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The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

creebulb.com

71–80 of 143 posts

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#71
post #3

This is huge if only because a LED bulb company finally put its warranty where its mouth is. Every other bulb, ie. the expensive Phillips bulb, only gives a 3-4 year warranty I'd definitely give this a try @ $10 It's also dimmer compatible which is a big plus for me with X10 control, CFL cannot dim. If this bulb does not operate for 10 years (based on 6 hours per day / 7 days per week of normal consumer use) from dat…

> It's also dimmer compatible which is a big plus for me with X10 control

If you have already X10 system in place, wouldn't X10 compatibility be more ideal than dimmer compatibility?

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#72
post #7

Off topic, but am I the only one to find the automatic scrolling very annoying ? Don't move the page on my behalf.

Not just you, it's annoying to have scrolling behaviour taken over by the website. Also, scrolling down != changing page, but their js is treating it as changing pages, so the back button is broken.

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#73
post #5
post #3

This is huge if only because a LED bulb company finally put its warranty where its mouth is. Every other bulb, ie. the expensive Phillips bulb, only gives a 3-4 year warranty I'd definitely give this a try @ $10 It's also dimmer compatible which is a big plus for me with X10 control, CFL cannot dim. If this bulb does not operate for 10 years (based on 6 hours per day / 7 days per week of normal consumer use) from dat…

I wonder what the expected warrantee redemption rate is for these things, for all of them that fail. Say you had it for 5 years and it failed. If it was me, I'd just go out and buy another one. Perhaps a different brand, but I probably wouldn't think that far ahead. For something at this price point, does anybody really USE the warrantee?

I know some people who write the date on their light bulbs (incandescent, no less) and switch brands if the bulbs burn out too quickly. For $10/bulb, those people would likely get their refunds, but I agree - for bulbs lasting five years, not a lot of People are going to be redeeming this warranty. The good news, is that Cree probably has a very good idea what the failure rate will be, and it's likely that the vast majority of these Lightbulbs are going to last more than 10 years.

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#74
post #9

This page has GOT to stop moving!! GRRRR. Who decided this was a good idea?

chrome console: window.onscroll is null, so it's probably buried somewhere in a setInterval. Couldn't work out how to stop it, so I just closed the darn tab.

to whoever wrote this: let me decide the vertical position of your paragraph of text on my screen! :p

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#77
We are still in the dark ages, though. Just consider: this "bulb" has to plug into the standard 110/230V AC electrical sockets. Powering an LED is nothing like powering an incandescent bulb: you need a constant current driver delivering a precisely measured DC current that, depending on the LED, is between 300mA and (say) 1.5A. The voltage you need depends on the number of LEDs in series, but assume 3.2V per LED. If you want dimming, you need to do PWM (pulse-width modulation).

This means that inside every "bulb" like this there is a small switching power supply. And small switching power supplies that can take you from 110/230V AC to 3-24V DC are a) expensive, b) not very efficient.

Even more amusing is the "dimmable" bulb: traditional dimmers in AC circuits use triacs to effectively cut out (e.g. cut to zero) a part of the sinusoidal AC waveform. Meaning you get a chopped-up sine waveform behind the dimmer. Any switching PSU won't really notice, as long as there is enough (let's use a technical term) "oomph" left in the waveform. So, what the "dimmable" solutions do, is look at the AC waveform coming in, notice that it isn't really a sine and a part of it has been cut out, estimate how much has been cut out, and provide a PWM dimming signal to the LED driver.

Sure, it's all still better than the incandescent bulb, but it's very costly and inefficient. It also generates a lot of waste: if you throw out an incandescent bulb, it's really just some glass and a little metal. The LED "bulb" contains at least 20 electronic components and a PCB apart from the LED itself.

I think that sooner or later we will need an additional electrical standard, 24 or 48V DC with an overlaid control signal for dimming and a new standard for sockets. 110/230V simply doesn't make sense for powering single bulbs anymore.

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#78
post #9

This page has GOT to stop moving!! GRRRR. Who decided this was a good idea?

Yes, this is going to far. And I am not blaming the web designer for this, I am blaming the html standard that still hasn't decided whether web pages are documents or applications.

Why does it even have a scroll bar if the behavior can be redefined at will.

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#79
post #45
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no mercury hazard - you don't have to vent your house and worry about mercury exposure if a bulb breaks.

In my entire life I've broken exactly 1 CFL - and I was a kid at the time. And you don't have to vent your house, that's an urban legend. The mercury is elemental mercury which isn't very toxic, and extremely poorly absorbed on top of that. (The toxic mercury is organic mercury. Some elemental mercury will be converted, which is why people worry about it - but it won't be converted in your house.)

> The mercury is elemental mercury which isn't very toxic, and extremely poorly absorbed on top of that.

That's fortunate. When I was a kid, we used to amuse ourselves by coating pennies with elemental mercury. Very shiny!

Of course, some organic compounds of mercury are a different story, e.g., dimethylmercury.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

Re: The Biggest Thing Since the Light Bulb

#80
post #51
post #44

I can't find any information on the CRI (color rendering index) of these particular bulbs, but Cree was making a bulb a couple years ago that was rated over 90, which is generally considered excellent. If these are comparable, they're a fantastic deal, particularly given the warranty.

CRI is 80: http://www.homedepot.com/catalog/pdfImages/36/36f3e188-bdb8-... which is slightly worse than most CFLs. Note that 80 is the minimum legal to qualify for Energy Star.

That's a deal-breaker. Don't buy this bulb. It will make everything look awful.
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