For the most part this was a very positive step. Prices for LED bulbs plunged when they went from the "premium" energy-efficient alternative to the default option. But you also get a lot of crap on the market, and stuffing LEDs in form factors designed for incandescent bulbs makes good electrical and thermal design challenging. Even for those brands that actually try
Yeah, basically what the EU did was to say: For X Watts of electricity at least X Lumen of light has to be produced. And this number was gradually increased. Since old school light bulbs are quite inefficient when it comes to producing light, they slowly had to be phased out.
Is this true? I’ve got LEDs in my house because they cost vastly less to run, and because I rarely have to replace the bulbs.
Some cheap LEDs do flicker (at 50 or 60 Hz). But that’s fairly easily solved. I don’t think I’ve noticed the flicker since some cheap bulbs I bought in 2014 or so.
Well… (Sorry, let me put my tinfoil hat on.) Yeah, well that noticed part is what is worrisome to me. I do worry that there is some effect on our brains even though we might not perceive the flicker.
As an analogy, I got into those supposedly audiophile "Class D" (or "Class T") amplifiers over a decade ago. Every day I turned on the music in my office and coded with the T-amp playing. I would have told you at the time that, indeed, it sounded amazing.
Some time later I built a tube amplifier (The Darling [2], in case anyone cares—I've since built perhaps a dozen more).
When I brought it into the office and swapped it out for the T-amp, the change was sublime but immediately noticeable. I hate to fall back on audiophile terminology but it's the best I have for the experience: I was suddenly aware of "listening fatigue" that had been a component of the T-amp. I hadn't even known it had been fatiguing until I heard the tube amp in its place for days on end.
With the loss of color fidelity and the flickering issue, I'm embarrassed to say that incandescent is starting to look good to me again.
I might, as an experiment, replace only those lights that we turn on in the evening when we are relaxing, reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-T_amplifier
[2] https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/darling-1626-amp.... and https://imgur.com/gallery/oh-darling-tube-amplifier-Lq2Sx
Probably there are more
LEDs clearly do not produce anything like the spectral energy of blackbody radiation (sunlight, incandescence bulbs), and many do flicker (although that’s a byproduct of individual designs, not the technology itself). This is easy to confirm with simple sensors. So it’s completely uncontroversial to say they don’t replicate “natural” light.
Pretty much all tube amp designs produce an output that is modified from the input signal. This is what makes them sound different and to plenty of personal opinions more enjoyable to listen to music on. But they are more like the “LED” side of the lighting example - they produce an output that is different from the “natural” aka original audio material.
I buy the ones that are suitable for dimmable switches (even tho I don't have dimmers) because there is discernible flicker with most other LED bulbs if you for eg wave your arm through the air or made a saccade. There is a certification (i think) for LED bulbs that are closer to sunlight in their emission spectrum
At least in EU is true. Citing from Wikipedia: "The 2005 Ecodesign directive covered energy-using products (EuP), which use, generate, transfer or measure energy, including consumer goods such as boilers, water heaters, computers, televisions, and industrial products such as transformers. The implementing measures focus on those products which have a high potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at low cost, through reduced energy demand."
A counter example is a water pump, which converts electricity into gravitational potential energy of the water as it flows upwards.
My point was about efficiency of the generation. You want the light, you don't necessarily want the heat.
Save heating for the (efficient) heat pump.
LEDs are just terrible in every way except electrical consumption.
Every other low quality led I bought around that time or even later is long dead by now. I disagree
Hooray shitty capitalist incentives.
The non-cheap LED bulbs I've bought have all lasted years and years. I do have some cheap ones that are starting to fail, after just a year or so. (Problem with those is that it was really hard to find the correct bulb size and connector type, so my options were limited.)
its the same thing. If it uses less electricity it both reduces the cost to you and reduces emissions from generating electricity.
I think most people would have switched over gradually anyway, but effectively banning incandescents speeded it up.
Otherwise, if there is a power IC present, there is flicker, though fast enough for most humans to not perceive normally (you can still check it by waving your hand in front of the light and seeing the strobed afterimage.)
Can you even buy them without buying new old stock? In the US they're banned and there's zero production.
I recall there was a guy in the EU who tried to get around the regulations by selling "heat bulbs" that were exactly the same as traditional incandescent bulbs but marketed as a heat source, but I think he was slapped down.
If you look around a bit you can also get 60W or 100W lamps, sold as "industrial lamps" or "extreme temperature lamps", labeled as unsuitable for household use. But those are specialty lamps that you won't find in your local supermarket. Not sure if those are new old stock or imported
I would pay a premium for longer life, and at least in some cases (e.g. lights I read by) for better quality. How do I do so? I would love to be pointed at sources of better ones (in the UK).
Buy name brands with a history of putting out decent bulbs instead of the Amazon alphabetsoup brands that won't be around in 5 years (although TBF some of my cheap BogAo bulbs are still going strong after 8 years). You can get a good feel for the light's "quality" by looking at the CRI and color temperature.
For CRI, anything 90+ is good.
For temperature, IMO around 3000k is the sweet spot. go higher if you want sterile operating room vibes or lower if you want super yellow/orange cozy hobbit hole vibes.
[1]: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
It doesn't fully quantify the light, but it's good enough to distinguish trash or even passable lights from actually good ones.