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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#401

Post by ghaff »

jrumbut wrote: post #348
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.

Yeah. It's not like changing incandescent bulbs was a weekly occurrence for me but it was certainly not at all a rare occurrence.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#402

Post by swimfar »

jsheard wrote: post #127
userbinator wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the limits of their ratings. They could make LED bulbs last many orders of magnitude longer and be more efficient, but they don't (unless forced to[1]) because they prefer planned obsolescence. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793

More recently Philips has started selling the Dubai-style bulbs worldwide, branded as the "Ultra Efficient" range. They're expensive though, as you'd expect.

Are you sure those are the same bulbs? The ultra efficient versions sold on Amazon have reviews going back to 2017. Supposedly the Dubai-style bulbs were only available in Dubai even a few years ago.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#403

Post by NelsonMinar »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #228
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #150

I hate how many of these things aren't limits of the technology but rather the result of cost optimization and general apathy towards the customer. We know how to mass-produce quality LEDs to the point entire TVs are made of the things. We know how to mass-produce rectifiers pretty much ever since diodes existed. We know how to cool mass-produced objects in compact spaces. But because we apparently can't have nice th…

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…

One thing the NYMag article says is that CRI is not a very good measure of light quality. I'd love to read more about that on a technical level.

edit I learned a bit from a marketing blog article; CRI measures reflection of 8 spot colors but it leaves out some important parts of the spectrum, particularly deep red. https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-cri-color-rend...

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#404

Post by cm2187 »

I think most people in this audience are aware but in case some are not, the other thing with LED is that it is not possible to dim them. So dimming works by making them flash at a higher frequency than what the human eye can see. Which is ok-ish for humans, but will drive dogs crazy as they see at a much higher frame rate.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#405

Post by jdcarter »

brodouevencode wrote: post #147
doitLP wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out https://www.waveformlighting.com/ for some very high quality LEDs and education about how they work.

I can't imagine paying $150 for a six pack, when Home Depot's private label LEDs are $12 for a six pack. I could replace it 10 times before I hit that mark - not sure it's worth that.

I bought many of the Home Depot private label LEDs...and had to replace every single one of them. Outright failure, buzzing, flickering. They're just terrible. I've replaced them with Philips.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#406

Post by hedora »

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…

I didn't hit many of these issues (our house has 100% LED bulbs, from different manufacturers).

I made sure they were all the same color temperature, and also all >> 90 CRI.

The main issue I've seen is that dimmer switches are usually not compatible with the electronics in high-end fixtures, and that high-end fixtures often take a long time to power on. (Like, walk across the room and open the fridge amounts of time.)

They should choose a standard way of dimming bulbs that doesn't result in noticeable 60hz flicker, and that dictates a max 100ms turn on latency, then ban the sale of "dimmer compatible" LED bulbs, or "LED compatible" dimmer switches that are not compliant with that standard.

Also, bulb reliability should be tracked, and any product with a > 5% failure rate in the first 5 years should either be banned, or the company should have to put replacement funds into escrow.

(Current bulbs have a ~ 5-10% failure rate from what I've seen.)

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#407

Post by Majromax »

sparker72678 wrote: post #223
VLM wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The e-waste issues of having to replace entire LED units every two to three years are worse than replacing an old fashioned bulb every decade.

Agreed the e-waste issues are real, but how did you get incandescents to last 10 years? I replaced every dang one after 12 months or less, every time.

> how did you get incandescents to last 10 years?

As a general answer, dimming. Incandescent bulbs are fantastically sensitive to applied voltage; Wikipedia's article on the subject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamp_rerating) notes that bulb lifespan is inversely proportional to the applied voltage to the fourteenth power or so.

In an ordinary home you can't directly reduce the supply voltage, but dimming a higher-rated bulb will get you somewhere in the ballpark through a reduction in the duty cycle.

However, this comes at the expense of luminous efficiency. Reducing the applied electrical power reduces the filament temperature, and the black-body spectrum of a lower-temperature filament has proportionally more output in the infrared region.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#408

Post by deelowe »

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?

Not in my experience. It's always a crapshoot.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#409

Post by kleer001 »

zaroth wrote: post #315
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?

If you want nice things that engineers spent thousands of hours researching, designing, and tuning, you can do the research to find those brands and pay extra for them. Most people don’t want to pay the premium and don’t value the benefits that come with that premium.

Reddit's /r/buyitforlife 's 1.4 million subscribers and probably 10x as many people that visit without joining reddit and the subsequent similar population of people scraping that data and consuming the scraped data... I think they would disagree with you.

That said, even if that's generously 100 million people that's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the population of consumers that couldn't care less.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#410

Post by orev »

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.

A very large portion of lamps purchased at home goods stores have dimmer switches (a knob that you turn instead of flipping a switch), and dimmers have been widely available at home improvement stores for decades. This idea is not some niche thing limited only to smart home tech people. It doesn’t have to be automated—one can just get up and set the brightness to their liking.

I think the big surprise for most people would be that many LED bulbs are not dimmable, as that hasn’t been something they had to worry about with older bulbs (it was also an issue with CFLs, but people avoided them because of the harsh color)

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