled over ethernet. You buy a single PoE switch, run some low voltage Cat6, and you can power an entire floor's worth of lighting. EEPoE (Energy Efficient PoE) offers more efficient PoE too which claims up to 94…

Definitely watching. I once was in the LED industry when it was still hot. The company was called Zega.

They tried every random thing, including putting a small real ARM server on the bloody thing to do remote control. It was back then when I first stumbled on Espressif people and Teo. They got lightyears ahead of us with all-in-one SoC.

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#83

Post by moosey »

BurningFrog wrote: post #14
vanderZwan wrote: post #7

> Plus, they’ll more than pay for themselves in electricity savings compared to the old, inefficient LED bulbs they replaced. Sure, eventually, but without further context this obsession with light bulbs always sounds a little bit penny wise and pound foolish to me. The relative cost of lighting on the monthly electricity bill is tiny so those savings are pretty small. Getting a more efficient fridge, washing machine…

I think people are always overly focused on things they personally touch and see. Thus environmental policy centers on shopping bags, straws, and light bulbs, rather than things that objectively have real environmental impact.

Like eating beef. Quit eating beef, people.

If we're going to fight climate change we're all going to be forced to give up most meat anyhow, so might as well start.

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#84

Post by jws »

Someone1234 wrote: post #64
Steltek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every so often, I come back to the "I should have DC power on demand in my house!" until I'm reminded that DC power loss over a distance can hurt bad, even 48VDC telecom power. Perhaps USB-C PD might help? USB power adapters are compact and PD offers standard, useful high power DC. If the adapters become ubiquitous, you could see "USB-C lightbulbs".

Slight tangent but "in-building DC" exists, and is rapidly gaining popularity but not via the medium many assumed: Power Over Ethernet. You can buy PoE LED light fixtures now, which are both powered and controlled over ethernet. You buy a single PoE switch, run some low voltage Cat6, and you can power an entire floor's worth of lighting. EEPoE (Energy Efficient PoE) offers more efficient PoE too which claims up to 94…

EEPoE is new to me:

Microsemi's exclusive EEPoE technology cuts the power losses on Ethernet cables by 50%, through the utilization of all the copper available on cable when a Microsemi EEPoE PSE IC or Midspan is used. It is 100% compatible with IEEE802.3at, and the savings work with ANY IEEE 802.3at Type 2, Type 1 or IEEE 802.3af compliant PD. In practice, devices that consume 25.5W would consume less than 27.75W, instead of the worst case 30W when a non-EEPoE PSE is employed.

So they use all 8 wires for power instead of just 4 to halve the power loss on the wire. For the worst case device that makes the 20% loss be a 10% loss.

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#85

Post by Tharkun »

phkahler wrote: post #69
umvi wrote: post #37

This makes me wonder if we shouldn't have an AC and DC circuits in the house. I mean, it could be all AC coming in, but at the box it splits into (at least) two different circuits (an AC one and a DC one). AC circuit would still be used for things that have motors, but everything else uses DC. Imagine how simple LED lighting could be on a DC circuit. Just an LED and resistor. I only took a few electrical engineering…

Having an AC to DC converter at the mains to your house would be great. Using a reasonably safe 48V DC in the home seems reasonable. Modern high efficiency motor driven appliances all use internal AC->DC converters and a 3-phase DC->AC driver anyway. I'm still on the fence about what the DC voltage should be - upwards of 60-80 are still nice and require less current for a given load but you don't want your PC and TV…

PoE seems pretty nice in that regard. Easy to use, lots of appliances run on it, cabling is easy and it can carry data.

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#86

Post by scrooched_moose »

momentmaker wrote: post #36

The same could be said about every product... Appliances back in the days could last decades. Now you're lucky if they don't break in a few years. What do they say about the best type of customer? The best customer is a repeat customer :)

It says more that customers overwhelmingly prefer cheap products.

A 1962 washing machine was 184.95 [1] ($1523.97 today) and a 1959 model was $209.95 [2] ($1729.97 today); which are both more expensive than all but the highest end front loader currently at Best Buy. The vast majority of top loaders are in the $500-700 range, top loaders $800-1000. There simply isn't much market for $2000 machines that will last decades.

It's a similar story for almost all home appliances I've looked at.

1) http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60selectrical.html

2) http://www.aei.org/publication/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-20...

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#87

Post by mikestew »

vanderZwan wrote: post #7

> Plus, they’ll more than pay for themselves in electricity savings compared to the old, inefficient LED bulbs they replaced. Sure, eventually, but without further context this obsession with light bulbs always sounds a little bit penny wise and pound foolish to me. The relative cost of lighting on the monthly electricity bill is tiny so those savings are pretty small. Getting a more efficient fridge, washing machine…

Getting a more efficient fridge, washing machine, TV

And after I've done all of that? Or maybe I'm looking for easier, less expensive wins than dropping $700 on a fridge? Let's not poo-poo the choice of replacing inefficient, CO2-producing tech by being quick with the "yeah, but...".

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#88

Post by ip26 »

sevensor wrote: post #72
pitaj wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until I'm reminded that DC power loss over a distance can hurt bad, even 48VDC telecom power. If you had AC to your house, then a rectifier for a 100V/200V DC circuit through your house, the losses wouldn't be any worse. DC losses are less than AC losses at the equivalent voltage, because the resistance seen by DC is less than the AC impedance.

Certainly at the household scale this is true. I cringe at the inefficiency of rooftop solar panels, hooked up to inverters, powering transformers that supply phones, lights, and electronics. AC in the house is great for an electric oven, vacuum cleaner, or fridge compressor, but so many modern electronic devices would be happy to run off of 5V or 12V.

Look on the bright side- in terms of real power, the electric oven, vacuum cleaner, AC compressor, and fridge compressor totally swamp the entire load, waste and all, of those 5V devices.

In a perfect world we'd have both AC & DC, and could use whichever was most appropriate. We could feed DC straight from the solar panels to the cell phone. But in terms of what consumes most of the power, in the typical home it's AC loads.

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#89

Post by amluto »

baybal2 wrote: post #20
setquk wrote: post #12

I've taken every single LED bulb that has failed on me to pieces and it's always the same failure mode. The heatsink compound isn't applied properly to the back of the LED board. The LEDs immediately in the gaps smoke out. Alas this isn't a problem. If a lightbulb goes, Amazon send me a new one out now free of charge and tell me to throw the old one in the trash. This is one manufacturer, prevalent on Amazon, the Lon…

Do not buy "bulbs," they are hopeless. Just buy a whole fixture with a big aluminium PCB and directly bonded chips.

I used to think that, and I changed my mind. The fancy retrofit fixtures are almost universally flood lights where the diffuser is close enough to the ceiling plane that it’s visible from far off axis. The result is that the lights on the far side of the room cause unpleasant glare.

With a retrofit lamp, you can use a high quality trim baffle (these things cost about $12, are quite well designed, and are probably already in your house and put a civilized PAR30 or PAR38 LED in, and you get a much better light distribution.

Back when lamps were all standardized incandescents, fixtures could focus on quality. Now, with LEDs, I suspect that manufacturers focus on how cheaply they can build a driver and assembly that meets some minimum performance criteria. So, with retrofit lamps, at least the fixture design is separate.

(There are exceptions, of course. Very high quality dedicated fixtures exist, but they’re quite expensive.)

Re: What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?

#90

Post by Pheide1j »

2019ideas wrote: post #76

I bought some G9 bulbs, and they are not performing like the halogens... It doesn't give me the full RGB like halogens and my house looks pale white(lacks red) instead of full color. I might go back, I do not like the look of my house, and I find myself turning on my living room lights AND dining room lights. The brightness wasn't there. There is massive improvement to be made on LEDs still.

You need to read the spec sheet when buying LEDs.

CRI, lumen, color temperature and watt (actual, not incandescent-equivalent) are the relevant parameters. The item titles are generally vague.

Specifically for the full spectrum you want CRI > 0.95

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