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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#371

Post by wil421 »

zippergz wrote: post #335
rootusrootus wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am also in the Europe, most other commenters seem to be from the US. You're falling for the "Europe is better than the US, of course" mindset. What you are actually seeing are partisans spinning a narrative to fit their ideology, not an accurate description of reality. We have really high CRI bulbs here, too, and they're inexpensive. I can go down to the home store and buy them by the dozen. I'll bet you money th…

Please link me to a 95+ CRI bulb available at Home Depot or Lowe's.

Greater than 95 or including 95? Most of the Philips brand dimmable LEDs have a CRI of 95. The eco smart is crap at 80 and that’s to be excepted from the cheap house brand.

The in ceiling lights I bought to replace a bottom dollar Amazon light was are 94 and I’m pretty sure I bought the cheapest I could that would change temp to match my existing ones.

Your friend has shared a link to a Home Depot product they think you would be interested in seeing.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Philips-Soft-White-A19-LED-60W-E...

Looks like GE’s Sunshine brand has a CRI of 97 and is $8.99 on Amazon.

GE Sun Filled LED Light Bulb, 60 Watt Eqv, Soft White, A21 Standard Bulb, Medium Base https://a.co/d/fLkL8wr

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#372

Post by vel0city »

alistairSH wrote: post #53
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…

It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it. 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".

I highly disagree about it being good enough. Those bulbs got hot and were expensive to run over the life of the bulb. I like a lot of light, so I'd often end up buying lots of 100W lightbulbs throughout my house. My kitchen would have like 6x100W lightbulbs on for several hours a day, so ~3.6kWh/day. At $0.11/kWh that's $11.88/mo just lighting my kitchen. $142.56/year to light one room one quarter of the day. And that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year.

For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#373

Post by raintrees »

rusk wrote: post #301
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people have a limited amount of caring and markets are really good at taking advantage of consumer ignorance. If you care about color rendering but don't know what color rendering is, you can't shop for it (and if you do know what it is you can't shop for it if it's not on the spec sheet).

Sounds like issues that could be solved by some market regulation - rules about labelling - etc etc but to many that would be tantamount communism

Instead of force, maybe voluntary? Publish/promote a set of standard measurements for consumers, then let consumers drive the manufacturers. "The Market" will follow the consumer if the consumer is strongly inclined about its desires - I think we have seen this play out in other consumer electronics niches...

When I was a teen, I wanted an alligator on my shirt, and not too long after I started seeing simulacra shirts... Enough of a demand for more than one entity to mimic it...

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#374

Post by jeroenhd »

the_af wrote: post #79
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…

What if you don't want to become an expert, which is something that wouldn't scale for every piece of tech and equipment? (Maybe you enjoy tweaking with lights, but what about chairs, tabletop materials, woods, wall paints, and yes -- electronic gadgets?). 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"?

I generally buy the lamps that say "warm white". They're usually the 2700k variety. I've literally never had an LED light go out and the colours look fine. Philips lamps seem like a good bet, though I remember seeing an in depth YouTube review that showed that IKEA actually had better colour representation (many brands add an extra dose of red light to boost the warm colours).

Not skimping on lamps helps prevent most problems, usually. IKEA sells great LED lights over here in Europe, for prices that had me worried at first. Most other budget stores and brands sell lamps that mostly emit warm light but will make any food look disgusting from missing wavelengths; fine for lighting a hallway maybe, but generally not worth it in my opinion. It's mostly these bottom of the barrel lamps that people buy, not knowing about the effects cheap lighting can have, that cause visual problems.

It makes sense: back in the day, a cheap lamp may not have lasted as long ,but the colour profile was nearly identical. If you were fine buying a lamp every year, you could just grab the cheapest bulb on the shelf. With anything beyond incandescent light, that's not true anymore.

The difference between a €5 lamp and a €10 lamp is quite significant and worth it considering they'll probably last you at least five years anyway. My personal approach is to look for "warm white" (or 2700k if they use that instead), not pick the very cheapest lamp I can find, and if that leaves multiple options, start comparing statistics like CRI.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#375

Post by rootusrootus »

Brendinooo wrote: post #230
dashundchen wrote: post #146

I think just like CFLs and incandescents before, quality is going vary and people will need to stick to a brand that works. I've had a lot of success with Cree light bulbs. They seem to have much better light quality than some of the hardware store brands. 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 i…

Wanted to give a tentative endorsement to Cree. I bought a box of LEDs at the hardware store and about a third of them failed early. I wanted to spend good money on good product; Cree is well-regarded, and so far (a few months) I've been way happier with their bulbs than the cheap stuff.

Cree has been good to me so far. Haven't actually had one fail yet, though I've had a few of the lesser brand ones (Feit, from Costco, mostly) fail. As they go, I replace with Cree.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#376

Post by gorkish »

formerly_proven wrote: post #24

There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order - 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 wit…

> 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.

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.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#377

Post by rini17 »

doitLP wrote: post #233
Arubis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you told me you could make one room of my house consistently color-balanced with LED lighting that I would have no reason to hate, I would ball up a couple hundred dollar bills and throw them at you. (Edit: I’m also coming from buying Philips Hue bulbs for precisely this reason, so in fairness, it’s not as big a price jump.)

Keep in mind: all LEDs leak blue light even the warm ones (color is achieved by average so you can have high red and high blue and it looks balanced visually). These bright blue leaking LEDs are great during the day — especially those with high CRI and R9 values. But not at night when you’re trying to go to bed! Switch to incandescent only in the evenings until they figure out blue-less dimmable LEDs

Not all, only white LEDs. You can use any cheap LED RGB strip without white components and set it to yellow/orange light with blue completely off. It has poor CRI though.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#378

Post by bondarchuk »

dahfizz wrote: post #350
browningstreet wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The problem is that previously the low-effort default option was great, and now the low-effort default option is bad and to get the equivalent of the previous great default you must now spend a bunch of extra time and money. "Caring about CRI" is basically just caring about the human visual system working correctly, that shouldn't be some weird niche.

Besides, I don't control the lighting decisions of every place I go that's not my own home. And many people might be impacted in tiny ways without even noticing (cf. the old research about fluorescent lighting in schools/offices impacting mood or concentration or whatever).

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#379

Post by samtho »

cogman10 wrote: post #222
JohnFen wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all LED bulb failures are because the power supply died due to overheating, not the LEDs themselves. I harvest the LEDs out of dead bulbs to use in hobby projects. With Edison-style bulbs, anyway, the orientation they're mounted in makes a huge amount of difference. They're last a lot longer if they're oriented upright (base down) than in any other orientation because it reduces the heat buildup in the power s…

This is the frustrating thing about LEDs that IDK we can change. If there was a "DC" light socket in the house we could have LEDs outlasting owners, and for cheap. Nearly all the expense of LED bulbs is the power supply. Everything else is dirt cheap. A single home DC power supply with ~200W of output could light an entire house, flicker free. What's even more frustrating is I think we could fix it. A national regula…

I am designing an off-grid cabin with a solar panel array charging a bank of batteries with a propane generator backup. I run ethernet as power with a custom designed PCB that terminates at the outlet side where it exposes a 20 watt USB charging port and an ethernet port.

The lights are all basically cut 12v light strips inside of old light fixtures with a custom controller that also terminates PoE. The 48 volts that most PoE standards specify is more than enough to push power down the line for The advantage of PoE here is that anything under 50 volts is considered low voltage and does not need to follow the same rules as normal house wiring. I did not like that everything is hinging upon a beefy PoE switch so I actually made it passive PoE instead by design.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#380

Post by rootusrootus »

cramjabsyn wrote: post #89

Cheap LED bulbs generate the worst light I’ve ever experienced. But after some research I found that there are options that make a nice warm light with no perceptible flickering. Personally I prefer the phillips warm glow dimmable bulbs

Yeah this is one of those things where quality really makes the difference. If you buy cheap LED bulbs, you'll hate LED bulbs. Buy goods ones, and you love them. The dichotomy is really stark in the overall HN discussion.
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