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There's something off about LED bulbs

nymag.com

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They contain mercury - that alone makes them a terrible idea. I suspect they are also less efficient and more expensive to make than LED bulbs, while also having a shorter lifespan and various other drawbacks like not liking quick cycling, not being instant-on, etc.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#852
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had 2 standard DC outlets for a while now: 12V cigarette lighter and 5V USB. You do often see them in odd places. But the voltage and wattage of those specs is too low to be useful, so they haven't evolved into DC power distribution. USB-C PD is at a useful voltage & wattage level, and so is Ethernet POE. I wouldn't be surprised to see them start to be used for general power distribution in niche applications,…

Cars are starting to move to 48V DC. My under cabinet lighting in the kitchen are powered by DC from a power supply in the basement. I could definitely see this becoming more common. Powering the ~100 watts of fixed lighting spread across my whole house on ten different 15A 120v circuits, each with their own arcfault breaker and 12 gauge copper electrical lines running back to the panel is fabulously expensive for wh…

If you're introducing electrical incompatibility, why on Earth would you try to preserve mechanical compatibility?

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#853

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…

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Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#854
post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered for a long time why we don't have standard built-in DC in building codes that could power our lights, and most electronic devices. Really the few things in my house that require full line voltage are all in the kitchen. Everything else has a transformer attached.

Me too - standard 12V and 5V rails run throughout the house would be great. I even thought about a wallpaper with conductive strips so the power could be invisibly delivered to any part of any room and "tapped" with a push-into-the-wall socket.

The usual counterargument is: voltage drop can become a problem. Trying to use one big power supply and use DC as your only distribution mechanism probably isn't a good idea.

But choosing a DC system for part of the house can make a lot of sense.

For one residential new construction room, it can be practical to have one shared power supply rather than one per LED. Say you have a 12 V, 5 A DC power supply. Using a star wiring topology, this can serve 10 lights (at 500 mA) fine with 16 AWG.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#855
post #367

This article and comment section is bizarre to me. It's like travelling back in time to the 2000s. We've only used LEDs in my country for, what, 15 years now? They are perfectly fine, no issues really, much cheaper than incandescent bulbs of course. We just buy the ones in IKEA and they haven't really failed us so far.

I guess you can't tell the difference? For me it's huge. I recently changed my bathroom downlights from dimmable LEDs to dimmable halogens, and it's so much nicer. The colour temperature was the same, so I guess it's not that. It's something else about the way they work. I don't profess to know why, but I can absolutely tell the difference, and I have a very clear preference now. And this is after a decade of me bein…

There are three factors: tint, flicker, and color rendering.

You're familiar with color temperature - that's essentially the orange-blue axis for white light, but there's also a red/green tint axis to consider. Humans vision is most sensitive to green light, and the lumen as a unit is calibrated to human visual sensitivity. You'll never guess what companies trying to add a few more lm/W to their efficiency rating do to the tint. Incidentally, one study I read that doesn't seem to be online anymore found people prefer tints redder than incandescent bulbs.

Flicker can come from running LEDs from AC, resulting in a low-frequency flicker that's very visible to more sensitive people. Incandescent bulbs change brightness much slower, so they're fine on AC. Another possibility is a power supply in the LED bulb that intentionally flickers the LEDs, usually at a higher frequency than mains power in order to control brightness with pulse-width modulation. Flicker-free variable constant current power supplies are available, but tend to be more expensive than PWM.

Finally, color rendering is affected by the spectrum of the light. An incandescent bulb has a spectrum that peaks at a specific wavelength and falls off relatively smoothly to the sides. LEDs can have a wide variety of spectra, often with many peaks and valleys, such that the two light sources viewed directly can look the same, but render colors very differently. A crude measurement of this is color rendering index, and many LEDs advertise theirs. 100 is the highest possible rating, and over 95 is considered very good.

The problem with CRI is it's based on a mere eight color samples, and leaves out some colors LEDs tend to be bad at. It's getting more common to see an R9 (deep red rendering) rating advertised. LEDs often do badly on R9, and there can be a big penalty to efficiency to achieve a high rating. Less commonly advertised, but also a common weakness for LEDs is R12 (deep blue rendering).

I care about this stuff and use an LED videography panel with adjustable color temperature to light my work environment. It's neutral to slightly reddish, flicker-free, has excellent CRI (97) and R9 (98). R12 is a bit weak (82).

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#856

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…

You can't have a low-voltage DC power supply supplying the entire home: the voltage drop between the supply and the LED would be huge. There's a reason we use higher voltages for long wire lengths: to increase efficiency and reduce line losses, since losses increase geometrically with the square of the current (according to Ohm's Law: P = R * I^2). Higher voltage means proportionally lower current, and geometrically lower losses.

And since we need high voltage (at least 100V) to keep line losses very low and allow the use of thinner-gauge copper wiring, we need a switching power supply at every light fixture, so it really doesn't matter if it's AC or DC, since modern SMPS (switch-mode power supplies) work equally well with either.

Finally, on top of all that, LEDs are current-driven devices, and need a constant-current power supply. So the power supply must be very close to the diodes, or else fluctuations in supply voltage will have very negative effects.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wondered for a long time why we don't have standard built-in DC in building codes that could power our lights, and most electronic devices. Really the few things in my house that require full line voltage are all in the kitchen. Everything else has a transformer attached.

It's because of Ohm's Law. Any sophomore-level electrical engineering student could answer this question immediately.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#858
I think the problem is ultimately that LED retrofit bulbs are a fundamentally terrible idea. They offer terrible thermal performance, require the power supply to be in a tiny case together with the hot LEDs, don't make good use of the directional nature of LEDs, and perhaps worst of all they compress most of the technical complexity of lighting into a tiny and super cost sensitive commodity item that is then put into some cheap fixture. Lighting is a complex thing and LEDs in properly designed lights can be fantastic but we need to get to a point where there are good offerings of purpose made lamps that integrate LEDs in a sensible fashion rather than crappy retrofits that are barely good enough because they use an amazing technology and then squander it's potential entirely. and no having the LEDs be integrated doesn't necessarily mean they are not replaceable. COB LEDs come in standardized sizes that have solder free sockets so you could totally make a lamp where the light source could be replaced when it dies or, much more likely, be upgraded when an even nicer one comes around.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low voltage DC lighting is a thing that has existed for a very, very long time. That most houses don't have it is more cultural than anything else, in my opinion. That means it's totally fixable. You can install such a system in existing buildings right now, and it's not crazy expensive unless you want to run the wires inside the walls. If we could shift cultural expectations around this, adding a LV system in new co…

For example: the stairwell shin-height lights in this 90s house are 12 VDC. There's a transformer plugged into a wall outlet in the nearby storage closet.

That works OK because the transformer is relatively close to the lights. If it were a reasonably-large house, and the transformer were on the opposite side of the house, you'd have a problem with a noticeable voltage drop. All these ideas people are throwing out here involve a single whole-house power supply. If it were for 48VDC, it would probably be fine, but 12V would result in significant line losses.

Re: There's something off about LED bulbs

#860
post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered for a long time why we don't have standard built-in DC in building codes that could power our lights, and most electronic devices. Really the few things in my house that require full line voltage are all in the kitchen. Everything else has a transformer attached.

Me too - standard 12V and 5V rails run throughout the house would be great. I even thought about a wallpaper with conductive strips so the power could be invisibly delivered to any part of any room and "tapped" with a push-into-the-wall socket.

The wires would be thick asf

Not practical

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