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.
> Dimming can shorten some incandescents life.
How’s that?
LEDs don’t work very well in my EZ Bake Oven.
100 watt incandescent bulb is also great in the chicken coop to keep the hen’s warm and laying throughout the winter.
This article applies to CFLs, not LEDs. The energy saved and the efficiency is incredible compared to incandescents and CFLs. The control circuitry has only improved so the longevity has as well, far beyond that of incandescent and especially CFLs.
I’ve seen those flickering yellow gas light looking LEDs on outside lights. If that can be done, anything can be with LEDs. If you go real cheap, you’re probably not going to like the light that comes from them. But they have been continually improving and are definitely better than incandescents, unless you want to melt snow off of your outside light fixture…
“””We have plenty of the “new, efficient” bulbs in our home and have been changing at LEAST one of them every month, for years!
The worst part is, how hard it is to even know which damn bulb to buy! Ugggghhhhh, I’m stopping now before I go Full Old Lady.”””
There is more to that story, are the lights on dimmers? Doesn’t the box tell you which bulb is which?
Sort of twitches and neurological oddities.
Didn’t really know until my doc tested me for it.
Wasn’t bad but I couldn’t touch tuna salad for six months.
Hated that.
Let me add with all that said, the government should have still stayed the hell out of it and let the market and people make their own decisions.
Total and compete bullshit. Not worth further response to this uninformed writer.
LEDs produce light at discrete frequencies. A white bulb has a red, green and blue LED that is white-looking.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some LEDs use an RGB system but most use a phosphor that emits over a broad color spectrum. The typical white LED bulbs you find at the store are the phosphor type, not the RGB type.
I’ve some led lights in my garage that stay on 24-7 and they’ve been going for about 12 years 3 small ones with multiple leds each I plug into the receptacles with an adaptor
And I’ve a ton of old type bulbs too mostly new but I don’t use them much
I love my LED bulbs but consumers should have a choice.
I ordered the last 100 watt bulbs for a toy cookie baker my kid has. Can’t use LED bulbs in that!
Mostly unused old type bulbs
Notice How I said “can be”. A family member has a pole lamp. The lamp is at chair height. Her hands are arthritic, but she can do some crafts when her hands are warmed by the lamp. Without it she can’t. Bet you never thought of that one.
I found some amazing tube type led to replace the fluorescent tubes in the garage and they look better but you have to get the warmer temperature color
High voltage with a low current is not good for incandescents. Opposite for leds. Forward voltage is maintained while the driver cuts the pwm to reduce the current.
Incandescents are dimmed with voltage. Not all dimmers are the same.
Nope! Both companies paid off and bought lobbied congress to pass a law requiring the new lightbulbs and ban the others.
This meant there was higher entry cost for other companies that could not retool and/or enter the LED and squiggle bulb market. Meanwhile GE and Sylvania were able to do such.
When they first did the math, for me to change every bulb in my house to "efficient"lightbulbs, barring majorly significant increases in electricity costs, (at the then cost of incandescent/HE bulbs; it was $0.75 per 4 for incandescents; ~$8 for 4 of the others in my area) it would've take me almost 50 years to realize any supposed savings, if and only if the new bulbs never needed replacing in those 50 years.
I have a chandelier in the dining room. It takes 10 bulbs, and we use incandescent. I bought LED’s because the reviews said they were better and now of course the only ones I could get.
Like John B Welles would say, “they are not meant to be good, they are meant to be bought”. They were so bright, and even the dimmer switch couldn’t make them tolerable. We now have to purchase a new light. You can see the elements at low and high. They literally hurt the eyes.
I have a 16’ high cathedral ceiling with a fan/light that uses 4 bulbs. It’s the main light for the room and are on 12 hours a day. I use to have to use a ladder to replace those bulbs every 6 months. I replaced those bulbs with LED bulbs over 10 years ago… they are still working.
I love my LEDs. I’ve replaced every light in my house with LED, including form factor LED replacements for 48” fluorescent tubes ( you have to bypass the ballast). I got a few lemons early on over the years that failed in short order, but since then, I haven’t changed a bulb in 5+ years.
In WA state, they are going to build a Billion dollar hydrogen plant, and the State says how lucky we are that we can use hydro power to make hydrogen, to put in vehicles, semi trucks, and likely ferry boats. INSANE.
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