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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#531

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

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…

There are YouTube channels dedicated to repairing non-functional LED bulbs. In every case the issue is usually that one of n leds has failed, and if you solder a bypass then the remaining leds work fine. After that the only real problem is that all the adhesives used in the construction of the bulb more or less require that you destroy the bulb in order to get to the point you can repair or bypass the one LED.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#532

Post by nerdponx »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #213
derbOac wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I actually am opposed to bans on traditional incandescent bulbs AFAIK, there are no simple bans on them [ EDIT: in the USA ]. What exists are energy performance standards, which these bulbs do not meet. If you want, you can say that this is nit-picking, and that of course that's a ban. But when we have energy performance standards for, say, cars, nobody says it is a ban on cars, just a effective end to the producti…

What happened to CFL bulbs? I was very happy with mine, but they have rapidly disappeared from shelves.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#533

Post by Zak »

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…

Trying to cram all the infrastructure for an LED lamp into the shape of a light bulb is a bad idea, even if the input power is DC. Good designs for LED lighting have larger surface areas for heat dissipation and some physical/thermal separation between the LEDs and the power supply. A quality power supply does not produce flicker. As other comments have noted, dimming, or even predictable output requires some sort of power regulation even with DC input.

I think the way to change it is to replace sockets with hardwired LED fixtures. This is easy for something like a standalone ceiling light. It may be harder for other devices like ceiling fans that integrate a light bulb socket, but converting those devices to take DC power as in your proposal isn't easy either (most would just get discarded and replaced).

Doing it well is more expensive in the short-term than screw-in bulbs. A quick look on Amazon suggests integrated ceiling lights are about 10x the price of LED bulbs, though I suspect the longer service life pays for itself.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#534

Post by throwthrowuknow »

hprotagonist wrote: post #18

A smoke-test i had not really thought of: shoot a quick video in slow motion on your phone and watch the result to see if there’s a light flicker .

That works really well! Tried it on a cheap LED that I notice the flicker on some times and it really showed up. Also tried an expensive one that I don’t notice any flicker from and there was a very fast flicker on slow mo. Tried daylight as a control and there’s no flicker.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#535

Post by louky »

BizarroLand wrote: post #446
jghn wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? I'm very happy to pay more for that. How does one sift through marketing to get to actual quality? And then how do I know that they stick with the high quality approach? What happens when a brand decides to rest on the laurels of their brand name and start slipping in lower quality parts?

I spent probably $150-$200 for 7 packages of "high CRI" "long lasting" phillips brand LED bulbs last year, for a total of 28 bulbs. 6 of them have failed in less than 9 months, either flickering so badly it could cause an epileptic seizure or just straight up dying on me. It's maddening.

Best case there is to never buy again, name and shame the specific model places like this discussion, and use the warranty!

PITA I know.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#536

Post by VoodooJuJu »

I fucking hate LEDs. Turned my back on them years ago because the tech and its salesmen turned their back on me. Nothing but lies.

I've been using 15-25 watt traditional incandescents in a bunch of lamps around the house and they're absolutely amazing. Consistent light, cheap, and comfy as hell - the warm fire-like glow appeals to my caveman sensibilities. So much better than soulless, flickering, sun-bright but ice-cold LEDs. I feel better, see better, sleep better, my house is just so cozy.

Thankfully, the low-watt appliance bulbs that I use seem to be exempt under the coming ban. And if they were banned, I'd find a way to make them on my own - I'm never parting with them.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#537

Post by shagie »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #502
chongli wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem for me is, as a consumer, how do I know that brand X is producing quality bulbs that'll last a long time? The issue is that LED bulbs aren’t simple devices like incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs have an electronic power supply inside which drives the LEDs at a constant current. Power supply design is a major subfield of electronics engineering and there are all kinds of tradeoffs you can make to optimize…

>It is possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners It is also possible (and not very difficult) to design incandescent bulbs that will outlive their owners. In fact, the first mass produced light bulbs generally lasted 2,500+ hours. In the 1920s, the major bulb manufacturers formed the 'Pheobus Cartel' in Geneva and secretly colluded to limit the lifespan of bulbs…

This goes into the "actual conspiracy - not a theory" category.

Veritasium - This is why we can't have nice things - https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE

The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy

> On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#538

Post by throwthrowuknow »

jwestbury wrote: post #368
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?

[flagged]

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#539

Post by cipheredStones »

fsh wrote: post #365
throw0101b wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 changin…

> A significant color shift happens only for a couple of minutes during sunrise and sunset.

This seems like a very dubious claim - the "golden hour" is obvious to everyone, and there's an intuitive mechanism for sunlight being "warmer" in the morning and evening (blue gets scattered in proportion to the amount of air it travels through). Do you have a citation for this?

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#540

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> The issue is that 95% of consumers will only choose the cheap bulbs, period.

Because the big box stores (Walmart, Home Depot or whatever) don't carry expensive stuff with Cree LEDs and solid cooling designs. They carry whatever shit they can get their hands on for as cheap as possible.

And most consumers don't know better, the 1% of consumers that does know orders from Amazon and prays for not getting ripped off by counterfeiters.

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