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There's something off about LED bulbs

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#631

Post by Maursault »

xxs wrote: post #567
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

incandescent light bulbs efficiency increases with their temperature/current. At low enough current they will last long enough but waste a lot energy as well. You can dim them, and provide a slow start to prevent the inrush current (which is like 10times more than nominal with tungsten resistance increasing due so high 2500K temps).

Thankfully, LED lighting will probably be gone within 20 years, while incandescent will be coming back more efficient than LED could dream. Already bumping up against theoretical maximum efficiency, LED lighting can't get any more efficient, and the better LED is at color rendition, the less efficient it is. But there are vast amounts of improvement available for incandescent lighting, and a group at MIT has already created incandescent light that is twice as efficient as LED.[1]

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bu...

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#632

Post by JohnFen »

xxs wrote: post #614
JohnFen wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LEDs are surface mount (although big surface mount components, so not particularly difficult to work with). I desolder them with hot air (although you can totally do it with a soldering iron), then use them later as any other surface mount LED. I don't have access to YouTube right now, so can't search for you, but there are tons of videos covering how to desolder and solder surface mount components. I'd be willin…

LEDs tend to be mounted on heat sinks, so de-soldering sort of sucks.

Yeah, it's not as easy as if they were mounted on a normal PCB, but it's not really all that bad (using hot air, anyway).

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#633

Post by aimor »

Some people seem to have different memories than I do of what it was like buying lightbulbs before LEDs came out. I remember incandescents also having a variety of color quality, lifespan, and decorative options. I remember having the choice between bargain bin bulbs and luxurious options, making sure to outfit a room with a single brand so everything looked the same, realizing it's more difficult to read with this one or that, keeping receipts in the box in case they don't live up to the "double life" (2000 hours!) branding, the annoyance of having a regular bulb in a 3-way lamp, or a faulty circuit causing lights to flicker, not to mention the fire hazard of having something too close to an exposed bulb.

Things are not so different now. As it was then, we still have crappy products with too little information and too much marketing. Having CRI ratings on the box is a good change (a spectrogram would have been nice though), I think it cuts down the trial and error it takes to find something suitable. What I don't like are all the built-in specialty lighting sources. More and more we're seeing fixtures with custom LED panels instead of sockets, which often means more expensive trial-and-error when it turns out that expensive "dimmable" ceiling light is doing PWM at 60 Hz, or when it dies one year out of warranty and you have to change the entire decorative housing instead of just replacing a bulb. The good news is that it's easier than ever to ask strangers what worked for them, and it's still less expensive to find and buy high quality LED bulbs than it is to use incandescents.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#634

Post by tomtheelder »

righttoolforjob wrote: post #568
hannob wrote: post #241

Hi US people, european here. The EU forbid terribly inefficient light around a decade ago. Yes, we had plenty of debates. Yes, people were concerned about all kinds of things. Most of them were entirely made up, some were exaggerated out of proportion. I can say that we still have lights, the debate mostly vanished and no, it's not blue everywhere.

Hi, also European here. Everything the article complains about is true. The light from LEDs is significantly worse, even in Europe.

US here. Light quality in my house went up noticeably when I switched to LEDs about a decade ago, probably due to having way more/better options for color temperature. Haven't had to replace a bulb since. I have zero clue what the author is talking about.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#635

Post by JohnFen »

xxs wrote: post #543
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I harvest the LEDs out of dead bulbs to use in hobby projects. This is a great idea and I would love it if you would post a Youtube how-to video. It might encourage a bunch of hobbyists to do something useful with those dead bulbs. I've had a number of LED's fail after only a year or two, in fact more quickly than the average incandescent bulb. Seems like it defeats the whole purpose of "upgrading" and in fact may…

Actually it's a terrible idea - those LEDs have been overdriven to hell and back, their luminosity and overall lifetime decreased. LEDs are super cheap. I bought few hundred pre-covid for $3.

Whether or not using them is a good idea depends on what you're using them for. I tend to use them for projects where none of that really matters.

LEDs are indeed extremely cheap, but for me, the benefit is reducing the amount of electronic waste I produce, not cost-savings.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#636

Post by elihu »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #620

No less that half my led can lights are unusable - either they "burned out" (whatever that means for an led light, but they did), or they flicker too much or buzz too loudly. I gave up on replacing them and am just living with the ones that work. I don't know where to buy good ones - the led market 99% scammers. The crap at the big box hardware stores is not worth it. I've probably spent more money in one year on def…

LEDs are sensitive to heat. It might be that recessed lighting is causing your bulbs to overheat and fail early because they don't have enough ventilation.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#637

Post by jklinger410 »

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…

This is a trend that has spread into every aspect of specifically American society.

Items have been replaced with poorer quality versions, and the originals become incredibly expensive or impossible to find. Once the downsides of the new version become clear, you are left with obvious and uncounted inflation. It's a mixture of shrink-flation and planned obsolescence.

Examples such as: 100% juice, window blinds, light-bulbs, furniture, vegetables (tomatoes, corn, etc), produce (specifically meat), buildings/building materials.

Until one day you notice you are living in a fake house and eating fake food. And some guy who works for the fed says you have it better than ever because you have a microwave.

Late stage capitalism started in the 80s.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#638

Post by timbit42 »

bmacho wrote: post #616

Of course. It's the market and negative selection. The companies that accidentally made long-lasting LED bulbs all went bankrupt. Governments (or other non-profit organizations) should create light bulbs, for the people, and not for the stockholders.

They should have advertised they were long-lasting and charged more.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#639

Post by sidewndr46 »

xeromal wrote: post #194
sidewndr46 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting you cite that the cost has went up for lighting. Where I live the government owned utility often raises their rates per kwHr. One of the reasons they cite is the increase in efficiency leading to a drop in revenue each year. The same utility pays for those efficiency projects.

On my first read of this, it makes sense though. The mileage of infrastructure is the same regardless of use. Those powerlines still need maintenance even if LEDs are making homes more efficient.

Sure, but I'm billed by kw-Hr. Bill me for the infrastructure if that is what costs money.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#640

Post by leobg »

Self-Perfection wrote: post #581
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?

One guy bought over 4 thousands LED lamps over years, meticulously measured their actual specs and made a huge online catalog https://lamptest.ru/ I follow his project a bit and it looks like consumers are really at loss. Generally there is no reliable way to choose a good led lamp without consulting such catalog. Lamps packaging often lies about actual specs, lamps with the same packaging but manufactured in differe…

Great site. I wish he had an English translation. But I forgive him. This is what the Internet should be! Individual people who do one thing really well. So happy to see that this still exists online.
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