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.
Your math is off, that would work out to $2.50 per
My ceiling recessed LED fixtures (or replacement bulbs in regular recessed cans) all have adjustable light temperature. There are five settings from very cool to very warm. I generally choose on the warm side to match the incandescents I’ve replaced.
Of course, I’ve thought of and used it when I didn’t have proper heating years ago, as a reader I had my 100-watt bulb close to my head.
If things get worse for her look into the various forms of heating pads and rubber mats that are heated that would make a warm table covering for her, and consider rigging up a heat lamp for her work area.
A pedestal lamp with a directed heat lamp might be the ticket for her, as well as an electric floor mat for her feat and/or a heat panel under the table (a warm body helps the hands), you can really come up with great solutions to a stationary work table if you look into all that is available.
That said... I love LED light bulbs.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And I love incandescent lighting.
Neither should be forced on us.
I do the same, it works out to about 130 a month for power surcharge, water surcharge, and sewer surcharge. If I go on vacation, turn off the power and water, my bill is just a little less than $130 per month.
Sorry. Four packs. My wife bought a couple.
“...their heat output is clearly less than incandescent”
The house we bought in North Idaho was built in 1992 and has something like 37 ceiling recessed light fixtures. About 25 of them are exposed on the attic side. These recessed cans were all made before the cans were required to be made airtight. These leaky cans with incandescent bulbs are notorious for dumping hot air into the attic. Worse, they create a stack effect that pulls your heated air out of your house into the attic.
But, FAR worse, the heated attic melts a layer of snow on the roof shingles which flows to the eaves (under the snow pack) and freezes, causing ice dams that back up and cause water to get into the house. (ask me how I learned this!)
So I converted every single fixture to LED and put a pressed fiberboard pre-shaped insulating “hat” over all the fixtures that are exposed in the attic. I improved the soffit ventilation and we then foamed the attic floor to create a perfect air barrier from the house to the attic. It was an expensive and time consuming retrofit project, but it did the trick. The attic stays nice and cold now so the snow on the roof doesn’t melt with my heated house air.
Do you remember the bulb details of the old ones?
Watt wattage, were they frosted?
The ban on incandescent does not apply to incandescent heat bulbs...you can buy all of those you want. I have a small portable "greenhouse" that we put potted plants in when the weather will be freezing. A thermal switch that turns "on" when the temp. reaches 40F and "off" when the temp rises above that and two heat lamps...
The economics “arguments” are as wrong as the scientific ones. I understand both. I repeat...the article crap.
Heat lamps are too hot.
I like my LED bulbs better than incandescent. Way better.
Self evidently you are the clueless moron if you think there is a wit of difference.
My lights flicker with LED bulbs so I went back to incandescent and problem solved.
> High voltage with a low current is not good for incandescents
Incandescent lamps are resistive loads. You cannot decrease the current without decreasing the voltage. 100 year old bulbs are still running because they are running at low voltage (they glow yellow).
Oil lamps work well. Especially with whale oil.
Even the small ones? The ones I use are about 3" in diameter (still shaped like other heat bulbs). I will have to check the wattage on the ones I have.
Anyone remember those curly CFL light bulbs the government pushed years ago to save the environment? They too gave a crappy garish light and were an environmental hazard themselves as they contained toxic mercury. Break one and you needed hazardous material clean up.
While I use LED bulbs...what choice do you have...I never know what type of bulb to buy. Package information is cryptic and I often find the bulb gives weird lighting.
I used to use them during lambing season in Wisconsin. Chicken building too. I didn’t know they made small ones. I could try that. Thanks.
The problem has always been an issue of power supply heat.
If you power LED’s directly from DC power source, it will last an incredible long time.
I have a box of burned out LED light bulbs, more than 2 dozen the have died on me. All with the same issue. AC power supply inside the bulb fails, probably because of heat and the electrolytic capacitors.
Powered by DC power source, LED’s make a lot of sense. It is one of the small number of household devices that DC power source makes sense. (i.e solar panels)
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