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It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it. But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal i

It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it. But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal incandescent bulb only to have the color rendering/brightness/etc be downright awful. LEDs come packaged as "daylight" or "bright white" or whatever else. I want one that's labelled "just like your normal 60W incandescent".

542458 4y ago
I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.
- gorkish 4y ago
  Power supplies in all GE bulbs are total horseshit. Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.
throwthrowuknow 4y ago
Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  For a "lifetime" bulb that doesn't make me crazy, I'd gladly pay $100. Well, maybe not quite, but certainly more than whatever I pay now for mid-grade (by HD/Lowes standards) bulbs.
balfirevic 4y ago
> But, that single option was at least "good enough" It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.
MBCook 4y ago
> But, that single option was at least "good enough". Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.
- zippergz 4y ago
  Effectively every incandescent bulb has good CRI and can be dimmed, so yes.
vlunkr 4y ago
And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.
vel0city 4y ago
I highly disagree about it being good enough. Those bulbs got hot and were expensive to run over the life of the bulb. I like a lot of light, so I'd often end up buying lots of 100W lightbulbs throughout my house. My kitchen would have like 6x100W lightbulbs on for several hours a day, so ~3.6kWh/day. At $0.11/kWh that's $11.88/mo just lighting my kitchen. $142.56/year to light one room one quarter of the day. And that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year. For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  My "good enough" was with regard to light quality. Operating costs are definitely much higher for incandescent bulbs, no question.
majormajor 4y ago
They mostly all were pretty awful. Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder. I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.

542458 4y ago

I've found the color/brightness of the GE Relax HD (Yeah, they go one step further and label the color temperature as "Relax HD") to be pretty good. Lifespan has been hit and miss in semi-enclosed fixtures though.

gorkish 4y ago
Power supplies in all GE bulbs are total horseshit. Their new bulbs with the selectable color temperature gutted the product of its remaining redeeming features. The cost of the extra LEDs in the bulb is coming out of the quality of the remaining components.

throwthrowuknow 4y ago

Sure but it’ll cost $100. The efficiency of LEDs is a joke when you factor in materials, manufacturing, and subjective utility. We’re paying more for worse.

alistairSH 4y ago
For a "lifetime" bulb that doesn't make me crazy, I'd gladly pay $100. Well, maybe not quite, but certainly more than whatever I pay now for mid-grade (by HD/Lowes standards) bulbs.

balfirevic 4y ago

> But, that single option was at least "good enough" It wasn't if you wanted a good amount of light without having kW heater over your head.

MBCook 4y ago

> But, that single option was at least "good enough". Was it? Or was it what we were all used to, good or not, so we accepted it as good/correct.

zippergz 4y ago
Effectively every incandescent bulb has good CRI and can be dimmed, so yes.

vlunkr 4y ago

And the single option was cheap. There are cheap LEDs, but they're going to flicker, or hum audibly, and die quickly (contrary to the advertising). It's taken many rounds of trial and error, many wasted dollars, and I still don't love the bulbs I've landed on that much.

vel0city 4y ago

I highly disagree about it being good enough. Those bulbs got hot and were expensive to run over the life of the bulb. I like a lot of light, so I'd often end up buying lots of 100W lightbulbs throughout my house. My kitchen would have like 6x100W lightbulbs on for several hours a day, so ~3.6kWh/day. At $0.11/kWh that's $11.88/mo just lighting my kitchen. $142.56/year to light one room one quarter of the day. And that's before thinking about how much extra heat I'm adding to my house when I'm spending tons of money running an AC to pump heat out of it. Add up all the rest of the lights in my house, its a lot of money just to have the lights on over a year. For comparison, a similar lumen setup with LED lights in my kitchen runs ~$19/yr to operate. ~13W compared to ~100W. I spent probably less than $80 total swapping out the bulbs and have not had any early failures after a couple of years. The quality of the lights are excellent, in fact in some ways better as I'd prefer closer 5000K in a kitchen as opposed to 2500K.

alistairSH 4y ago
My "good enough" was with regard to light quality. Operating costs are definitely much higher for incandescent bulbs, no question.

majormajor 4y ago

They mostly all were pretty awful. Twenty years ago I remember a lot of PR about "full spectrum" incandescents and flourescents - no LEDs then! - there was a lot of talk at the time about Seasonal Affective Disorder. I bought a few different options to check out, and looked at some photo prints under them. They blew the "basic" incandescents away, the photos popped and looked much more lively instead of yellow-tinted and dim.