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With regard to bulb life, the big thing to remember about both CFL and LED drop-in replacements for incandescent bulbs is that the electronics do not tolerate h

by mmagin 13y ago

With regard to bulb life, the big thing to remember about both CFL and LED drop-in replacements for incandescent bulbs is that the electronics do not tolerate high temperatures well, so they're not particularly suitable for use in completely closed fixtures. Where practical, both for heat dissipation and optical purposes, it's far more ideal to use fixtures which are actually designed around these technologies rather than just throwing retrofit bulbs into crappy incandescent fixtures. I'm really hoping we see more of these sold to the consumer markets. For good quality LED products, you're talking about 50k hour life which makes a non-user-replaceable solution not seem that bad -- some cheap incandescent bulb sockets might start having trouble after equivalent usage. On the other hand, I'm concerned that we're going to see a repeat of all the cheap low quality products we've seen in CFL-land.

bhauer 13y ago
Interesting that you should point this out because I converted my home to full ~5000K high-CRI fluorescent in 2003 and now ten years later, I am about a third of the way through replacing all fluorescent bulbs in my household with ~5000K LED bulbs. I recently tackled the challenge of equipping an enclosed light fixture with an LED bulb. I ended up going with the Xledia D series A19 bulb. (Warning, Xledia is a Chinese company and I think they've hired a gray-hat SEO company to spam up Twitter and the like; but don't let that taint whatever merits they have in engineering.) The D125 [1] is my favorite LED bulb to-date. My wife, an electrical engineer, was incredulous: "you bought a seventeen watt LED bulb??" It's quite astonishing to fire that beast up. 2000 lumens. And true to its spammy marketing ("the most efficient series of omni-directional LED bulbs suitable for fully enclosed fixtures"), its temperature management is impressive. After hours of operation, its lens is merely warm, heatsink is hot but not flinch-inducing in the same manner a fully-warmed incandescent bulb would be. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EW6R0EC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EW6R0EC (available elsewhere as well)

by mmagin 13y ago

bhauer 13y ago

Interesting that you should point this out because I converted my home to full ~5000K high-CRI fluorescent in 2003 and now ten years later, I am about a third of the way through replacing all fluorescent bulbs in my household with ~5000K LED bulbs. I recently tackled the challenge of equipping an enclosed light fixture with an LED bulb. I ended up going with the Xledia D series A19 bulb. (Warning, Xledia is a Chinese company and I think they've hired a gray-hat SEO company to spam up Twitter and the like; but don't let that taint whatever merits they have in engineering.) The D125 [1] is my favorite LED bulb to-date. My wife, an electrical engineer, was incredulous: "you bought a seventeen watt LED bulb??" It's quite astonishing to fire that beast up. 2000 lumens. And true to its spammy marketing ("the most efficient series of omni-directional LED bulbs suitable for fully enclosed fixtures"), its temperature management is impressive. After hours of operation, its lens is merely warm, heatsink is hot but not flinch-inducing in the same manner a fully-warmed incandescent bulb would be. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EW6R0EC http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EW6R0EC (available elsewhere as well)