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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 fa

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 with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford. - It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal - Retrofits generally work poorly on principle - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive

timw4mail 4y ago
Not to mention space constraints for power supplies, and cooling the LEDs enough. For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.
- galleywest200 4y ago
  > cooling the LEDs enough Maybe I am missing something from this conversation, but all of my LED bulbs produce far _less_ heat than incandescent bulbs. The lamp in my bedroom no longer keeps me warm!
  - rini17 4y ago
    But LEDs are very sensitive to heat, so even the small amount of heat will cause gradual dimming.
  - weberer 4y ago
    Yes, but incandescent bulbs don't need to be cooled at all because they're just tungsten and glass. High powered LEDs require a heat sink to not damage the diode.
  - 1980phipsi 4y ago
    You will find that you will need to search a bit harder to find an LED light that is rated to work with enclosed fixtures. Enclosed fixtures don't allow the same amount of cooling as a normal lamp.
  - orev 4y ago
    By cooling the issue is that LEDs and the driving electronics will become damaged with heat, while an incandescent has simple parts which can easily survive inside an oven. This matters when used in fixtures like recessed ceiling cans where there’s no ventilation. The LEDs just cook themselves while incandescents don’t care.
    - organsnyder 4y ago
      When my garage+office was built a few years ago, the electrician used a bunch of faux-recessed LED fixtures (the brand name is "I Can't Believe It's Not Recessed!", which is certainly memorable). They surface-mount over standard ceiling junction boxes, but appear similar to recessed lights once installed. We have ~20 of these fixtures, both interior and exterior. They're quiet, flicker-free, and have a great dimming curve (with the standard Z-wave dimmers I've used). We've had no failures so far after almost four years, so they've passed the leading edge of the bathtub curve. I think it's much easier to design entire fixtures than retrofit bulbs, as there's much more control over heat dissipation and so on. Finding trusted manufacturers (and supply chains that resist counterfeits) is also extremely important.
      - droopyEyelids 4y ago
        The faux-recessed LED fixtures are a really interesting case because they're either going to be the most reliable LED in your house, or one of the least! This is because heat is the LED diode killer (as well as the power supplies driving the diodes) Can lights have historically been an issue for insulation of houses, as they provide a channel for the warm ceiling air to enter the plenum space between floors or the attic. Thats bad for insulation, but actually amazing for a retrofitted LED light, because it's the only fixture that will provide airflow to cool it! On the other hand, faux-recessed LEDs can also be installed directly on top of the ceiling drywall, without any penetration. Thats the worst case scenario for heat build up, as heat rises and it's completely trapped by the dish of the light and the ceiling.
        organsnyder 4y ago
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Simpler and better light, but bad energy efficiency. Although, as was pointed out to me at some point, because LEDs are more efficient, people feel less guilty about having more of them; replacing 1x40 watt bulb with 8x5 watt LEDs means the net result is the same. I've got like 7 cute LED spotlights in my TV closet for example, I wouldn't have had that setup if I was forced to use incandescent lamps.
  - sgregnt 4y ago
    Energy efficiency wise, in cold weather it warms the apartment which is desirable in my case.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      Little downside if you have electric heating, but if you have natural gas heating the electric heating is probably more expensive.
  - saulpw 4y ago
    Jevons Paradox in action.
- willis936 4y ago
  I've moved three times with one set of cheap LED bulbs without having to replace a single one. I'd have gone thorough dozens of incandescent bulbs in the same time period. I'd have also burned my hand on a few. LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
> LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons > Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.
- userbinator 4y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Or because, as with many products and services, many people go into Home Depot or wherever and buy whatever is cheapest--especially in a world where higher price does not necessarily equate to higher quality or longer life.
    - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      > especially in a world where higher price does not necessarily equate to higher quality or longer life. There's the kicker; how can you tell when something is better quality anymore? Qualifiers like "is this device run at max capacity or is there leeway" are never listed on packaging or product features.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It's often hard to know, especially for items you're not going to individually research in great depth, whether you're actually paying for quality or for a name on the package even though it actually came off the same assembly line in China as any number of knock-offs. And, even if it is higher quality by some standard, does that really affect consumer outcomes?
    - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
      I do not, nor will I ever, excuse penny-pinching by companies by agreeing that they’re forced to do it because people will always buy the cheapest thing they can. It’s trotted out as the lame excuse for bag check fees and other declining flying services, cheap consumer goods, cheap electronics, you name it. To accept the premise is to believe that anything made of quality will never get bought/used which is manifestly not the case. And it strangely completely ignores the incentives companies have to make things as shitty as possible, namely lower expenses and planned obsolescence.
jjoonathan 4y ago
How much of this is driven by the actual cost of properly provisioning emitters and fielding a good power supply vs the inability of consumers to hold manufacturers accountable?
- mleo 4y ago
  Does the average person remember the brand of lightbulb they purchased at Walmart or the hardware store? I would hope the buyers at stores would have better sense to buy half decent brand vs utter trash available through 3rd party sellers online. Not much hope though.
aardvarkr 4y ago
What’s an example of what you consider to be a high quality led? I’m pretty happy with everything that I have in my home but I’m curious what you’re talking about
- doitLP 4y ago
  Check out https://www.waveformlighting.com/ https://www.waveformlighting.com/ for some very high quality LEDs and education about how they work.
  - brodouevencode 4y ago
    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.
    - Arubis 4y ago
      If you told me you could make one room of my house consistently color-balanced with LED lighting that I would have no reason to hate, I would ball up a couple hundred dollar bills and throw them at you. (Edit: I’m also coming from buying Philips Hue bulbs for precisely this reason, so in fairness, it’s not as big a price jump.)
      - brodouevencode 4y ago
        I have a few Hues and they are great, and last much longer. But in this house I cannot justify even that. In my kitchen/breakfast nook alone I have 10 lightbulbs plus an overhead flushmount.
      - doitLP 4y ago
        Keep in mind: all LEDs leak blue light even the warm ones (color is achieved by average so you can have high red and high blue and it looks balanced visually). These bright blue leaking LEDs are great during the day — especially those with high CRI and R9 values. But not at night when you’re trying to go to bed! Switch to incandescent only in the evenings until they figure out blue-less dimmable LEDs
roel_v 4y ago
"Good indoor lightning" Man I'd love me some indoor lightning, no matter the cost.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Building a fire death machine using soviet military tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNisqZOAaAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNisqZOAaAs
- jfrej 4y ago
  You can get it in a bottle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-93Ij5WIcok&t=28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-93Ij5WIcok&t=28s
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Tesla coils aren't that expensive; go live your dreams:)
  - shagie 4y ago
    Your new stereo system, courtesy ArcAttack - https://youtu.be/6OdubOdFS-Y https://youtu.be/6OdubOdFS-Y (DIY kit from them https://arcattack.com/kits-accessories/thundermouse-tesla-coil-kit/ https://arcattack.com/kits-accessories/thundermouse-tesla-co... ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil
amluto 4y ago
> The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. In a screw base, maybe. But compare: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-inc/DRW-A4D030-1-CC700-42-700/14309949 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i... $25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30H3000-D-73/8536747 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30... $3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.) So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30. Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast. To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks. I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it: https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescent-lighting https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...
- DougN7 4y ago
  This is just an anecdote, but I’ve had multiple “10 year” LED bulbs fail after just a year or two. I suspect much of the claims for these bulbs are theoretical as they just don’t hold up, probably for reasons the grandparent poster is pointing out.
  - britzkopf 4y ago
    I'll add a second identical anecdote. I've witnessed about a dozen die after about doing about 1/10th their promised duty.
    - smolder 4y ago
      Are they in fixtures designed for incandescents? "Boob lamps" for example are highly efficient LED bulb destroyers, since they don't breathe, and the bulbs overheat.
sidewndr46 4y ago
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.
- xeromal 4y ago
  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.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    Sure, but I'm billed by kw-Hr. Bill me for the infrastructure if that is what costs money.
    - lmfaowhat 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        Burgers and bread loafs compete on all their costs, different competing outlets actually differ in those costs, and people choose which ones to use. Utilities don't have that. Everyone is stuck paying for both infrastructure and use, so it makes sense to charge them separately. If each neighborhood had exactly one restaurant that everyone used for all their food, maybe it would make sense to split the burger flipper costs evenly.
- consp 4y ago
  My network and kWh cost are split and the network cost have risen far less than kWh cost. Also the network cost are constant. Looking at where those are used for the main cost are in peak usage capacity which efficiency actually lowers.
xnx 4y ago
Quantity (lumens) is its own type of quality.
samstave 4y ago
I have every single light bulb in my house (and outside my house) as an LED RGB Alexa-addressible light, and I love it. "Set all the lights to red" and every single bulb in my house and porch and walkway and garage etc, all turn red. "Turn on/off all the light" Set kitchen to firebrick... Etc. I LOVE IT. During the day I rarely have any lights on at all - but at night I have precise control over every bulb in my house with alexa voice. I initially would never have put alexa in my home, but now that I have it and all bulbs on it, as well as several alexa-fied power outlets, its just a very nice thing to have. Im not too concerned over "lighting quality" - as I get exactly what I want. The bulbs I bought were from Costco, where they had them on sale for $5 for a (2) pack. so I replaced all CFLs with RGB Wifi LEDs with alexa, and it was ~$70 to do the whole house (27) bulbs. EDIT: Dimmability "Alexa Set Kitchen to 10%" --> I can dim or brighten all the lights at once "Alexa set house to 100%" etc...
VLM 4y ago
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.
- sparker72678 4y ago
  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.
  - Majromax 4y ago
    > 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 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.
    - sparker72678 4y ago
      Gotcha, thanks!
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      That page is also why the popular depiction of the Phoebus cartel (as in: they intentionally made 1000h bulbs, but could have made 3000h bulbs instead that were otherwise identical, like e.g. Veritasiums popular video) is wrong. For classic incandescent bulbs, color temperature and lifetime limit each other. It is not possible to make a 2500K incandescent bulb that lasts longer than about 1000 hours, and a 3000 hour bulb will always have a dim and warm output. Because that's how it gets to 3000 hours.
reaperman 4y ago
What is "SSRI" in the context of LEDs?
- toby- 4y ago
  I believe they meant SSI, which is Spectral Similarity Index. https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-similarity-index-ssi https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-...
- Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
  A misspelling of "SSI", Spectral Similarity Index, another color accuracy metric. Basically the industry figured out how to win at the CRI game without actually creating the same underlying spectral distribution of light. So they same up with another metric to try to optimize called SSI (also TLCI, etc.) SSI is mostly relevant in the digital cinema space, where the observer is a digital camera, not a human eye, as they can't be tricked the same way because they have different underlying RGB spectral sensitivities.
throw0101b 4y ago
> - Poor CRI and SSRI So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself: > Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_value:_R9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticis... There are initiatives to come up with a better metric, but there doesn't seem to be much traction: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale
jsmith45 4y ago
> - Dim-to-warm is uncommon Yeah, I love Alec's Technology Connections video on some bulbs with that feature, but he pointed it partly because some of the few bulbs that offered it seemed to be getting phased out. Its much like a bunch of other points on the list. There are a fair few that would only add a small amount of additional cost, but because the companies can save money by not doing it, they don't. It does not actually cost all that much more to add a few more diodes, to avoid severely overdriving the ones on the board, or to improve the power supply circuitry so that it will likely last longer. But it really sucks that even if you chose to buy the more premium tier bulbs being offered at the big box store, they often don't fix some of these issues. They may have a better CRI, but are still often overdriven, with questionable power supply designs.
lacrosse_tannin 4y ago
What is the embodied energy of all those high tech parts? An incandescent lightbulb is a piece of tungsten wire.
gorkish 4y ago
> The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford. Where? How? I can no longer buy quality LED lighting at any price. I have a bunch of Sylvania Ultra Sunset Effects bulbs purchased ~15 years or so ago that nothing since even comes close to.
bombcar 4y ago
They've started marking LED bulbs as "not for enclosed fixtures" which is .... 90% of existing fixtures? They overheat and die really fast if used in something that's not vented/cooled. You need fixtures that fully expose the bulb so it doesn't burn itself out. Amusing that LED bulbs, the energy savers, die from excess heat.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Is that because they are “downscaling” (totally made up term, IDK electronics) the energy coming into them?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    It's because despite being far more efficient than incandescent they are still only about 30% efficient at producing visible light. The rest is heat, and unlike incandescent an LED does not want to be hot. The device must be cooled or it becomes less efficient and wears out faster. There is no good way to get the heat out of the front of the device because that's the side you are supposed to see, so in practice all the heat is removed from the back, i.e. the part inside the fixture. Other solutions to this include using much larger devices, but that costs proportionally more and has application issues because people want their light bulbs to act like either line or point sources, not as areal sources. So most lights on the market use a single small LED, unless they are targeted to a buyer demanding high efficiency and long life, like a city streetlight.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Part of it is that but part of it is just heat loss as the other reply mentioned. If you get an LED strip, the power supply itself can become warm; but even a LED with no voltage changing needed will warm up.
- dawnerd 4y ago
  And if you want enclosed rated bulbs there’s not many choices. The GE ones I picked up flicker like crazy.
hedora 4y ago
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.)
carride 4y ago
Primarily it is the E27 bulbs that are the problem. Designed to ease people into simple replacement into the old light sockets 10+ years ago. Now in 2023 the new LED products with the well designed power supplies work much better and efficiency. The author mentions renovations, but still using ancient fixtures, wiring and switches. A new house, or partial renovation, should now be wired with 24v for all wall and ceiling lights.
tablespoon 4y ago
> There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs. About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC). > - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.
- dr_kretyn 4y ago
  In Canada (BC), cheap Ikea LED bulbs cost 1 CAD [0]. I'm not sure what price you expect but to me that's pretty cheap. [0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen-globe-opal-white-60498582/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen...
sam_goody 4y ago
There is also IoT in some of these bulbs, especially the more expensive ones. That there is a huge turn off for me, even if I don't have a smartphone handy ;)
ljf 4y ago
I would agree - BUT try 'Edison style' warm leds - these use the filament style. They last for YEARS, and give a soft warm light - the bulbs I have a dim (but then 'Edison style squirrel cage bulbs have always been dim).
_rs 4y ago
> - It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal I'm going through this again now. At one point I found Philips EyeComfort bulbs on Amazon which checked all my boxes (2700-3000K, 60W, dimmable, almost non-existent flicker). I've had a couple bulbs die on me now, and I cannot for the life of me find replacements, it's like they stopped manufacturing them. I have no clue what to replace them with now
moogly 4y ago
To add a thing to the list: RF interference. I wanted to upgrade the super faint positional lights in my two garage openers, and I need to stay <= 10W, so I tried some LEDs. But they kill the 433 MHz remote signal, sadly. Tried 3 different brands, a couple of which don't actually fully turn off, or give off a loud hum to boot. The openers use rear car light bulbs, for some reason (BA15s).
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
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.
xxs 4y ago
The same topic about LEDs has so many entries on HN in the recent years. I have posted about it a lot. To add to the list - low power factor (usually 50%). - cheap passives, caps/coils - terrible heat dissipation, e27/e14 are no good target, but see overdriven again - close to no input protection (see power supplies, again), so motors totally wreck them with their induction kickback OTOH, constant (not over)driven LEDs with dedicated power supplies (pref. isolated, so safer), with decent area, aluminum PCBs can last long. A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.
- droopyEyelids 4y ago
  We're mostly on the same page, but there are some caveats to buying the heavier bulbs, even assuming the weight is all heat sink- because that won't matter if the heated air has no where to go! An expensive bulb with a nice heat sink will fail just as quickly as a cheap one when you put it in a well-sealed can light or something else that traps all the hot air.
  - xxs 4y ago
    If one bothers to care about heat sinking, they might actually test the thing and opted not overdrive it. It's just a good totally layman indicator. Funny enough most mains/350V DC, chips tend to have a limiting resistor for the current drive - lower resistance = high current. Most (if not all) have two resistors in parallel (for a better control, and less power per resistor) - desoldering one would greatly improve the lifespan for a minimal luminosity loss. So by picking a larger heatsink, they might picked a bit large value for the resistors as well.
nielsbot 4y ago
They're pricier but you can get LED bulbs that have better color rendering For example https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php# https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php...
twawaaay 4y ago
As an amateur EE, I have analysed some of LEDs when I wanted to light up my kitchen counters. I wanted flicker-free LEDs with high CRI and temperature matching the rest of my apartment. I ordered samples of a lot of LEDs and found that almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs. Driving caps at well above their specs, at high temperature, basically ensures speedy failure. Not only that, but undersized smoothing capacitor causes visible 100Hz flicker. What's even more interesting is at the price point putting better caps was almost inconsequential to the price of the product. I have ordered capacitors that should have been there in the first place and replaced the original ones with the new ones. Not only LEDs are flicker free now, I suspect they will be serving me for much longer.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  >almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs Well, the LEDs themselves will last up to 20 years, so they have to make something in the bulb fail before that. Can't have people only buying replacement bulbs every other decade.
  - blackbear_ 4y ago
    Not sure why you are being downvoted, when that is exactly what has happened with incandescent light bulbs one century ago: > How exactly did the cartel pull off this engineering feat? It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anybody could have done that. But to create one that reliably failed after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours took some doing over a number of years. The household lightbulb in 1924 was already technologically sophisticated: The light yield was considerable; the burning time was easily 2,500 hours or more. By striving for something less, the cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
    - archon810 4y ago
      There's a fantastic video about this called "This is why we cant have nice things." https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE
guerrilla 4y ago
- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly - Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly - Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly These are all features from the producers POV. Planned obsolescence. - Poor CRI and SSRI This is true for all cheap lights, you gotta pay for that.
Bluzzard 4y ago
Everybody already knows these things. Like, why do democrats (not politicians, I mean you people) have a need to enact new regulations everytime they get a chance?
throwaway290 4y ago
Add to that spiky spectrum. Incandescent bulbs give black body radiation, a solid spectrum. Regular LED lights spike in RGB to achieve a neutral color. Can cause metamerism in photos and just looks bad IMO.
_2uwr 4y ago
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Consultant32452 4y ago
In cold climates incandescent bulbs are 100% efficient.
novok 4y ago
A bunch of this is driven by power efficiency requirements, creating a flickering low quality mess. Like no-flicker LED lights usually have a worse power factor.
- consp 4y ago
  Most flickering mess is caused by throwing away half of the sine wave due to cheaping out on components and has nothing to do with efficiency.
  - novok 4y ago
    Waveform lighting sells flicker free LED lighting that they can't ship to california due to a lower power factor, and their 15W bulbs cost $29, so it's not a cheap component issue: https://www.waveformlighting.com/home-residential/why-cant-these-light-bulbs-ship-to-california-an-overview-of-california-energy-commissions-title-20 https://www.waveformlighting.com/home-residential/why-cant-t... Otherwise why exclude the california market in this case.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  A bulb gets a burst of power every 120Hz, so it would only use about .075 joules per cycle. Half the time is spent above 110v, and half is under 110v, so we need to store less than 1/240th of a second of power to have a perfect output and a perfect power factor. Let's put a capacitor before the regulator to store that power, and design the regulator to compensate for how the voltage will vary over each cycle. Since we don't want to drain our capacitor entirely, let's spec it for .05 joules at 100v, which means 10µF. Digikey says a 10µF 200v capacitor costs ten cents. If there's flicker, I blame the voltage regulator or lack thereof, not the requirement of power efficiency.
herbst 4y ago
I replaced nearly all bulps with WiZ bulps more than 2 years ago. - I don't see flicker on any of my cameras. The light is actually really nice for filming too. - The price is way less than hue (I own a few, and don't think they are any better) - I get way more light per watt than with any other bulp type. Not sure what you mean with luxury. - I love that each of them has an independent API on their own IP. Works perfectly for my smart home design. I've had several cheap (in build quality, not price) bulps fail on me meanwhile. Not a single WiZ had failed so far. As said I own some hue too, but I wasn't willing to spend over $1000 just on bulps for my house but then I found the WiZ brand. Not sure if am just lucky. But I really enjoy multicolour plus warm and cold LEDs in the whole house.
wkat4242 4y ago
I agree on most point but dim to warm is pretty undesirable in my point of view. I'd like to just be able to set the color temperature independently of brightness. Which I can do with my zigbee lights.

timw4mail 4y ago

Not to mention space constraints for power supplies, and cooling the LEDs enough. For all the benefits of LED lights, incandescent bulbs are infinitely simpler.

galleywest200 4y ago
> cooling the LEDs enough Maybe I am missing something from this conversation, but all of my LED bulbs produce far _less_ heat than incandescent bulbs. The lamp in my bedroom no longer keeps me warm!
- rini17 4y ago
  But LEDs are very sensitive to heat, so even the small amount of heat will cause gradual dimming.
- weberer 4y ago
  Yes, but incandescent bulbs don't need to be cooled at all because they're just tungsten and glass. High powered LEDs require a heat sink to not damage the diode.
- 1980phipsi 4y ago
  You will find that you will need to search a bit harder to find an LED light that is rated to work with enclosed fixtures. Enclosed fixtures don't allow the same amount of cooling as a normal lamp.
- orev 4y ago
  By cooling the issue is that LEDs and the driving electronics will become damaged with heat, while an incandescent has simple parts which can easily survive inside an oven. This matters when used in fixtures like recessed ceiling cans where there’s no ventilation. The LEDs just cook themselves while incandescents don’t care.
  - organsnyder 4y ago
    When my garage+office was built a few years ago, the electrician used a bunch of faux-recessed LED fixtures (the brand name is "I Can't Believe It's Not Recessed!", which is certainly memorable). They surface-mount over standard ceiling junction boxes, but appear similar to recessed lights once installed. We have ~20 of these fixtures, both interior and exterior. They're quiet, flicker-free, and have a great dimming curve (with the standard Z-wave dimmers I've used). We've had no failures so far after almost four years, so they've passed the leading edge of the bathtub curve. I think it's much easier to design entire fixtures than retrofit bulbs, as there's much more control over heat dissipation and so on. Finding trusted manufacturers (and supply chains that resist counterfeits) is also extremely important.
    - droopyEyelids 4y ago
      The faux-recessed LED fixtures are a really interesting case because they're either going to be the most reliable LED in your house, or one of the least! This is because heat is the LED diode killer (as well as the power supplies driving the diodes) Can lights have historically been an issue for insulation of houses, as they provide a channel for the warm ceiling air to enter the plenum space between floors or the attic. Thats bad for insulation, but actually amazing for a retrofitted LED light, because it's the only fixture that will provide airflow to cool it! On the other hand, faux-recessed LEDs can also be installed directly on top of the ceiling drywall, without any penetration. Thats the worst case scenario for heat build up, as heat rises and it's completely trapped by the dish of the light and the ceiling.
      - organsnyder 4y ago
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Simpler and better light, but bad energy efficiency. Although, as was pointed out to me at some point, because LEDs are more efficient, people feel less guilty about having more of them; replacing 1x40 watt bulb with 8x5 watt LEDs means the net result is the same. I've got like 7 cute LED spotlights in my TV closet for example, I wouldn't have had that setup if I was forced to use incandescent lamps.
- sgregnt 4y ago
  Energy efficiency wise, in cold weather it warms the apartment which is desirable in my case.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    Little downside if you have electric heating, but if you have natural gas heating the electric heating is probably more expensive.
- saulpw 4y ago
  Jevons Paradox in action.
willis936 4y ago
I've moved three times with one set of cheap LED bulbs without having to replace a single one. I'd have gone thorough dozens of incandescent bulbs in the same time period. I'd have also burned my hand on a few. LEDs are definitely simpler than incandescent from a user perspective.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

> LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons > Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.

userbinator 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
- ghaff 4y ago
  Or because, as with many products and services, many people go into Home Depot or wherever and buy whatever is cheapest--especially in a world where higher price does not necessarily equate to higher quality or longer life.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    > especially in a world where higher price does not necessarily equate to higher quality or longer life. There's the kicker; how can you tell when something is better quality anymore? Qualifiers like "is this device run at max capacity or is there leeway" are never listed on packaging or product features.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It's often hard to know, especially for items you're not going to individually research in great depth, whether you're actually paying for quality or for a name on the package even though it actually came off the same assembly line in China as any number of knock-offs. And, even if it is higher quality by some standard, does that really affect consumer outcomes?
  - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
    I do not, nor will I ever, excuse penny-pinching by companies by agreeing that they’re forced to do it because people will always buy the cheapest thing they can. It’s trotted out as the lame excuse for bag check fees and other declining flying services, cheap consumer goods, cheap electronics, you name it. To accept the premise is to believe that anything made of quality will never get bought/used which is manifestly not the case. And it strangely completely ignores the incentives companies have to make things as shitty as possible, namely lower expenses and planned obsolescence.

jjoonathan 4y ago

How much of this is driven by the actual cost of properly provisioning emitters and fielding a good power supply vs the inability of consumers to hold manufacturers accountable?

mleo 4y ago
Does the average person remember the brand of lightbulb they purchased at Walmart or the hardware store? I would hope the buyers at stores would have better sense to buy half decent brand vs utter trash available through 3rd party sellers online. Not much hope though.

aardvarkr 4y ago

What’s an example of what you consider to be a high quality led? I’m pretty happy with everything that I have in my home but I’m curious what you’re talking about

doitLP 4y ago
Check out https://www.waveformlighting.com/ https://www.waveformlighting.com/ for some very high quality LEDs and education about how they work.
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  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.
  - Arubis 4y ago
    If you told me you could make one room of my house consistently color-balanced with LED lighting that I would have no reason to hate, I would ball up a couple hundred dollar bills and throw them at you. (Edit: I’m also coming from buying Philips Hue bulbs for precisely this reason, so in fairness, it’s not as big a price jump.)
    - brodouevencode 4y ago
      I have a few Hues and they are great, and last much longer. But in this house I cannot justify even that. In my kitchen/breakfast nook alone I have 10 lightbulbs plus an overhead flushmount.
    - doitLP 4y ago
      Keep in mind: all LEDs leak blue light even the warm ones (color is achieved by average so you can have high red and high blue and it looks balanced visually). These bright blue leaking LEDs are great during the day — especially those with high CRI and R9 values. But not at night when you’re trying to go to bed! Switch to incandescent only in the evenings until they figure out blue-less dimmable LEDs

roel_v 4y ago

"Good indoor lightning" Man I'd love me some indoor lightning, no matter the cost.

orangepurple 4y ago
Building a fire death machine using soviet military tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNisqZOAaAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNisqZOAaAs
jfrej 4y ago
You can get it in a bottle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-93Ij5WIcok&t=28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-93Ij5WIcok&t=28s
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Tesla coils aren't that expensive; go live your dreams:)
- shagie 4y ago
  Your new stereo system, courtesy ArcAttack - https://youtu.be/6OdubOdFS-Y https://youtu.be/6OdubOdFS-Y (DIY kit from them https://arcattack.com/kits-accessories/thundermouse-tesla-coil-kit/ https://arcattack.com/kits-accessories/thundermouse-tesla-co... ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Tesla_coil

amluto 4y ago

> The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. In a screw base, maybe. But compare: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-inc/DRW-A4D030-1-CC700-42-700/14309949 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i... $25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient. https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30H3000-D-73/8536747 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30... $3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.) So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30. Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast. To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks. I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it: https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescent-lighting https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...

DougN7 4y ago
This is just an anecdote, but I’ve had multiple “10 year” LED bulbs fail after just a year or two. I suspect much of the claims for these bulbs are theoretical as they just don’t hold up, probably for reasons the grandparent poster is pointing out.
- britzkopf 4y ago
  I'll add a second identical anecdote. I've witnessed about a dozen die after about doing about 1/10th their promised duty.
  - smolder 4y ago
    Are they in fixtures designed for incandescents? "Boob lamps" for example are highly efficient LED bulb destroyers, since they don't breathe, and the bulbs overheat.

sidewndr46 4y ago

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.

xeromal 4y ago
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.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Sure, but I'm billed by kw-Hr. Bill me for the infrastructure if that is what costs money.
  - lmfaowhat 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Burgers and bread loafs compete on all their costs, different competing outlets actually differ in those costs, and people choose which ones to use. Utilities don't have that. Everyone is stuck paying for both infrastructure and use, so it makes sense to charge them separately. If each neighborhood had exactly one restaurant that everyone used for all their food, maybe it would make sense to split the burger flipper costs evenly.
consp 4y ago
My network and kWh cost are split and the network cost have risen far less than kWh cost. Also the network cost are constant. Looking at where those are used for the main cost are in peak usage capacity which efficiency actually lowers.

xnx 4y ago

Quantity (lumens) is its own type of quality.

samstave 4y ago

I have every single light bulb in my house (and outside my house) as an LED RGB Alexa-addressible light, and I love it. "Set all the lights to red" and every single bulb in my house and porch and walkway and garage etc, all turn red. "Turn on/off all the light" Set kitchen to firebrick... Etc. I LOVE IT. During the day I rarely have any lights on at all - but at night I have precise control over every bulb in my house with alexa voice. I initially would never have put alexa in my home, but now that I have it and all bulbs on it, as well as several alexa-fied power outlets, its just a very nice thing to have. Im not too concerned over "lighting quality" - as I get exactly what I want. The bulbs I bought were from Costco, where they had them on sale for $5 for a (2) pack. so I replaced all CFLs with RGB Wifi LEDs with alexa, and it was ~$70 to do the whole house (27) bulbs. EDIT: Dimmability "Alexa Set Kitchen to 10%" --> I can dim or brighten all the lights at once "Alexa set house to 100%" etc...

VLM 4y ago

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.

sparker72678 4y ago
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.
- Majromax 4y ago
  > 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 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.
  - sparker72678 4y ago
    Gotcha, thanks!
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    That page is also why the popular depiction of the Phoebus cartel (as in: they intentionally made 1000h bulbs, but could have made 3000h bulbs instead that were otherwise identical, like e.g. Veritasiums popular video) is wrong. For classic incandescent bulbs, color temperature and lifetime limit each other. It is not possible to make a 2500K incandescent bulb that lasts longer than about 1000 hours, and a 3000 hour bulb will always have a dim and warm output. Because that's how it gets to 3000 hours.

reaperman 4y ago

What is "SSRI" in the context of LEDs?

toby- 4y ago
I believe they meant SSI, which is Spectral Similarity Index. https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-similarity-index-ssi https://www.oscars.org/science-technology/projects/spectral-...
Dave_Rosenthal 4y ago
A misspelling of "SSI", Spectral Similarity Index, another color accuracy metric. Basically the industry figured out how to win at the CRI game without actually creating the same underlying spectral distribution of light. So they same up with another metric to try to optimize called SSI (also TLCI, etc.) SSI is mostly relevant in the digital cinema space, where the observer is a digital camera, not a human eye, as they can't be tricked the same way because they have different underlying RGB spectral sensitivities.

throw0101b 4y ago

> - Poor CRI and SSRI So having a minimum CRI of 80-90 is a good starting point, there are issues with the CRI measure itself: > Ra is the average value of R1–R8; other values from R9 to R15 are not used in the calculation of Ra, including R9 "saturated red", R13 "skin color (light)", and R15 "skin color (medium)", which are all difficult colors to faithfully reproduce. R9 is a vital index in high-CRI lighting, as many applications require red lights, such as film and video lighting, medical lighting, art lighting, etc. However, in the general CRI (Ra) calculation R9 is not included. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_value:_R9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Special_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index#Criticis... There are initiatives to come up with a better metric, but there doesn't seem to be much traction: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_quality_scale

jsmith45 4y ago

> - Dim-to-warm is uncommon Yeah, I love Alec's Technology Connections video on some bulbs with that feature, but he pointed it partly because some of the few bulbs that offered it seemed to be getting phased out. Its much like a bunch of other points on the list. There are a fair few that would only add a small amount of additional cost, but because the companies can save money by not doing it, they don't. It does not actually cost all that much more to add a few more diodes, to avoid severely overdriving the ones on the board, or to improve the power supply circuitry so that it will likely last longer. But it really sucks that even if you chose to buy the more premium tier bulbs being offered at the big box store, they often don't fix some of these issues. They may have a better CRI, but are still often overdriven, with questionable power supply designs.

lacrosse_tannin 4y ago

What is the embodied energy of all those high tech parts? An incandescent lightbulb is a piece of tungsten wire.

gorkish 4y ago

> The same light quality is vastly more expensive to achieve with LEDs, even if you account for high electricity prices. Good indoor lighting is now something only people with plenty of disposable income can afford. Where? How? I can no longer buy quality LED lighting at any price. I have a bunch of Sylvania Ultra Sunset Effects bulbs purchased ~15 years or so ago that nothing since even comes close to.

bombcar 4y ago

They've started marking LED bulbs as "not for enclosed fixtures" which is .... 90% of existing fixtures? They overheat and die really fast if used in something that's not vented/cooled. You need fixtures that fully expose the bulb so it doesn't burn itself out. Amusing that LED bulbs, the energy savers, die from excess heat.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Is that because they are “downscaling” (totally made up term, IDK electronics) the energy coming into them?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  It's because despite being far more efficient than incandescent they are still only about 30% efficient at producing visible light. The rest is heat, and unlike incandescent an LED does not want to be hot. The device must be cooled or it becomes less efficient and wears out faster. There is no good way to get the heat out of the front of the device because that's the side you are supposed to see, so in practice all the heat is removed from the back, i.e. the part inside the fixture. Other solutions to this include using much larger devices, but that costs proportionally more and has application issues because people want their light bulbs to act like either line or point sources, not as areal sources. So most lights on the market use a single small LED, unless they are targeted to a buyer demanding high efficiency and long life, like a city streetlight.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Part of it is that but part of it is just heat loss as the other reply mentioned. If you get an LED strip, the power supply itself can become warm; but even a LED with no voltage changing needed will warm up.
dawnerd 4y ago
And if you want enclosed rated bulbs there’s not many choices. The GE ones I picked up flicker like crazy.

hedora 4y ago

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.)

carride 4y ago

Primarily it is the E27 bulbs that are the problem. Designed to ease people into simple replacement into the old light sockets 10+ years ago. Now in 2023 the new LED products with the well designed power supplies work much better and efficiency. The author mentions renovations, but still using ancient fixtures, wiring and switches. A new house, or partial renovation, should now be wired with 24v for all wall and ceiling lights.

tablespoon 4y ago

> There's a lot wrong with LEDs in general and retrofit (E27 bulbs) in particular. In no particular order If all that's true, it explains my experience that LEDs have totally failed to live up to their promise. Sure, they use less power than incandescents, but they're far more expensive and also more finicky. They were supposed to last a decade, but I'm lucky if I get a year or two out of them. I wonder what the environmental impact is when you factor in e-waste and manufacturing costs. About the only clear win for me is they run much cooler, which is nice when you have underpowered AC (or no AC). > - LEDs mix exceptionally poorly, making things even more expensive I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, but (compared to incandescents), different models of LED differ significantly in light characteristics and start up time. More than once I've had to replace all the bulbs in a fixture, because I couldn't buy and equivalent replacement for one that failed.

dr_kretyn 4y ago
In Canada (BC), cheap Ikea LED bulbs cost 1 CAD [0]. I'm not sure what price you expect but to me that's pretty cheap. [0] https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen-globe-opal-white-60498582/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e26-450-lumen...

sam_goody 4y ago

There is also IoT in some of these bulbs, especially the more expensive ones. That there is a huge turn off for me, even if I don't have a smartphone handy ;)

ljf 4y ago

I would agree - BUT try 'Edison style' warm leds - these use the filament style. They last for YEARS, and give a soft warm light - the bulbs I have a dim (but then 'Edison style squirrel cage bulbs have always been dim).

_rs 4y ago

> - It is quite difficult to even buy high quality LEDs as a mere mortal I'm going through this again now. At one point I found Philips EyeComfort bulbs on Amazon which checked all my boxes (2700-3000K, 60W, dimmable, almost non-existent flicker). I've had a couple bulbs die on me now, and I cannot for the life of me find replacements, it's like they stopped manufacturing them. I have no clue what to replace them with now

moogly 4y ago

To add a thing to the list: RF interference. I wanted to upgrade the super faint positional lights in my two garage openers, and I need to stay <= 10W, so I tried some LEDs. But they kill the 433 MHz remote signal, sadly. Tried 3 different brands, a couple of which don't actually fully turn off, or give off a loud hum to boot. The openers use rear car light bulbs, for some reason (BA15s).

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

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.

xxs 4y ago

The same topic about LEDs has so many entries on HN in the recent years. I have posted about it a lot. To add to the list - low power factor (usually 50%). - cheap passives, caps/coils - terrible heat dissipation, e27/e14 are no good target, but see overdriven again - close to no input protection (see power supplies, again), so motors totally wreck them with their induction kickback OTOH, constant (not over)driven LEDs with dedicated power supplies (pref. isolated, so safer), with decent area, aluminum PCBs can last long. A cheap advice if you have to buy a retrofit LED bulb, buy the heaviest one, i.e. get a scale with (at least) gram precision and weight them. More mass - better heat dissipation, better passives.

droopyEyelids 4y ago
We're mostly on the same page, but there are some caveats to buying the heavier bulbs, even assuming the weight is all heat sink- because that won't matter if the heated air has no where to go! An expensive bulb with a nice heat sink will fail just as quickly as a cheap one when you put it in a well-sealed can light or something else that traps all the hot air.
- xxs 4y ago
  If one bothers to care about heat sinking, they might actually test the thing and opted not overdrive it. It's just a good totally layman indicator. Funny enough most mains/350V DC, chips tend to have a limiting resistor for the current drive - lower resistance = high current. Most (if not all) have two resistors in parallel (for a better control, and less power per resistor) - desoldering one would greatly improve the lifespan for a minimal luminosity loss. So by picking a larger heatsink, they might picked a bit large value for the resistors as well.

nielsbot 4y ago

They're pricier but you can get LED bulbs that have better color rendering For example https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php# https://www.soraa.com/products/50-Soraa-VIVID-A19-(120v).php...

twawaaay 4y ago

As an amateur EE, I have analysed some of LEDs when I wanted to light up my kitchen counters. I wanted flicker-free LEDs with high CRI and temperature matching the rest of my apartment. I ordered samples of a lot of LEDs and found that almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs. Driving caps at well above their specs, at high temperature, basically ensures speedy failure. Not only that, but undersized smoothing capacitor causes visible 100Hz flicker. What's even more interesting is at the price point putting better caps was almost inconsequential to the price of the product. I have ordered capacitors that should have been there in the first place and replaced the original ones with the new ones. Not only LEDs are flicker free now, I suspect they will be serving me for much longer.

DebtDeflation 4y ago
>almost all of them are using their parts, especially capacitors, well above the specs Well, the LEDs themselves will last up to 20 years, so they have to make something in the bulb fail before that. Can't have people only buying replacement bulbs every other decade.
- blackbear_ 4y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted, when that is exactly what has happened with incandescent light bulbs one century ago: > How exactly did the cartel pull off this engineering feat? It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anybody could have done that. But to create one that reliably failed after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours took some doing over a number of years. The household lightbulb in 1924 was already technologically sophisticated: The light yield was considerable; the burning time was easily 2,500 hours or more. By striving for something less, the cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
  - archon810 4y ago
    There's a fantastic video about this called "This is why we cant have nice things." https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE

guerrilla 4y ago

- LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly - Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons, age and fail quickly - Poorly designed power supplies that age and fail quickly These are all features from the producers POV. Planned obsolescence. - Poor CRI and SSRI This is true for all cheap lights, you gotta pay for that.

Bluzzard 4y ago

Everybody already knows these things. Like, why do democrats (not politicians, I mean you people) have a need to enact new regulations everytime they get a chance?

throwaway290 4y ago

Add to that spiky spectrum. Incandescent bulbs give black body radiation, a solid spectrum. Regular LED lights spike in RGB to achieve a neutral color. Can cause metamerism in photos and just looks bad IMO.

_2uwr 4y ago

[dead]

Consultant32452 4y ago

In cold climates incandescent bulbs are 100% efficient.

novok 4y ago

A bunch of this is driven by power efficiency requirements, creating a flickering low quality mess. Like no-flicker LED lights usually have a worse power factor.

consp 4y ago
Most flickering mess is caused by throwing away half of the sine wave due to cheaping out on components and has nothing to do with efficiency.
- novok 4y ago
  Waveform lighting sells flicker free LED lighting that they can't ship to california due to a lower power factor, and their 15W bulbs cost $29, so it's not a cheap component issue: https://www.waveformlighting.com/home-residential/why-cant-these-light-bulbs-ship-to-california-an-overview-of-california-energy-commissions-title-20 https://www.waveformlighting.com/home-residential/why-cant-t... Otherwise why exclude the california market in this case.
Dylan16807 4y ago
A bulb gets a burst of power every 120Hz, so it would only use about .075 joules per cycle. Half the time is spent above 110v, and half is under 110v, so we need to store less than 1/240th of a second of power to have a perfect output and a perfect power factor. Let's put a capacitor before the regulator to store that power, and design the regulator to compensate for how the voltage will vary over each cycle. Since we don't want to drain our capacitor entirely, let's spec it for .05 joules at 100v, which means 10µF. Digikey says a 10µF 200v capacitor costs ten cents. If there's flicker, I blame the voltage regulator or lack thereof, not the requirement of power efficiency.

herbst 4y ago

I replaced nearly all bulps with WiZ bulps more than 2 years ago. - I don't see flicker on any of my cameras. The light is actually really nice for filming too. - The price is way less than hue (I own a few, and don't think they are any better) - I get way more light per watt than with any other bulp type. Not sure what you mean with luxury. - I love that each of them has an independent API on their own IP. Works perfectly for my smart home design. I've had several cheap (in build quality, not price) bulps fail on me meanwhile. Not a single WiZ had failed so far. As said I own some hue too, but I wasn't willing to spend over $1000 just on bulps for my house but then I found the WiZ brand. Not sure if am just lucky. But I really enjoy multicolour plus warm and cold LEDs in the whole house.

wkat4242 4y ago

I agree on most point but dim to warm is pretty undesirable in my point of view. I'd like to just be able to set the color temperature independently of brightness. Which I can do with my zigbee lights.