LED's rule, twisty bulbs drool

I have tried to hop on this bandwagon so many times, only to be thrown off by the color (which despite what I’m assured each time is bluish) and the humming (which assurances to the contrary I have always heard).

The only problem with incandescent light bulbs is that they are banned.

I love the LEDs too. But I am a late adopter of technology. I bout one lamp with a built-in LED array for $15.00 at Home Depot and tried it out. The light was a tad too blue for my tastes but that is now overcome with better more natural spectrums.
All of the LEDS ending up failing however. Worse part was that they all failed independently and intermittently. There were 24 LED on the lamp, each one would flicker then fail. The Led would flicker for weeks. The flickering light lasted for 2 years before it died. It was a pain.
I took the lamp apart and re-soldered every single LED and they all came on again!
I see LED arrays as problematic because their reliability drops as an inverse function of the number of LEDs in the array. One flickering LED with drive you bonkers.
I am certain that is is a solvable problem if attention is applied to it. That is why I am bringing it up. Hey GE and Sylvania! Fix the flicker!
Is it possible to have a single 3-watt LED that yields the same light output as a 100W incandescent bulb yet?
One other thing, stop putting network interface communications hardware in these lighting devices.

I love the efficiency and service life of LED technology, but the color fidelity still needs lots of work. My wife is an artist. She can not work under LED lights unless the color rendering index (CRI) is in the 90s.

Yes, but they are being phased-out.
Far more interesting, from my viewpoint, is that many of the current LED lamp DRIVERS are quite good at radio interference. So if the new crop work at higher frequencies things look grim. As soon as the cheapo versions come out it will get worse.

ConfusedPhoton says:
March 11, 2014 at 2:07 pm
“Incandescent light bulbs are now banned in the EU”?????
Well, even 100 Watt are available: heat bulbs 100 Watt about 95% efficient with a side efect of emmiting light too..
But indeed leds are the futrue of lighting…

And, given that LEDs use DC, is there any movement toward equipping new office buildings with DC circuits for the lighting? It would seem that a single transformer would be cheaper than transformers in each bulb for large scale applications. . .

I am a convert to LED Christmas lights for the past 4 years. Mostly because I was too cheap to replace my electrical panel, and the regular ones were tripping breakers. (I have since upgraded my panel for other reasons).
I hate the CFLs. And so now that incandescent are virtually banned in the US, I am switching to LEDs. I prefer the light even to the incandescent. The price is an issue, but now that I am older, fatter and richer (relatively) I can go with what I want instead of what is cheap.

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
March 11, 2014 at 2:10 pm
Technically speaking, LEDs will not have captured that larger percentage of the lighting market; it will have been awarded to them by virtue of regulatory bans on competing technologies.
=====
exactly…..just like wind and solar

Now for me to comment on something I know a little about. (Never thought that would happen, did you?)
Anyway, back in the 1940s automobile headlights were a dismal safety feature. The reflector plating would often flake off. Or, moisture would get inside and rust it. Dirt and dust could coat the surface of both the glass lens and the reflector. All of these things would diminish the power of the headlamp. And then there was the small bulb which went in this assembly: particles would burn off the tungsten filament and coat the inside of the glass bulb; blackening it over time.
So, the venerable sealed beam headlight was developed. (If you’re old and worn out like me you’ll remember them.) The lens and reflector were hermetically sealed and made part of the bulb. Thus the inside would stay clean; the plating could not rust off; moisture could not accumulate within the bulb; and since the lens and reflector were actually part of the bulb the particles of tungsten were deposited over a much greater surface, therefore the blackening of the headlight over time was reduced.
So, our beneficent overlords decided to make these sealed beam headlights mandatory on automobiles. After all, they were state of the art for safety – back in the 1940s.
Unlike the enlightened rulers of the US the callous Europeans never enacted such a safety ruling. So, in the latter 1950s the Philips Co. of Holland invented the quartz halogen bulb. Instead of operating in a vacuum the tungsten filament burned in an atmosphere comprised of one of the halogen gases, usually iodine. The gas set up a reaction whereby the particles of tungsten would redeposit themselves back on the filament. Thus the bulb lasted longer and, most importantly, it would not blacken with age. This reaction occurred at a very high temperature which necessitated a bulb made out of quartz glass. This high temperature also insured relatively high light output for the electricity consumed plus the light was much whiter, and closer to sunlight, then conventional bulbs.
Un encumbered by a sealed beam regulation, high end cars in Europe began appearing with these Quartz Halogen headlights in the 1960s. When the filament in a sealed beam headlight burned out the whole unit, including the lens and reflector, got tossed. Thus they were made cheaply. On the European cars, only the small QH bulbs were tossed, the lens and reflector remained. Thus they were top quality: the lens was made out of lead-crystal glass, very accurately fluted; and the reflectors were mirror finished. A substantial rubber boot sealed the bulb in the unit.
In the 1970s the California Highway Patrol began to equip their patrol cars with the European QH headlamps, and called them the finest headlamps they had ever used. Nevertheless, they vigorously enforced the sealed beam regulation on us lesser folks.
The disparity between daytime and nighttime accident rates are dramatic. And, up to the middle 1980s, almost 40 years after their development, the by then antiquated sealed beam headlamps were still required on cars because of a federal safety standard.
It has taken until now, almost 60 years after the fact, for automobile headlights to begin to recover from that ‘safety’ standard. Rest assured, there were substantial lobbying arms aimed at preventing this.
Let the foregoing story be a lesson to anyone who thinks that government regulations are always, and every time, the answer to our problems. Or, to consider why a political entity has been allowed to develop the arrogance to tell us what devices we are permitted to use to light our homes and our lives.

otsar says:
March 11, 2014 at 2:39 pm
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They finally got blue light LEDs about 10 years ago, after decades of work.
UV LEDs are probably still several decades off.
Once they get them though, recorded movies will probably get close to theatre quality.

I build custom LED light fixtures for various things and the least reliable component by far is any electrolytic capacitor in the circuit (as it is with most any other electronic switching power supplies).
For LEDs, the killer is heat. There is a direct relation between life expectancy and operating temperature. Mount an LED on a sufficient heat sink, keep the current within spec, and the rated life expectancy will be met. As for the power supply, keep out any cheap electrolytic caps and the power supply might last as long as the LED.

We’ve used CFLs for 14 years because our new house had tons of can lights that would have cost us a fortune. The CFLs all lasted at least 8 years. The only issues we had were the warm up time and that they don’t work well, or at all, in the cold. We had them in the porch lights since we leave them on all night, but that doesn’t work in the winter and in really cold temps of around zero, they don’t work at all.
LEDs are way too expensive still.
I do have some heirloom lamps where only low-wattage incandescents work. I stocked up on 60 watts when I could.
We also switched all of our Christmas lights to LEDs. It was expensive but worth it after all the years of blown fuses, juggling wattage, and the wind breaking the bulbs. The colors are a bit different, but we can put almost all of them on one outlet.

John in Oz sez: —————————–
If low voltage LED lighting is going to be the norm, perhaps building codes should be changed such that a low voltage lighting circuit is built into our building power distribution boxes.
A single voltage converter supplying all lighting power would eliminate the need for converters in every LED lamp, lowering the unit cost even further. Lighter and cheaper wiring would also reduce costs as the current is much lower and an earth cable should not be necessary for 12V DC circuits.
—————-end quote ———————-
This sounds like it could be a good plan in new construction. But it would necessitate running “lights only” circuits to all rooms in addition to all the “appliances” wall-sockets. And for floor and table lamps, one would need either a separate “lighting” wall socket on each wall, or else. . .? But I like the idea! There is a lot about home/commercial wiring that could be improved over the next few years.
We live in an old [80-100 yrs] farmhouse (in the USA near the Great Lakes) whose wiring has been “updated” several times, in bits and runs, last time by me when we moved here 20 years ago. Ground floor wiring is great, next floor up is so-so and the top storey (finished room/attic) has EVERYTHING on ONE circuit contolled be a single light switch at the bottom of the stairs! We’d done limited use of CFLs earlier in the century, but in the last 18 months we’ve gone over almost 100% to LED light bulbs. The cost and quality have both improved (if you watch for sales!) There are limited coices in terms of color output, but lamp shades and glass can correct most problems one might have. Better than incandescent or CFLs, in my experience.
Very interesting article! Thanks, Anthony.

Just a few inaccuracies in the original text (perhaps translation errors) (boldface added by me);
“During practical testing, the scientists found that the drivers developed using this NEW semiconductor material were extremely robust.”
GaN (Gallium Nitride) is hardly a “new” material. All of the blue LEDs and Laser Diodes available since the 1990’s use it. Yes it is “faster” than silicon and that is why it is also used in microwave amplifiers.
“To function properly, they need a driver that ensures a constant supply of POWER at all times.”
Nowhere near true, the light output of any LED is linearly proportional (to the first and second order) to the applied current. The voltage developed across the LED is a function of the semiconductor band-gap which differs between materials. Since the physical area of the semiconductor junction is relatively small any “spike” or “surge” of current can heat the junction beyond it’s damage or “kill” threshold and permanently reduce or eliminate the light output.
What LEDs really need is a “driver” that protects them from the voltage surges common on most AC house wiring (“Mains” in Europe). An incandescent bulb with a larger thermal mass can withstand these surges better since the thermal response of the filament is on the orders of seconds. A 25% over power condition on an incandescent filament for a second makes little difference. A 25% over power condition on an LED for a second is likely “terminal”.
What could cause these surges, well large electrical uses like central air, refrigerators, etc can “pull down” the voltage inside you home when they switch on. Ever notice that momentary light bulb “flicker” when your AC “kicks in” ? The voltage recovers quickly, but when the AC turns off you could easily see a 10 volt surge (for a few 1/10s of a second) on your AC lines. These voltage surges can become current surges with a poorly designed driver circuit and kill or “maim” an LED.
But there has been lots of attention in the semiconductor industry to designing low cost/size driver ICs that overcome these problems.
Back about 20 years ago I designed a device to exposure color photographic paper (before it went extinct) with an array of small Red/Green/Blue LEDs imaged onto the paper with “ball lenses” (they are just a finely ground ball of glass). I had to design multiple LED driver circuits for the task (50+).
Cheers, Kevin.

Tested LED lamps in industrial setting (three years ago ) As several have noted, heat is a MAJOR problem.
Results : epic FAIL . Short life span ,ran WAY too hot.
Hopefully , better heat sinks and better design(s) will fix this .
Re 12vdc not needing an “earth” conductor…. only if you do not mind burning things down / up .How many automotive electrical fires do you know of ? And 40 years of industrial experience leaves me extremely adverse to leaving out ANY safety related practises or procedures.
Also read somewhere that some people develop insomnia under exposure to blue spectrum light.
Still , LEDS have many benefits , and they will surely get even better.
Good post.

Silverbear says:

But it would necessitate running “lights only” circuits to all rooms in addition to all the “appliances” wall-sockets.

Interesting that the US allow lighting and power sockets on the same circuit whereas in Oz we have separate power and lighting circuits so we would not be adding to the wiring runs, just making the lighting runs with cheaper cabling..

Someone explain what we’re doing wrong. We have no CFL’s no LED’s and no solar panels or wind turbines. Maybe years of my mother nagging us kids to turn off the lights, take short showers (actually we only had a bathtub, no shower), and generally not to be wasteful paid off. My wife seems to have had the same mean mother.
http://imgur.com/liLBa30
We tried CFL a number of years ago. Right on the box it said ‘7 year life’. None of them lasted more than 1 to 2 years, some 6 months. So, before it become illegal we went to Menards and bought as many Edison bulbs that would fit in the cart and replaced every one of those CFL’s (one actually blew up) with the politically incorrect bulbs. Unfortunately those once nice durable GE bulbs were made in China; complete garbage.
I fail to see how spending $15-30 for a light bulb is going to have a ROI in my lifetime based on our electric bills, although LED Christmas bulbs and flashlights LED are great, not to mention for the guns.
CFL bulbs suck; there’s no other way to describe them. LED bulbs, even if I wanted them, are still not practical in many instances, such as existing light fixtures they don’t fit in. The cost of lighting our twice-a-day-use in the barn would be astronomical. Sorry, I just don’t see the logic in spending $1000 for 1 hour a day of use.
Alas, the good old incandescent bulb is actually still legal, you just have to make sure they are branded “rough service” in various wattages and know where to find them. Hallelujah! Menards was carrying them, not sure if they still do or not; I bought a bunch of them for about $5 apiece. Oh, and they last a LOT longer.
Here’s a place that sells “rough service” bulbs. http://www.newcandescent.com/
Call me a rebel, old fashioned or whatever, They can have my Edison bulbs when they pry them from my cold dead hands.

Question: how does anyone know LED’s are long lasting when they’ve only been on the market for a few years? CFL’s were promised to be the same, but we sure didn’t find them to have the advertised MTBF, plus they get dim over time and are horrible in cold weather.

We own houses in AZ and MN. We just switched out (450+) BR30 halogen floods plus dozens of normal incandescent lamp bulbs to led bulbs at the AZ house. Starting in July of this year, the local utility will be awarded a new monthly fee to compensate it for the fact that, in aggregate, the customers are not using enough electricity. (https://www.tep.com/customer/rates/new/). This is also true in MN (not fun but see riders http://www.xcelenergy.com/staticfiles/xe/Regulatory/Regulatory%20PDFs/rates/MN/Me_Section_5.pdf).
Not cynical, but the utilities’ need for return on infrastructure buildout means we pay if we conserve, and we pay if we use lotsa electricity.

My experience with LED lighting (in-ceiling down-lighting incl. power converter, purchased on-line from China, ~$14ea, 12W equiv. to ~70W incand.) is that the LEDs are bright and very reliable. Great alternative to traditional pot lighting. No failures after 1.5 years. My biggest complaint is that although the lamps were advertised as dimmable, the power converters DO NOT work with standard dimmer controls. I have purchased “LED friendly” dimmers and the result is the same: the LED power converters go insane (I know now why but I won’t go into the details here).
I’m almost resorting to designing and building my own converters. I’d prefer however to buy something off-the-shelf if it works and is not too pricy.

Great conversation! I’ve been holding back on LED bulbs until the price-point reduced, but that may be about now.
I’ve been a reluctant adopter of the CFL twisty-bulbs….however, the first one I ever bought (nicknamed “Hercules”) has operated without fail in an outside light fixture for at least four years. Since I live in Chicago, the Delta T can easily be 120º F! I’m fairly impressed with the old thing.
Everything works, it is just a question of if it works for you. The waste heat of the incandescent bulbs is an advantage in a cold house in the winter, and they sure were cheap. However, I don’t find that I miss them much, except for the bright 3-way bulbs. C’est la vie.

I like LED bulbs and have many in high-use fixtures. However I cannot justify the increased cost in a fixture that only operates 1 hour per month (guest bedrooms, etc). It simply is not cost effective at such low usage levels.
For that reason alone I have stockpiled incandescents for use into the foreseeable future.
In effect the cost of wind energy and fewer fossil power plants has been legislated down to the consumers via more “efficient” and costly bulbs. But I digress…

My guess is that we will only find out what is the best kind of lighting if all restrictions on marketing all types are lifted and all hidden taxes and subsidies eliminated and they can all compete with one another – i.e., a truly free market. I’m dreaming, of course.
My own experience with CFLs has been: (1) actually little more intensity for the wattage than with incandescents – an advertised 60 watt equivalent CFL for me has usually been more like 20 to 30 watts from incandescents; (2) the bulbs dim quite rapidly, down to half or less as intense within a month, and don’t last much longer than incandescents – say, three or four months vs. two or three months in the fixtures in my house; (3) there is a noticeable ozone smell around the fixtures where I have CFLs, but not around incandescents. It’s the same for all the brands I’ve tried.
The rapid dimming and the ozone smell make me wonder what sort of emissions are coming out of the CFLs. I suspect strongly that mercury is among them.
Makes me want to find a way to make the regulatory ciphers who come up with these things pay personally to fix it. How’s that for a law – if regulatories do damage, they pay?

In terms of life, I have had to replace only one since I have done this about a year ago – I have something like 45 globes (bulbs) in the house.

I am a little disappointed that out of all the post so far, only one, KevinK, had any technical LED information. I have been using LEDs in products since the 60’s when they first became available and the recent advancements in power output have made them practical for lighting.
To get a white LED, a blue or UV LED is used and a glob of phosphor is put on top of the die to down convert some of the higher frequency (short wavelength) light into lower frequency longer wavelength light (red, yellow, green, etc.). The resultant mix of wavelengths gives warm white, cool white, etc. The first white LEDs were still experimenting with the phosphors, which is why the early white LEDs had a blue tinge to them, but that is largely a non issue now.
An LED is a current device with a compliance voltage (voltage drop across the LED) that is dependent upon the chemistry used. The white LEDs using a blue LED that has a compliance voltage around 3.5 volts. If the power source is a constant voltage device, like a battery, a dropping resistor is commonly used to limit the current. (Now you know why the cheap flashlights use 3 AAA cells, to get the voltage over 3.5 volts)
All of the power generated by the current flowing through the resistor is waste heat. The most efficient way to power an LED is with a switching power supply whose output is a current, typically from a switched inductor. The newer flashlights, like the new LED Maglight, now use this method.
The part about the GaN transistors appears to be mostly BS. The typical LED switching power supply will be a few ten to a few hundreds of KHz. The only reason someone would want to use a GaN tranistor is because they have lower parasitic capacitance compared to a Mosfet, but that only matters in the high Mhz to GHz range. Using a GaN transistor makes no sense, and it will have no effect on the efficiency of the LED. There is no way using GaN transistors can do anything significant, let alone double the power output of the LED.

“environmentally friendly source of light … consume less energy …”
This site – of all places – should bring in a link to Jevons Paradox. Jevons pointed out that when you use an input to some process more efficiently, you will eventually use more of that input. By making the conversion of electricity into light cheaper, we will find more and more ways to use lights – and inevitably use more and more electricity for lighting. As computers have grown increasingly efficient in their use of electricity, we use more and more electricity to power them. People who own Priuses drive more.

Tried CFL’s early. Outside at 30 to 40 below, they didn’t even come on. The light colour inside was poor, the flicker about drove me crazy, they made an audible hum, interfered with electronics in the house and several failed in the first couple of months after which I took all the CFL’s out and put back incandescents. Over the last 5 years, I have replaced one ( 1 ) incandescent light bulb. I have two cardboard boxes of those “mercury accidents waiting to happen” in my basement if anyone wants them, next to my 10 year plus supply of incandescent bulbs. Given the low failure rate of my incandescents, make that a supply I will likely pass on to my children. I have some LED lights as emergency back up but at $14 to $20 per light versus $1 to $2 for incandescents (which supply some additional heat in the winter months) I don’t see changing over full LED’s soon – especially given they don’t always fit the existing fixtures.

Well, this is my fourth attempt at writing this comment over the last hour or so. The UK’s “New! Improved!” third-rate third-world electricity supply has dealt us three brief interruptions so far this morning, forcing PCs to reset, clocks to fall back to 88:88, the radio to turn off … We reduce our consumption and still we get cr@p service.
Right. I’ll try again.
Agreed LEDs are far superior to CFL junk, though (as Hlaford has noted since I started trying) they do have problems. The colour balance problem has been noted above, and given that LEDs, like CFLs, rely on phosphors to produce their light, it is hard to see how that can ever be resolved. Phosphors intrinsically produce a spectrum of lines; incandescent sources produce a continuous spectrum much more like the spectrum our race evolved with. That this can also give physiological problems has been noted already by Chiefio, here.
Hlaford’s mention of the EM pollution spewed out by these things is very welcome too – it sometimes seems to me that I’m the only person who’s noticed. Along with CFLs, PCs, phone chargers. TVs … OK, practically everything nowadays, they have switchmode power supplies built-in which now, in my city environment, bury most of the interesting part of the EM spectrum under their pollution. It doesn’t matter that most people (whose only interest in the spectrum is receiving high power broadcast stations) don’t notice this pollution, pollution it is, and apparently completely uncontrolled.
On the plus side, though, LEDs do have things going for them. I recently bought (at the budget German supermarket Aldi) a superb LED flashlight – 3x C cells in the (metal) handle and a 10W LED at the front, a sort of poor man’s Maglite®. Sure, they only claim 8 hours battery life, but for a handy light source which measures brighter at 1 metre than full summer sun (in the UK …) I’m not complaining. Fed from low voltage DC there’s no interference at all; and you most likely won’t be using it in situations where colour balance is critical. Horses for courses. But I’d still like to see reliable electricity supplies (like we used to have) running proper incandescents around the house – and at a price we can afford (like we used to have).
Good grief, I think they’ve held the power up for nearly half an hour this time. Post quick, Steve, before you have to watch Windows checking its file system again …

Just wait; they’ll soon be whining about the environmental impact of gallium mining!
Anything to push us back to the stone age.

I picked up a couple of 40W-equivalent LEDs at IKEA last weekend for under $5 each. Cheapest I’ve ever seen them. Vastly better for walk-in clothes closets than those *%%# CFLs. I can tell the difference between white and off-white shirts again, and don’t have to wait 30 seconds to have enough light to see.

“Incandescent light bulbs are now banned in the EU,”
Wrong. Production of them is banned. Existing stock can be and is sold. I can’t stand low energy bulbs, and don’t like the cold light of LEDs, hence our house uses only old fashioned incandescent bulbs, and we have a huge stock set aside. People notice it when they stay with us – the light comes on immediately when you flip the switch, and is a lovely warm light.
UK folk can go to bltdirect for stocks, and they are not the only supplier.

Since the LED lights require a circuit board to function – has anyone done an analysis on the energy it takes to build the circuit boards?
I wonder how much energy we are wasting during manufacture to save during use?

Light is a necessity not a luxury. LEDs produce a different type of light to incandescent. Many people need incandescent lighting – it is not a luxury – it is a need. Al Gore, Tony BLiar and the fat cats at Philips and the communist EU use private jets – they are not concerned about energy – they are concerned about their own wealth and greed – and don’t give a damn about people that are made ill by the ban on incandescent bulbs. If LEDs were so great – no need to ban incandescent – let people choose according to their own needs. Philips etc have used their EU connections to rig a the legal system to ban incandescents for their own selfish ends – higher profits – Philips also sponsor the WWF to promote their harmful LEDs.
If you like LED – use them – but it is pure evil – real evil minds – that force people to used LED lighting in full knowledge that doing so will make them ill. Light is a necessity – let people choose what light they need in their own homes and at work.

I am in the energy conservation business and have installed over 50 LED retro-fits in the last year and have had only a few lamp failures. LEDs have come a long way in a short time. Some of the comments are on point. 1) lights operating only 1 hour a day will generally not be worth switching to LED 2) LEDs now come in just about every shape and color temp. 3) Consumer Reports has been testing them for over 10,000 hours and have been impressed with the results so far. 4) LEDs will flicker badly when used with an incandescent dimmer and are generally not rated for enclosed fixtures. 5) I am not a fan of gov’t mandates or gov’t incentives so that is why I like LEDs so much they make sense without any of these incentives, I proudly say none of the projects I have completed have involved any type of rebate or gov’t incentive.

What people fail to comprehend in the discussion is the fact that while LEDs do last longer, the electronics to support them (and the soldered connections to join them) don’t enjoy the same longevitivy. And as others have mentioned are rather fussy when it comes to spikes, droops, drops and other common power maladies. The solution is often to add more regulation circuitry, unfortunately this merely increases the complexity and therefore reduces overall reliability. Truth be known, LEDs rarely if ever fail. What fails is the support circuitry, lousy solder joints or other parts of the system. Whether it is the LED, the transformer or power conditioner, when one fails the lamp ‘assembly’ fails. Landfill time. False economy. 30+ years in electronics manufacturing has been a tough taskmaster.
This is part of my rant about LED and high tech lighting in cars. Yes, LEDs may last longer and require less energy. But when they fail, it isn’t a $5 bulb to replace; it is a $300 light module. When are they more likely to fail? In the secondary and beyond markets, the downstream or used car market. The market populated by folks who really can’t afford to replace $300 light modules. So they don’t and either replace the entire car with a newer used car or they simply ignore the problem and drive with one dead headlamp. But a $5 replacement bulb would have avoided the issue altogether.
The part of reliability and efficiency that most folks do not understand is that the repair/replacement cost plays a huge role in determining the “right” answer.

Regarding incandescent lights lasting longer if dimmed, the rough rule of thumb is that, for each 2% reduction of operating voltage, the life is doubled.
There is a limit to how much you can dim, or under-run, halogen lamps. Below a certain point, the quartz envelope will cool, and allow the tungsten from the filament to deposit, blackening it just like a conventional incandescent. So run them at full throttle, they will last longer when the tungsten gets put back on the filament.
Yes, Steve C, I certainly noticed the increased EM pollution from the CFLs. But it is the same with anything the PC bunch want to foist on us – the rules go out the window. If anybody but them had suggested switching to lamps with mercury vapor in them, they would have screamed blue murder. Or to a device with a worse power factor than an incandescent.
To those suggesting running 12 volt feeds round the house in lighter cable than the 110 or 220 volt power – you are not running less current, just less voltage. Work out the current, watts divided by volts, and you may even be running more current. And the voltage drop will be a much bigger fraction of the supply voltage, so you can’t skimp on the copper. Having individual switch-mode converters to provide constant current for each LED fitting makes some sense, and you don’t have a single fail point to make all the lights go dark at the same time.
The only thing I like about CFLs is that I don’t have to worry about turning them off when I leave the room.

LEDs have their advantages – like all lighting,
including incandescents, and including fluorescents, for different uses in different circumstances, as per link below.
None should be banned on grounds other than safety.
But it is hardly surprising that manufacturers lobby for profitably patented sales
(compared to generic patent expired incandescents)
To begin with,
The non-guaranteed lab based lifespan of LEDs is hightly doubtful,
also as Philips, Osram, GE etc already reduced lifespans in their Phoebus cartel to limit ordinary bulb standard lifespan to 1000 hours – incandescents lasting 20 000 hrs and more can and are being made eg for mining at $1.50-$2 each
LED point glare and blue light issues have been raised eg ANSES France Govmt Health agency,
and UC Davis (USA) in big cross-discipline study with other American and international research depts, as referenced below, along with the complex LED use of rare earth minerals etc
Supposed energy savings don’t hold up for many reasons, including that relevant domestic incandescents etc are mainly used off-peak after 7pm anyway (DEFRA data), when surplus electricity available.
Applies not least to Coal, the main environmental worry – since coal plants have minimum night cycle levels covering any bulb use
(minimum output levels for operative cost reason re slow downturn and stoking up again to daytime levels, including wear and tear, again referenced APTECH and power plant commissions) = effectively the same coal burned anyway )
People can of course prefer LEDs – why not.
But for society, the whole bulb switch – save planet argument is therefore a Scam.
Even if it was not a scam, taxation (covering price lowering subsidy to LEDs) or market stimulation, helping new bulbs to market without baning others, are better policies.
14 points against the bulb switching or banning arguments
http://freedomlightbulb.org/p/how-bans-are-wrongly-justified.html#ban
.
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We tried some of the twisty cfl bulbs in our house years ago, mainly because of the children leaving lights on all the time. I had even reported a fire with those bulbs on this blog a while back. Since then I have tried some of the LED bulbs and have been very much pleased with them. I can only imagine that things will get better from here. I still firmly believe that the outlawing of the traditional bulb was criminal.

“Box of Rocks” was the localhost name of my last desktop computer, for all of the clever little dopey silicon rocks in it.
Chuckles…
I on the other hand get the moniker from the idea from my US Navy ‘A’ school – AX that some folks are as dumb as a “box of rocks” and can not be taught anyhtingie….

I have no problem with technical advances. I just want to point out that there is not any energy being saved. Any energy being saved on lighting just goes somewhere else. The governments have been passing energy saving regulations for forty years and yet there are no huge piles of saved energy in any form. It’s basic rule that the economy will burn all the energy produced. No energy has been saved and there are no laws even being considered to mandate saving energy. Saving energy would mean putting X barrels of oil or Y tons of coal aside and not being allowing to use it. Taxing energy doesn’t save any energy. Taxing energy is like taxing the blood going through your veins. If you want to live you pay the tax but the blood can’t stop moving. In the government regulation game there are winners and losers, but no energy is being saved. The flows of energy may just be directed somewhere else. If I am saving X energy on lightning I might just use it to keep my house more comfortable. One degree on my thermostat probably blows away all my energy “savings” caused by government regulations. If I don’t burn the “savings” somebody else will.

Is there enough economically-extractable gallium in the world to keep advanced LED’s at the top in the lighting pecking order? Or, when we finally reach “energy nirvana” and electricity becomes cheap again, will tungsten bulbs make a comeback???? Stay tuned…

My experience is that long lifetime for LED is a blatant lie, a year ago or so I changed from halogen to LED’s in a 3-bulb celing fixture in the dayroom of my flat , the halos had 35w power rating gave a nice warm soft white color to the room , so I went for 4w warm white LED’s , the light color from them was little harsher, but not so much that it bothered me, and the brighness was on par with what I was used to from the halogens, so I was resonably happy with the change, but not for long , whithin five days the first of the new bulbs went haywire , and stated to bink like feew**ng ’80- style disce danceroom lamp, so I pulled it out , went to store where it was bought, and demanded a new one free of charge , on the groundt that it must have been a defective item when they sold it to me, because had only lasted all fo 30 hours of use , not the stated 10000. The store chief hewed and hummed a little and was fairly relunctant to do so but relented in the end. So I put the new led in and everything was okay for some 8-10 days , then the new led simply died ( after 40-60 hrs use ) , Well I did nother bother to try to get another free replace as the my word exchange with store personnel had been on the verge of turning ugly in the first instance, so I just pulled the dead bulb out , and decided to live with the two still going for a while to see if they lasted longer, and wonder of wonders both died within a 4 week from that. Ok I thought, those LED bulbs were a comparatively cheap Chinese brand to begin with and perchance were just “China quality” junk , let’s give it another try. But to be on the safe side I asked a friend who is a certified electrician to come around an check if there was something wrong whith the light fixture, he di so found nothing amiss and also brougth me three new top of the range ( both in price and brand rating = SIEMENS ) 2.5w LED’s and put them in. The light from them was a bit more to the blue end of color scale ( bright white ), and to tell the truth I found the illumination from them somewhat uncomfortable, with the result that for a while i only turned the overhead light on for short periods of time , and made do with the wall lights and a couple of reading lamps for daily use the next few weeks, intending to replace those LEDs again for a set with a more pleasant color temperature. But alas I never got around to do that , wihin a couple of months all three of the new LEDs had turned up their toes and retired to greenie paradise or wherever else such thing go in their afterlive, and I had replugged the perfectly good halogens that I orginally took aout of the fixture again. And there they shall stay , even if they draw 8-10 times the power a LED does, and if they die I will most likely replace them with the same type , I have already bought and stowed a batch 30 spares, which should be enough to last a couple of decades as those that are now in use are already somewhere above the 3000 hour mark of in use ( c.a 2 years worth of illumination ) .

Just fitted out my whole house with100% LEDs – been running some of them for 3 to 4 months intermittently during last stages of fit out – moved in 2 months ago – not one light has failed, flickered or caused problems – dont know what you are all whinging about. Mix of warm white with bright white – can vary the balance to whatever we need. I am sold…

I replace about 4 or 5 incandescent bulbs a year. When they were due to be phased out I went out and bought enough bulbs to see me out. At the time I was buying two 100w bulbs in a pack for 38 cents (euroland) thanks to them being phased out.
During the summer we are outside much of the evening, so lights are not used for long periods. During the winter, the lights go on when it gets dark and generally the extra heat given out means that no heating is required despite sub zero temps (oil central heating – much more expensive than the lighting). Here in France the electricity (mostly nuclear) is relatively cheap – once the relevant extras are taken into account about ten euro cents per Kwh (cheap rate after ten pm) and sixteen euro cents during peak hours.
I can’t imagine switching over to any other form of lighting anytime soon. I prefer the light, the response time and I believe I am using less total energy hence saving money. Win/win/win.
SteveT

Do we still know what we are buying when we acquire CFLs or LEDs?
Earlier, when we bought incandescent light bulbs, we knew exactly the color rendering index (CRI), the power factor (PF), the spectrum that is similar to the setting sun. Buying modern lamps, the CRI is lower (about 80%), the PF is very reduced, the characteristics of the spectrum is not indicated: Which colors are predominant? Which hues are absent? What’s the share of the blue color in the spectrum? It is very important to know this share because if it is too high, the lamp may not be used at evening because of health reasons.
Moreover, the life time of the lamps has become a matter of statistics. In Europe, it is considered as ‘normal’ that 10% of the LEDs fail before 6,000 hours, that 20% of the LEDs do not maintain the prescribed luminance after 6,000 hours burning!
Conclusion: Buying a modern lamp is purchasing a product of poor quality regarding CRI and PF. And is taking part in a lottery regarding the life time. The rights of the consumer are denied blatantly.

In a cold country LEDs don’t save energy. They provide heat when and where it is needed and otherwise don’t, i.e. they save energy in the same way as ventilation controlled by presence of people in a room. The “saving” LED provide assume people don’t put up their thermostats when the room they sit in becomes colder. All practical experience speak to the opposite. Which you can see from actual energy use in residential homes: it has increased.