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.
Back in 2015 I replaced every incandescent in my house with LEDs. First, I noticed a decent drop in my electric bills and I was able to customize every location with the color of light I liked.
Last week I had to replace a hallway light. The first one since the 2015 installation.
The nicest thing was our yard light. It uses three of the candelabra bulbs with the small base. I have had this house for 30 years now (bought it new) and those three bulbs would burn out in three months or so, the longest at four months.
I am an EE and have all the testing equipment and I checked everything I could think of in the circuit to no avail. Since I put three LED bulbs in that yard light in 2015 I have had to replace them once, in 2021. Six years instead of three or four months and I have much more light in my yard now.
Dow Chemical did almost the same thing with Freon.
There was really nothing wrong with R12/22 but the patents were going to run out so they gave several million dollars to greenie groups and congressmen and the whole CFC scare started. That gave them the room get R134/410 into place with their new patents.
Now the R134 patent is going dry I read Dow has paid Al Gore a substantial sum as well as a few million to at least two greenie groups to start the tilt at R134/410. They are already selling the new, terribly expensive, R1234YF and the car companies are already using it.
It has nothing to do with any science, it has everything to do with money for all parties involved.
If the new tech is super duper better than the old one, you will not need to make a mandate.
We do not have many people driving around in Model-T cars, just antique lovers...because mandates are not neccesary.
Ping for later.
From the article:
“The problem, as you know, is that frozen ice cream is better than room temperature ice cream soup.”
I beg to differ. Maybe I’m just weird like that, but truly frozen ice cream just tastes like plain ice to me. Melt it and I can taste it just fine.
me too! but I also have a stash of old bulbs, just in case lol
“most use a phosphor that emits over a broad color spectrum”
Thanks for that information. I wasn’t aware of the use of phosphors. From Wikipedia:
“White LED lamps consist of a blue or ultra-violet emitter with a phosphor coating that emits at longer wavelengths, giving a full spectrum of visible light.”
And another quote:
“Since LEDs have slightly different emission patterns, the color balance may change depending on the angle of view, even if the RGB sources are in a single package, so RGB diodes are seldom used to produce white lighting.”
I still wonder whether a color TV actually produces all possible colors. It must have something to do with what our eyes are capable of seeing.
Yup...but government regulators are idiots.
Eight years in my current home and only one bad LED bulb. I particularly like the ones that replaced the fluorescent tubes in my garage and bathrooms. For me, the “color” factor is a non starter. My only complaint is they don’t work as well with dimmers.
Dow Chemical had nothing to do with Freon (Dow and Dupont had not yet merged at the time)...that was all Dupont. I worked for Dow in those days.
Every lightbulb in my house is LED and that allows my farmhouse to be off grid; but, that's my business, not the government's.
You are right about the lightbulbs designed for 1000, but that is a trade off between longevity and brightness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
This guy on YouTube makes videos about common things and goes into more detail than you would ever want to know. It turns out that there is a good reason why light bulbs are designed to only last 1000 hours.
“Sorry, George76, but this article is the biggest pile of bullshit I have ever seen posted on FR.”
The color of the light is annoying if you have 2 lamps in the same room with different color (one very white, the other more yellowish which is what incandescent bulbs put out). But if you buy the same bulbs it doesn’t bother me that LEDs are less yellow. And I have only changed 1 bulb in the last 6 months out of probably 50.
We did. Mom and Pop joint. Good people. The new cylinders... 10 years. That’s it.
The LED wafer lamps I just purchased for a drop ceiling offer me 4-5 choices to "select" Kelvin...incandescent lights don't offer that flexibility.
You understand nothing of economics, in that case. Hard science is purely objective, physical measurements. Economics is social, not physical science, and depends on the personal preferences of the consumer to determine value and efficiency.
The argument here is let the market decide. Not an engineering argument.
Yeah, you gotta be careful to select the right "color temperature". I prefer the "cool white" (color temperature 5000K), but you can get pretty much any color temperature you want. LEDs are incredibly versatile. I used to design chemical instrumentation, some based on spectroscopy. LEDs are about the perfect spectroscopic sources.
Personal preferences are an input to value determination. Period. There are other measures of value e.g. kilowatt-hours of electricity produced vs capital costs, labor costs and commodity (fuel) costs. Efficiency is an easily measured quantity - cost of factors that go into making something. Productive utility vs cost is another determiner of value, e.g. This plant can make steel at x$ per ton and that plant can make steel at y$ per ton.
Some economics is human caprice - color and styles of next Spring's fashions. Much is much more rational.
My cost of electricty for heating, colling and lighting is an objective number. Whether you care to spend a lot more for running an incandescent bulb and the derrivative cooling costs of your house rather than equivalent or even better lighting from an LED bulb is your individual caprice, but the decision is not without objective economic consquences like say paying for the cost of your caprice by drinking cheap gin rather than single malt.
Individual caprice. as you call it, is key to economics. It’s called choice and preference. IT DETERMINES VALUE. If noone ever wanted an led bulb for example, the value is ZERO. Doesn’t matter how efficient it is electrically, doesn’t matter what production factors and costs are, none of it matters until the consumer agrees to pay and considers it worth buying.
That’s the bottom line. To those persons the efficiency of the bulb is ZERO and its value is ZERO. Its efficiency and effectiveness, you guessed it, zero! To those consumers. To others, and to manufacturers, quite different values exist. This is a value question, not an engineering one.
You’re an engineer. Like most, plus computer professionals, you are kind of autistic. Your ability to grasp human motivation and psychology is weak at best, so you cannot and will not see what I’m saying. That’s ok, we need engineering nerds. We just don’t need them in charge of businesses or society.
This is coming from a Randian who believes in supreme objectivity. Human needs and preferences vary. Autists in charge leads to things like Bill Gates wanting to cut off human populations from food sources. You think “efficient” but you cut off that concept from human needs and wants.
They are frosted, as were the LEDs. 40 Watts are the OG’s, the LEDs were 25.
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