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Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

maurycyz.com

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Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#61

Post by somat »

craftkiller wrote: post #13
freediddy wrote: post #4

I've never had LED lights last anywhere near the purported 5-7 year timeframe. The worst ones are the small decorative ones with the tinier screw part that my house seems to have an inordinate number of. Those last maybe 6 months and then they start getting dimmer and then all the lights in the circuit get worse at once. I like LED lights immensely but the idea they last even 2 years is a lie in my opinion.

I have never had an LED light bulb fail. I'm still using the same 6-pack I bought over a decade ago, bringing them with me from apartment to apartment. I only have 5 remaining because the glue that holds the glass bulb onto the base eventually failed on one and I couldn't be bothered to figure out what the correct adhesive would be for lightbulbs.

Fair enough but they don't get hot, nearly any glue would work, Being plastic, I would use CA(superglue).

After failure I like to do a postmortem teardown, it has never been the LED proper, usually it is the capacitor in a capacitance power supply, otherwise the controller IC.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#62

Post by pigpop »

foobarchu wrote: post #48
pigpop wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called a dimmer switch.

Brightness and color temperature are orthogonal. The dimmer switch only controls brightness.

Incandescents are mostly in the red/warm end of the spectrum anyways so you don't need to change the color temperature at night.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#63

Post by cge »

While the author mentions that they are not trying to defend the Phoebus cartel, I think they may inadvertently be somewhat misleading in their explanation. What they are saying is, from an engineering standpoint, true. But my understanding of the argument against the Phoebus cartel is that it was using legitimate engineering points as the official justification for profiteering business collusion: that the points were real, but were not the actual reasons for their decisions, or reasonable justification for the particular choices of values they enforced.

In doing so, the article perhaps obscures the point that business collusion, I expect, is more often built around legitimate reasoning taken to illegitimate extents and conclusions, than around outright fabrications.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#64

Post by quickthrowman »

wolfgangK wrote: post #36

BTW, I don't understand why having the driver converting AC to DC inside the LED spots is the default. For a new house, it seems to make sense to me to have at least one external driver for a ceiling of spots, if not one per floor (not one for the whole house because pf the drop in voltage). But 24V led spots seem much less common and I cannot find many reviews. Any idea why it's not more common ? It seems efficiency…

You can buy recessed LED cans with remote drivers. It’s not super common, but they exist in commercial installations. The largest LED drivers that I am familiar with are 24VDC/96w which is enough for (12) 8w recessed cans.

Individual drivers per fixture allow flexibility with regards to commercial lighting control. The 0-10V dimming signal is sent to the driver, and if you have multiple fixtures per driver, they will all dim together. This behavior can be accomplished with individual LED drivers by wiring the dimming signal in parallel to each driver from the dimming module.

Line voltage circuits can handle a lot of fixtures, particularly at 230V or 277V. A 277V 20A circuit can continuously power 554 8w recessed cans or 138 32w 2x4s on a single pair of #12/2.5mm^2 wire. Two of those circuits can power all of the lights in a 20,000 square foot office.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#65

Post by craftkiller »

somat wrote: post #61
craftkiller wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never had an LED light bulb fail. I'm still using the same 6-pack I bought over a decade ago, bringing them with me from apartment to apartment. I only have 5 remaining because the glue that holds the glass bulb onto the base eventually failed on one and I couldn't be bothered to figure out what the correct adhesive would be for lightbulbs.

Fair enough but they don't get hot, nearly any glue would work, Being plastic, I would use CA(superglue). After failure I like to do a postmortem teardown, it has never been the LED proper, usually it is the capacitor in a capacitance power supply, otherwise the controller IC.

Good to know, because another one of the bulbs visibly looks on the verge of separation. Thanks!

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#66

Post by PinkSheep »

hagbard_c wrote: post #41
Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought all new Philip hue bulbs going on 7 or 8 years ago now and not a single one has gone bad. Maybe you're just buying cheap poor quality bulbs? A 100 out of 100 success rate after 8 years.

> Maybe you're just buying cheap poor quality bulbs? If only that were true. Osram is a well-renowned brand so you'd think their - rather pricey - 'high-wattage' (10W) bulbs meant for outside lights here on the farm would last longer than about a year, all in different armatures, all with plenty of cooling (they're mainly used in autumn/winter/spring when it tends to be rather chilly here in Sweden). You'd think chea…

> Osram

Pay attention to the European efficiency rating for LEDs. Anything above B is practically "Dubai LED" class. The common Osram isn't doing good in this category, their LEDs I have seen in retail are rated like E-F.

To reiterate: the article fell short on the point of LED efficiency. LEDs are semiconductors, do you know when the CPU is at peak efficiency? Before it hits the exponential voltage/frequency curve. Low voltage -> cooler LEDs -> more efficient light conversion -> easier to cool -> tens of thousands hours of practical lifespan.

What does it cost? Like less than a dollar in BOM. What does it cost us? Billions in replaced LEDs worldwide and megatonnes of electric waste, because it is not made to last for "objective reasons": lower price tag in storeshelves aka capitalism and oblivious consumers.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#67

Post by jsLavaGoat »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #20
jsLavaGoat wrote: post #5

5700 is a terrible temperature for lighting unless that matches the daylight. Soft white and even reddish is much better at night. Presumably, most artificial light it used at night. 2700 is more like it. My LED lightbulbs change temperature based on the time of day and are dull red at night so you both don't wake up and you don't stub your toe. Show me a non-LED that can do that.

> Show me a non-LED that can do that. Many of use simply don't find LED lights, no matter the color they try to simulate, enjoyable. I find my LED lights, including fancy decorative ones, bearable only because I always use one real, old-school, warm white (more like yellow really), incandescent (hence non-LED) light in my living room. And, yup, if you know what you're looking for, it's totally possible to still buy i…

For the vast majority of people the problem was their first exposure to LED bulbs were in harsh temperatures and they wrote them off. The lightbulb wars aren't new. It's an evergreen political football.

If you strongly prefer incandescent that's fine but it doesn't take the 5-7 years the author suggests to recoup your investment. It might, or it might not. Where your curve lands depends, but they do in fact use a lot less energy.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#68

Post by Shadowmist »

addaon wrote: post #23
freediddy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a bunch of Philips Hue LED light bulbs until they started dying within a couple of years or less and the replacement costs were ridiculous. That's when I switched to Lutron Casetas.

I run about 50 Philips Hue lights and I’ve replaced 3 in six years, so definitely not as reliable as the L-Prize lights, but not awful. The L-Prize bulbs are built like tanks… when you drop one you check the floor for damage before the bulb.

Exact same numbers for me! 3 bulbs stopped shutting off completely. When I would turn them off they would stay around 5% brightness.

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#69

Post by jerlam »

foobarchu wrote: post #43
xnx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enclosed fixtures can kill some LED bulbs quickly if they can't dissipate heat.

I would say most LED bulbs. You need ones specifically rated for enclosures, which are way less common, and most people have the wrong idea of what counts as enclosed (the glass hood around your kitchen chandelier bulbs is an enclosure, as are ceiling cans)

I was killing a lot of LEDs in recessed cans. I replaced them with integrated retrofits, which aren't designed around a bulb shape that fries its own electronics, and aren't made as cheaply as possible.

Here's a nice dim-to-warm recessed: https://www.homedepot.com/p/HALO-RL56-Series-5-6-in-Recessed...

Re: Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

#70

Post by fn-mote »

mort96 wrote: post #44
freediddy wrote: post #4

I've never had LED lights last anywhere near the purported 5-7 year timeframe. The worst ones are the small decorative ones with the tinier screw part that my house seems to have an inordinate number of. Those last maybe 6 months and then they start getting dimmer and then all the lights in the circuit get worse at once. I like LED lights immensely but the idea they last even 2 years is a lie in my opinion.

Do you keep your light on constantly? I used to have a lamp that I kept replacing bulbs for "all the time". I didn't understand why since the light bulbs claimed to last for years and years. One day I read the light bulb package more closely, and it said something along the lines of, "7 years life span at 2 hours per day" in small text (the numbers may be wrong, going by memory). Doing the math, the number of active…

> I don't know if LED bulb packages play similar tricks but it's worth checking out.

It's perfectly logical that lifetime should be measured in hours of service, not days of existence. People don't know how to translate 7500 hours of service into a real duration, though. Hence the years.

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