Posted on 10/19/2023 4:08:51 PM PDT by george76
Not all of us have time to get a degree in electrical engineering to make sure our home doesn’t look like the inside of an alien spaceship...
Aren’t LED lights supposed to outlast the heat death of the universe or some unbelievably long amount of time?
Under this guise and the guise of energy efficiency, the Biden administration finally allowed a 2007 ban on incandescent light bulbs to go through at the end of July this year.
The problem is that LED lights are not more efficient in a meaningful economic sense, and, as my story illustrates, they don't necessarily last longer. To understand why, let’s explore some of the technical and economic details behind the mythical efficient LED.
The Lie of LED Efficiency..
The ban on incandescent lights isn’t a ban on them specifically. Rather, the standard is that a light bulb must illuminate 45 lumens per watt. Most incandescent bulbs are incapable of doing this, so the regulation effectively bans them except in particular circumstances.
It is by this scientific jargon of an arbitrary lumens per watt standard that the government claims LEDs are more efficient.
The problem is that just because the LED bulbs (when they work) have a higher lumens per watt ratio, that doesn’t make them more efficient.
Consider an example to see why. Imagine we have two ice cream trucks. One ice cream truck is just an empty van. The driver throws a bunch of tubs of ice cream in the van and sets out for the day. The second truck is a van equipped with freezers to preserve the ice cream. Tell me, reader, which truck uses more energy?
Obviously the truck with freezers. So which truck has the best ratio of gallons of ice cream moved per unit of energy? Well that would be the truck without freezers. By our arbitrary technical measure, the freezerless ice cream truck is more efficient.
The problem, as you know, is that frozen ice cream is better than room temperature ice cream soup. The issue with our efficiency measure is that it ignores the important fact that the two trucks are accomplishing different goals. One is delivering ice cream people want, the other is delivering inedible slop.
You cannot compare the efficiency of two things which accomplish different outcomes for consumers. The same issue is true of light bulbs.
Incandescent bulbs put out a consistent, pleasing light output. LED lights do not. The Department of Energy website tries to debunk this obvious truth with an appeal to technical jargon. In response to the criticism that LED lights are dim compared to incandescent, the website says,
“LED bulbs produce more lumens per watt and last up to 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs. A 10W LED bulb emits as much light as a 60W incandescent bulb, making them both brighter and more energy efficient.”
This is akin to claiming that melted ice cream is still ice cream.
It is sometimes true that LED bulbs emit as many or more lumens than incandescent bulbs, but what people colloquially refer to as “brightness” is not the same as what scientists call “lumens.”
When people talk about brightness, they aren’t just talking about lumens. They’re also talking about the extent to which different light sources make things like color easier to see. An essential component of whether something is easier to see is how warm or cool light is.
This is where things get complicated. For incandescent bulbs, wattage is what mattered. More watts meant more visibility. For LEDs, things are different. Lumens measure the brightness but Kelvin (a temperature scale) determines how “warm” or “cool” the light appears. There is an in-depth piece by Tom Scocca in New York Magazine’s website The Strategist which describes this very well.
The summary is that LED light bulbs, though usually bright in terms of “lumens,” often do not always illuminate colors well. Scocca points out:
“If you want the objects that the light shines on to look the same, you’re getting into a different color question, specifically the color-rendering index. Your incandescent bulb — a glowing analog object, its light coming from a heated wire — had a CRI of 100 for a full unbroken spectrum. Your typical LED bulb, shining with cold digital electroluminescence, will not. Some colors will be missing or just different. If you’re lucky, the LED will have a CRI of 90 or higher. The box may not list any CRI at all.”
He then highlights that so-called experts often downplay the importance of the CRI index, but provide no substitute measure for color-rendering.
So lumens alone is not brightness—at least not the way you and I talk about brightness. But that isn’t the only problem.
LEDefective..
Remember my flickering bathroom light bulb? Turns out this isn’t a one-off complaint by yours truly. All over the internet I found people complaining about LED lights malfunctioning in much shorter time spans than it takes an incandescent to burn out.
When searching, I found several answers for why. One common answer is that the driver in the power base (bottom opaque plastic part of each light bulb) often fails in the less expensive LED lights. Temperature issues were also listed as a possible cause as well as the building providing “too much” power.
The bad driver in cheap LED bulbs could be explained away by saying you simply have to buy more expensive bulbs, but the up front cost of LEDs being higher was already an issue. Now we can’t even buy the best value version of the more expensive bulb?
In Scocca’s piece, he highlights well how good lighting is more expensive with LEDs:
“I checked my nearest dollar store and discovered that there were plenty of LED bulbs to be had there. Their color temperature was 6,400 Kelvin — the harshest, cheapest possible light, a light so blue that when I Googled it, what came up were grow bulbs. The efficient future of lighting now includes poor people; it just does it by making lighting one more form of privation.”
Even worse, it’s not always obvious when the driver isn’t working or that the power base is too hot. Sometimes the bulb just gets subtly dimmer. The Department of Energy can kiss its “lumens” argument goodbye. It may be the case that LED bulbs can produce more lumens in theory, but if they dim frequently without warning in practice, who cares?
LED lighting advocates will be quick to argue you can get the same results as incandescent light if you just approach it correctly. “Make sure your lumens are high enough. Don’t forget to memorize which degree Kelvin is best for each setting! But be careful not to buy one with a bad driver. You may need to rewire your house for best results, of course.” The list of excuses—and extra work for consumers—goes on.
Unfortunately, not all of us have time to get a degree in electrical engineering to make sure our home doesn’t look like the inside of an alien spaceship.
Let the Market Decide..
As I’ve demonstrated, technological efficiency is not the proper way to evaluate the efficiency of a product. So how should we evaluate it?
Let’s return to our ice cream truck example. Which truck will consumers buy ice cream from? Obviously the one with freezers. It may cost a bit more than Uncle Sam’s ice cream soup, but people will pay the cost.
When discussing efficiency as it applies to people’s choices, economic efficiency is king. The idea behind economic efficiency is there are lots of technologically feasible combinations of goods and services that can hypothetically be produced. The question is, which combination yields the most value? Economic efficiency is the criterion that separates the highest valued use of scarce resources from all other possible combinations.
How is this point determined? By consumers! If consumers value frozen ice cream enough, they’ll be willing to pay more for an ice cream truck with a freezer. These higher prices enable the truck owner to buy the higher energy costs associated with running the freezers.
The same is true with light bulbs.
Who pays for an “inefficient” incandescent light bulb? The homeowner who installs the light bulb does in the form of higher energy bills! So how would we know if the better (or at least more consistent) lighting is worth the higher energy usage?
Well, if the consumer chooses an incandescent bulb over an LED bulb, they are confirming they value the services of the incandescent bulb even after accounting for the cost of using more energy.
The same principle operates with cars. Is the purchaser of an SUV tricked into buying a product which is not as efficient with fuel as a small sedan? Obviously not! The SUV owner prefers the additional space and larger size more than the cost of the extra gasoline. Since the SUV is assigned higher value than the extra gasoline that must be purchased to use it, the “inefficient” fuel economy is completely compatible with economic efficiency!
If LED light bulbs are truly unquestionably superior, you would not need to pass a law stopping consumers from purchasing incandescent bulbs. Consumers would make the switch themselves to save money. Good ideas don’t require force, as they say.
The fact that a law was needed to displace incandescent bulbs highlights a simple truth: on many margins LED lights are frankly worse for consumers. And all the bureaucratic gobbledygook in the world will not change that fundamental fact.
Have been using LEDs for years. No need for incandescents at all. They are more reliable, use much less power, and provide pleasant lighting. No complaints except the manufacturers do not mark them well. Weird.
Heresy!, Report immediately to train 53 for re-education.
A coworker of mine used to collect the mercury. He made bombs as a hobby. He used the mercury for detonating switches. He specialized in blasting out farm ponds. Farm ponds muck up real bad and need dredging every five years or so. Or......You blast them. The mud and muck flies a quarter mile. It works really well. Gave him something to do.
AC-DC converters (choppers using capacitors) are incredibly ubiquitous. No LED is actually running on AC. I agree that the capacitors go, and that is actually the main failure mode. There are videos on repairing the bulbs, though there’s no need to do that as long as the “supply chains” are running. Stock up on capacitors?
Great read
A domestic LED uses about 14% of the energy that an incandescent does. A common LED bulb costs no more than one dollar. Pretend that incandescents only cost 25 cents in a non-manipulated market.
Give the incandescent bulb a 1000 hour lifetime. Count on about 10,000 hours for the LED. That is a savings of $1.50 per bulb over their lifetimes (10 old bulbs vs 1 LED).
In the 10,000 hours, a 100 watt bulb will use 1,000 (one thousand) kilowatt hours. Figure a very low 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s one hundred dollars for electricity over the life of the ten incandescent bulbs.
The LED bulb, running at 14 watts, will use 140 kilowatt hours. At only a dime per kW h, that’s $14.
So LEDs are a lot cheaper to run.
But, refer to the videos from the MD that I posted above. Being inside too much is bad for your metabolic health, and blue-ish light in the evening is bad for your sleep.
So maybe the savings of LEDs are often a bad idea. Bear in mind that you are paying about TWICE for the electricity when your AC is on when you figure the cost of running incandescents.
> Being inside too much
In this case, meaning lack of exposure to red and IR light. IR penetrates deep into your skin and has health effects on your cells.
Look at Dr. Seheult’s videos. You probably need more IR light than you are getting, and that’s exactly what white LEDs do not have.
> The ban on incandescent does not apply to incandescent heat bulbs
That is kind of funny because almost all of the energy converted by a white incandescent bulb is heat.
I may be the minority. I really like LED bulbs. In the southern part of the country, excess heat impacts comfort and cost in central AC. The also don’t work great outside in very cold weather but that is limited in my geographical location. I find that LED are more susceptible to voltage drops from power companies.
Picking the correct color of light is important. Buying in bulk lowers unit cost. Allication is critical but LED works much better than Compact fluorescent bulbs.
All that said US FEDGOV should have no voice.
“That said... I love LED light bulbs.”
Same here - they are way more efficient than incandescent. They mostly generate light rather than heat. As a result they use about 1/8 the energy.
But the luddites here in FR will never admit to it even if you prove it to them.
These are the types who, had they been alive during Edison’s era when electric bulbs became available, they would have still clung to candles and oil lanterns.
LEDs are more efficient. But they emit radio waves and cause interference in other electronics. Especially two way radios.
I have a stash of candles and kerosene lamps. You’d have to be crazy to trust that newfangled “incandescent” gimmick. Electric lights? Just a passing fad.
LEDs use less energy, are brighter, cooler, and (at least the better ones) seem to last forever. Whenever an old incandescent burns out I replace it with LED. I’m happy with them and I’m sticking with them.
But yes, the market should decide. Last data I saw indicated that the market was deciding - LED’s had captured something like 70% of the market. Banning incandescents is nothing but ignorant virtue signaling. If anything should be banned it’s mercury-bearing fluorescents.
No, I will not rework them, but I am an old school Ham Op (have GROL too) and inherited the cheap approach.
I’m going to take the LED’s out and panel them for direct DC from batteries. Current limiting is easy that way. I bought some like that, off shore, that gave me ideas for layout.
I like to take things apart and see what makes them tick. Makes no economic sense, but it give me satisfaction.
I can fix about anything.
100% for market choice. Mandates suck.
That said, I have never managed to burn out an LED lightbulb (yet), the original article is full of bad analogies and faulty logic, and I like using less power, money, and heat lighting up things.
Little more outlay up front; order of magnitude more efficient vastly outweighing the cost; and to be fair one has to include the cost of time to obtain and replace annoying lightbulbs when they go out.
The only use case where I see them as a waste would be in low-value rentals where people bust things regularly. Homeowners, businesses, and renters who aren’t wasteoids are better off with the bulbs (not the mandates).
Oven lights, yes, for now but you may want to rethink the refrigerators.
My new fridge has LED lights everywhere, including the freezer, and they light up the whole inside nicely. Better than any refrigerator I have owned that used incandescent bulbs.
I will admit that LEDs are in some area of my place, but incandescent don’t give me the same headaches that LEDs do. Sure, they burn out a little faster than I’d like, but they are better for those who can’t tolerate the on-off nature of the LED bulbs.
I’m gonna check them out too. Thanks for the suggestion.
It’s a good article that goes into detail. However, all that detail, while interesting, was unnecessary. In this case, and in all others:
“If LED light bulbs are truly unquestionably superior, you would not need to pass a law stopping consumers from purchasing incandescent bulbs.”
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