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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#361

Post by rootusrootus »

szoszon wrote: post #110

LED lights are unfortunately a big marketing scam. Remember when they promised that the will last up to 20 years? Well, when I renovated my house 5 years ago I installed LED lights over my kitchen island - they were so bright that you couldn't look directly at them and it was too hard to see somebody on the other side of the island.. This is no longer true - they are visibly dimmer. In a few more years they will prob…

OTOH, my original Cree retrofit can lights from about 2014 are still going strong. They seem to have the electronics separate from the LED itself which keeps the heat under control. I've definitely noticed that some less expensive designs don't bother with that, and it really lowers the longevity of the fixture.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#362

Post by RHSeeger »

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.

Others have commented, but to reiterate

- Older LEDs house bulbs were much worse than newer ones; far more prone to failure from "things". I had many of them fail after only a few months because our power was "flickery" and their power supplies could not handle it. That's _far_ less common now.

- The power supply / controller circuitry is not a fan of heat. Don't mount them upside down (so the heat floats up to the circuit) and never mount them in a recessed mount. The heat buildup will destroy them a lot quicker. That being said, this advice can be ignored is you're paying attention... mounts that have a way to heat to escape; bulbs that are designed to go in upside-down mounts (maybe?), etc.

- While you certainly don't want to always buy the most expensive bulb, you also don't want to buy the cheap ones. They are far more likely to be made from poor, failure prone components.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#363

Post by treffer »

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…

It is not a conspiracy, it was a well known cartel that made light bulbs horrible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

The 1200h are slightly above the 1000h target put in place by the cartel.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#364

Post by rini17 »

eimrine wrote: post #248
rini17 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reading in the bedroom I use RGB strip behind furniture, preset to yellow. Diffuse light, no blue at all. Of course poor color rendering but I don't mind for this use case.

> no blue at all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35373754

That is true only for white LEDs. The RGB strip does not have them (there are some that include white LEDs but not this one). If you set it to yellow, only pure red and green elements are on, blue elements are completely off.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#365

Post by fsh »

throw0101b wrote: post #256
fsh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite interesting that 2700K is often considered to be a "normal" color temperature, even though it is much yellower than sunlight (around 5000K, depending on atmospheric scattering). This stems purely from a technological limitation of incandescent bulbs. The bulb filaments simply cannot withstand a temperature significantly above 2700K. Even though LED bulbs have no such limitations, a color temperature of on…

There is another benefit to If all your indoor lighting was 5000K, then it would be like you would be living your indoor life constantly at noon. It's why software like f.lux was created (and the functionality has been incorporated into some OSes as well).

I believe this is more folklore than science. A significant color shift happens only for a couple of minutes during sunrise and sunset. The change in brightness is probably significant, but it is hard to believe that the color has a significant physiological effect (but the placebo could be very strong!). In my experience, f.lux and co. make it pretty difficult to read text due to the low contrast, and simply changing the screen brightness is much more effective.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#366

Post by paulrpotts »

Spooky23 wrote: post #185
thrdbndndn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons > Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.

100 years of training make most people think of light bulbs as a trivial purchase. And now a product that cost $0.50 20 years ago is $10, and often performs worse for its purpose. So the economics just drive cost down no matter what. And even a picky consumer is hard pressed to get what he wants when you go to the bulb aisle at Lowe’s. They literally went from 10 SKUs to 250, with no meaningful standards.

This is my biggest barrier to finding decent bulbs. The search engines on sites like homedepot.com offer very little help, especially since they always show promoted items higher in the results, even if they don't match any keywords I put in my search. Then, if I do find what looks like the right thing, they're invariably out of stock everywhere.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#367

Post by cal85 »

simongray wrote: post #258

This article and comment section is bizarre to me. It's like travelling back in time to the 2000s. 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.

I guess you can't tell the difference? For me it's huge. I recently changed my bathroom downlights from dimmable LEDs to dimmable halogens, and it's so much nicer. The colour temperature was the same, so I guess it's not that. It's something else about the way they work. I don't profess to know why, but I can absolutely tell the difference, and I have a very clear preference now. And this is after a decade of me being very bullish on LEDs for environmental reasons and proudly fitting LEDs everywhere possible (expensive, carefully chosen ones too, with appropriate colour temperature). At the end of the day, LED light is just horrible for some reason.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#368

Post by jwestbury »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #54

As we continue to shift our primary motivation for creating products away from what is best for the consumer towards what is best for an artificially determined goal we will increasingly see the compounding secondary effects of those choices.

I believe that "not creating an uninhabitable environment" is probably best for the consumer, yes? Surely, if you are posting on hn, you are aware that people do not always make the best decisions for themselves in the long term, and that putting guard rails in place is a good mechanism to prevent us from accruing (technical|environmental) debt?

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#369

Post by rootusrootus »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #341
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.

Yes, but check the bulb. Some are compatible with the fluorescent ballast, but some expect you to use a fixture that has had the ballast removed. The trend is towards the latter, because they are more efficient.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#370

Post by CrimsonCape »

ChadMoran wrote: post #357
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…

I've been looking for solid high CRI LED bulbs, thank you. Lately I've been using the GE Reveal/Relax. They were better than the contractor grade bulbs that came with the house but still just... wasn't there. If you know any other manufacturers like this I'd greatly appreciate it if you could provide their links.

Budgetlightforum.com is the best source for flashlights and bulbs. Everyone there knows the metrics of what makes good light.

GE Filled With Sun, Philips Ultra HD (available on Amazon, but from Canada), and some other Chinese brands are currently top of the chart for CRI 95+, RA 90+ bulbs

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