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.
ANOTHER ANNOYANCE:
Bulbs now-—for some years—have been made with aluminum bases-—and the sockets are also aluminum.
Used to be that at least one was brass.
Because I had bulbs die & then were STUCK so badly that I had real trouble removing them to switch, I NOW spray the bulb base with “DRY SILICONE” to make them slip back out safely.
FIND A DIFFERENT SHOP
Exactly! With incandescent bulbs I was always following my wife and kids around to turn off the lights in empty rooms. With LEDs I don’t even worry about it.
so-called LED “drivers” are nothing more nor less than AC-to-DC converters, and cheap ones build with cheap components rapidly burn out, and all of them produce a significant amount of waste heat ...
take a look on amazon for giant LED panels made to illuminate parking lots, and the main attribute discussed is their ability to dissipate waste heat via heavy aluminum castings ... i tried some and sent them back because they ran so hot and produced so little light for the amount of amps consumed ...
i did some calculations when i was relighting my attached garage/shop and realized that i could obtain far more light (lumens at 3500K) per amp with 8’ High Output T8 bulbs and electronic ballasts than those parking lot LED panels, the reason being that less amps were being converted to wasted heat via the T8 bulbs and electronic ballasts vs the parking lot LEDs ...
then there’s the fact that those T8 bulbs and ballasts will function for many more years than LED panels ...
as far as i’m concerned, for large lighting projects, LEDs are a costly scam and a waste of energy ...
naturally, T8 bulbs are now being phased out and it’s almost impossible now to buy a T8 fixture, though it’s still easy enough to build your own with inexpensive, high quality electronic ballasts and tombstone lamp holders of your choice, plus a bit of sheet metal ...
He’s right that there are some awful looking LED bulbs out there due to having a low CRI or too high of a color temperature. But when they have a decent CRI and the right color temperature, they produce really nice light. And in my experience they don’t burn out nearly as often as incandescents.
Just this week I picked up a 4-pack of 60-watt equivalent LED bulbs at ALDIs for $4.99. They have a CRI of 90 which is excellent and color temperature of 2500K which is warm like a soft white bulb. They’re flicker free and have a projected lifespan of 23 years.
Side note: QLED 4k resolution is like looking through a window. In dark scenes with the smallest area light for effect, the black sky with all the stars twinkling is what I've been looking for years.
I've been through many High Def front projection TVs and many rear projection TVs on a 110" screen on dark painted wall, ceilings, and dark flooring. I never found true black until these new 4k TVs. I would get dark grey and the stars were faded from the ones I saw in the theater. Anyone who can afford an LG or Samsung 4k should buy one yesterday.
What was your symptoms of mercury poisoning?
Given it’s rampant abuse of being authorized to “regulate” economic matters, we’d be better off with a constitutional amendment disallowing the government to interfere with the economy.
You have to read the box. LEDs now come in a range of hues(?). My outside lights look like 1800s gas lamps. There is even some that are adjustable from warm to blinding white.
I’ll take an LED flashlight any day of the week and having lived off grid with only 350 watts of solar panel power, LEDs were a godsend.
Still don’t think incandescent should be outlawed. Let people decide.
I have an LED house bulb in a wall fixture with white coated glass that probably needs cleaning, as they usually do. Mimics an incandescent pretty well.
A droplight is another good place for LED. Bump an incandescent — boom boom, out goes the lights.
I resisted the curly fluorescent bulbs for the mercury-containing ecologic disasters they were, but today's LEDs, if you bother to move up just a bit on the quality scale, do last for thousands of hours, give off warm white light if that's what you want (I don't, I prefer daylight white) and cost much, much less to run.
The only location in my home that still uses incandescent bulbs is my oven.
” color of the light is very good, just like an incandescent.”
LEDs produce light at discrete frequencies. A white bulb has a red, green and blue LED that is white-looking.
But incandescents produce a continuous spectrum of light that I agree is more pleasing.
But in the LED flat screen TVs, each pixel has a red, green and blue LED and these TVs produce pictures that no one criticizes for their absence of richness of color.
So I don’t know what to conclude in comparing incandescents with LEDs.
What happened to the BIG saving by using LEDs?
The LED lights are getting better, but the cheaper ones do seem prone to failure. I like the ones that have a switch to control the color temperature. You don’t always know what the lighting will look like until you install it in a room.
Newer homes have much fancier lighting and usually more fixtures than older homes, so a bulb that uses less electricity and doesn’t put out a lot of heat is helpful.
LEDs are more efficient if your goal is light and not heat.
I’ve had LED light bulbs for years without replacing them. I should probably get an LED replacement bulb for my outdoor lighting; 3000 lumen bulb that uses 27 watts and lasts for years.
Not all incandescents when dimmed act the same. Dimming can shorten some incandescents life. Dimming LEDs always extends their life.
LEDs can only extend their useful life with heat mitigation
An led run at 100% current will melt itself off its solder pad if the heat is not dissipated.
What engineers due instead often or in combination, is to design in a scale back method where the pwm signal driving the led string is reduced, cutting the current to the led, which dims the light output.
Finally, if you want nice warm white led light, buy 2700K bulbs with a CRI of 90 if you can find them.
Any scientific way you cut it and my experience with LEDs over the past 20 years has far surpassed both incandescent and those CFLs (by a long shot). Yes, you have to choose the color temperature you want and have to gauge the pure output strength but it’s not that hard to understand. In today’s market LEDs are cheaper and their heat output is clearly less than incandescent which is a big advantage in my book.
I have LEDs that have been going strong (and better, more pleasing output than incandescent) for 20 years.
“””One thing I like to point out is that Incandescent bulbs can be 100% efficient in your home in a cold climate. This is because all the heat losses simply heat your home.”””
Most lights are at the ceiling where the heat is wasted, if I’m going to spend a 100 watts (85 subtracting the led replacement) of electricity I would rather put that 100 watts (85) exactly where I want the heat, like aimed at me.
This doctor has published quite a few videos that explain why near IR and red light are important for health. He promotes incandescent lamps, clear windows, and getting some sun.
https://www.youtube.com/@Medcram/videos
A decade ago, I bought a huge supply of incandescents. They’re still sitting on the basement shelf where I put them. I found LEDs to be the better choice by far.
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