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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#341

Post by TheHypnotist »

titzer wrote: post #157

Not mentioned in the article are the LED replacements for full-size fluorescent tubes (i.e. 48in tubes). I got a bunch for my basement. The LED tubes really are a million times better than the fluorescents. For one, they aren't enormous fragile glass tubes filled with toxic mercury vapor, and two, they give off good light (for a basement work area) with very little power.

Can you place those bulbs in the regular fluorescent "socket"? I bought a house and have a few burned out fluorescent looking long bulbs and I don't want to replace them with toxic bulbs.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#342

Post by beebeepka »

b112 wrote: post #289
oh_sigh wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Even without clouds.

Sounds depressing. That's how I feel when days are like that

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#343

Post by melff »

gaudat wrote: post #51

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…

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#344

Post by vel0city »

derbOac wrote: post #58
eig wrote: post #6

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 sh…

I had a similar reaction to the article. 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 expect…

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#345

Post by bentcorner »

wankle wrote: post #313

https://www.stouchlighting.com/blog/light-comparison-led-lig... . "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…

I've seen it go both ways, at least for LEDs.

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#346

Post by rootusrootus »

mhb wrote: post #192
orev wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am skeptical that any significant portion of the population outside HN is tailoring their room lighting, via dimming, to their activity schedule. It also is a tad hyperbolic to include non-dimmable bulbs in the pantheon of things to make homeowners lose their minds.

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#347

Post by dwighttk »

DougN7 wrote: post #135
amluto wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. 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…

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.

In my experience LEDs have been a little more reliable than CFL, but that’s not saying much… those things you could almost watch burn out.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#348

Post by jrumbut »

wankle wrote: post #313

https://www.stouchlighting.com/blog/light-comparison-led-lig... . "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…

That's funny, I remember going through incandescent bulbs pretty quickly. I always knew where the extra light bulbs were in the house and they were a not-uncommon grocery list item.

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#349

Post by roughly »

rusk wrote: post #215
throwaway173738 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, as always, the MBAs.

It’s not MBAs place to set public policy though is it? If it’s the MBA’s fault at all it’s because they’re doing their job which is optimising the product to the market. If the markets not optimising the right things then that’s a failure in the market. Maybe the market is being manipulated somehow has it was for the old incandescent bulbs - but that’s not necessarily the fault of the management tier … some economise…

It remains the case that you don't discard your identity as a person or personal responsibility when taking a job somewhere, and the purpose of an MBA for the last 40 years has been to produce crappier products for less money while charging consumers the same amount. It's not the MBAs place to set public policy, but it's also broadly an admission of some kind of serious cultural failure to say we need public policy to prevent a large group of people from stripping everything they get their hands on down to the studs for short-term gain, and it doesn't say great things about that group of people, either.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#350

Post by dahfizz »

browningstreet wrote: post #304
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go buy high CRI, high quality bulbs right now. Nothing is stopping you. 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 T…

As consumers are we really supposed to do a ton of research on light bulbs and accept that we can't run down to Home Depot and get some new bulbs when they go out in our house?

No, the lightbulbs at home depot are inexpensive and they work fine. On the other hand, if you care about CRI, then you can also google for high-quality bulbs with a good CRI. I don't really see a problem here?
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