New Crop of LED Filament Bulbs Look Almost Exactly Like Incandescents 328
An anonymous reader writes A recent article posted on a green building site gives a detailed analysis of a creative new kind of LED bulb that has been popping up Europe and Asia over the last year. They look almost exactly like Tungsten filament bulbs, require no heat sink, and offer extremely high efficiencies in the 100-120 lm/W range. The article describes their construction, compares them to conventional LED bulbs, and describes the result of a report by the Swedish Energey Agency that analyzed the performance of several brands of these these bulbs on the European market. Particularly interesting are links to teardown videos.
It will never work (Score:5, Funny)
Is it 3D printed? No.
Is it the Internet of Things? No.
Is it Elon Musk? No.
How can anyone think this will work?
Re:It will never work (Score:4, Funny)
Ah but you can get WiFi enabled ones, that can adjust color/light levels in conjunction with whatever TV show is on.
Re:It will never work (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why remote control lights are not more popular in the west. In Japan other parts of east Asia they are very common. Typically bedrooms and living rooms have a large central dome light with remote control. The remote controls the brightness and these days often the colour hue as well. Daylight, warm white and very warm white are standard options. The more advanced ones let you control the direction of the light as well, so for example when watching a movie you can dim most of the room but back-light the TV a bit to improve the apparent black level.
The lights are usually LED, around 5000lm but highly diffuse. I've never seen anything like them in the west, just stupid RGB wifi enabled crap with no practical purpose.
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I was thinking that too but it's still in the lab doing impressive stuff like Gb/s even around corners reflecting off ordinary house paint.
Re:It will never work (Score:5, Funny)
Is it 3D printed? No.
Is it the Internet of Things? No.
Is it Elon Musk? No.
How can anyone think this will work?
You forgot to point out that it isn't from Apple... Obviously, all other bulbs will become obsolete when the iBulb comes out...
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
The retro bulbs look fantastic. (Score:5, Informative)
We have a bunch of these--had to mail order them, since they aren't available at retail yet. They look very realistic, and produce a nice warm light. I wouldn't want them for my only lighting, but compared to the old fake edison bulbs, they are fantastic--no stupid excess of heat, and much more efficient.
Re:The retro bulbs look fantastic. (Score:5, Informative)
I am curious if they still have the property of not attracting insects. One of the things we discovered while in Texas is that LED bulbs were great for outdoor lighting when you didn't want to attract insects like a normal light bulb inevitably does. Apparently, it has to do with the LED lights not transmitting light at certain frequencies. With a warmer light, they may be transmitting frequencies now that will attract insects. It would be great for indoor lighting, but it loses the benefit when used outdoors.
Re: The retro bulbs look fantastic. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah well I like my porch light attracting bugs. Bugs attract geckos and geckos are fuckin' awesome.
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Re:The retro bulbs look fantastic. (Score:5, Interesting)
Insect attraction predominantly comes in the UV and the infrared spectrum. I don't think there is an appreciable difference in the spectrum to change the attractiveness to bugs.
Also of note is the primary spectral components don't change with colour temperature. Only the relative intensities between the blue and the red component where the warm light will have a higher concentration of red emitting phosphor and less in the blue change. The fundamental frequencies are the same.
Also for a really strange night, put one of those nightclub UV bulbs out on your porch. They attract some really weird bugs.
price? (Score:3, Insightful)
i want to go LED so bad but waiting for a good price point
Re:price? (Score:4, Informative)
waiting for a good price point
I don't know how much these cost where you live, but where I live I can get LED bulbs at Home Depot from $6 to $20 depending on quality and brightness. They have an expected lifetime of 20+ years, and I don't have to change the light in that time. To me, this is a no-brainer and I've been buying LEDs for my whole house.
In fairness, I know that the power company where I live is subsidizing the bulbs, and absent the subsidy they would cost more. But it seems likely that you might be able to buy subsidized bulbs where you live too.
Also, I just checked the EarthLED [earthled.com] web site, and without asking me where I live, the site showed me a deal: $100 for a 20-pack of LED bulbs. I've never heard of the brand ("Euri") but surely you could pay $5 per bulb for something that will last so long?
I like the Cree TrueWhite bulbs and I pay extra for them. LED bulbs tend to be a bit too yellow, so Cree developed a "notch filter" that takes out some of the yellow from the light, correcting the color. But now the light is a bit dimmer since some was taken out; so Cree puts a few extra LED modules into the bulb. Result: same amount of light, better color, consumes a little more power but not too much more.
I have also replaced all the 48-inch fluorescent fixtures in my home with Cree Linear LS4 fixtures at 3500K color temperature. Wow, it's so much nicer light and completely silent. Totally worth it.
If you are using incandescent bulbs, and you replace your most-commonly-used ones with LED bulbs, you will save enough money on electricity to pay for the new bulbs within a reasonable time. If you already have compact fluorescent bulbs, and you don't mind their light, then LEDs aren't guaranteed to pay for themselves right away and it might make sense to keep waiting. Otherwise, go for it.
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great info, thank you, very tempting
time to take the plunge
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In Europe places like Aldi and Lidl sell 800lm (70W equivalent) bulbs for about £2.50 each, which is something like $4. No subsidy, 20 year expected lifespan.
For about £6 you can get more efficient ones (100lm/W) with a five year warranty on sale some times, normal price about £10. The situation is similar in Japan. I don't know why the US is so expensive, even with subsidies.
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I had a similar experience with fluorescents. I replaced most of the ordinary light fixtures in my home with special fixtures with a circular fluorescent bulb (not "compact fluorescent"). I liked the quality of the light and I figured I'd be saving electricity.
Then the fixtures started burning out. Sometimes it would just be the bulb, but usually it was the whole fixture. At first I replaced the fixture with another (at $20 per fixture), but eventually I decide it was stupid and I started replacing the
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The price point is already great, when you consider the operating cost.
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true. an economic barrier, but a barrier once leaped it's all gravy
Price and Pretty! I bought loads. (Score:2)
I ordered a whole load from Aliexpress for around $4 each. Given the expected life of them and the efficiency I thought that was a pretty good pricepoint.
Plus they really are pretty to look at, and dimmable! (you can specify dimmable or otherwise, voltage, and fitting type)
So far the ones I got in 4W and 6W configurations emit light comparable to 40W and 60W bulbs imho, They run cool, barely getting warm after long use. The colour is very nice, much better than the old style LEDs, i.e. without the blue
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and good riddance to ancient wasteful tech
Re:price? (Score:4, Insightful)
ditto for CFL, what a boondongle forced on us by ignorant legislatures and "progress social" morons who value symbolism over substance. What I really hate is the the one in six that put out a 7.5KHz or so shrieking noise, that's worse than the bad light and uneven lifespan
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drop one in your house and you have a mercury cleanup scene, yay
throw them out and you're dumping heavy metal contaminants
i suppose someone could point out that the amount of mercury pumped out from coal burning plants to power all those incandescent bulbs is far more mercury released
but still, yeah, fuck CFL
and their weak corpse colored light
and the whole minute you have to wait for them to warm up if you just want to walk in and out of a room to get something
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Use to do that a lot with dropped lab thermometers. Not all that hard to do it properly.
I thought that was bullshit for years until I got a Phillips piece of shit that was shaped to look like an incandescant light, and it does exactly what you say. So just get the cheap Chinese things with glass looping everywhere instead of
I'll never give up incandescents. EVER. (Score:4, Funny)
I heat my house with incandescent bulbs. Until LED's can do the same thing, I will never switch. What kind of an idiot would switch to a less efficient method of lighting AND heating their house?
Re: I'll never give up incandescents. EVER. (Score:2, Funny)
LEDs could do the same thing. 300 watts of incandescent and 300 watts of LED will do the same heating.
You'll just have a lot more light with the latter.
I still use whale oil (Score:5, Funny)
Re: I'll never give up incandescents. EVER. (Score:2)
Re:I'll never give up incandescents. EVER. (Score:4, Informative)
I know you are joking but there are more efficient methods of heating than resistive heating. Namely heat pumps.
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Don't you mean there are cheaper methods of heating than resistive heating? Because as far as I can tell, resistive heating is 100% efficient. Incandescents convert some fraction of the input energy to visible light. Almost all of the rest is emitted as heat. And if there was no light emitted, a resistive element is nearly 100% efficient. It's just that compared to cheap gas it's not particularly cheap to heat with electricity.
My computer is 100% efficient at converting every last drop of electricity t
Re:I'll never give up incandescents. EVER. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you mean there are cheaper methods of heating than resistive heating? Because as far as I can tell, resistive heating is 100% efficient. Incandescents convert some fraction of the input energy to visible light. Almost all of the rest is emitted as heat. And if there was no light emitted, a resistive element is nearly 100% efficient.
No, he means more efficient [wikipedia.org]:
In electrically powered heat pumps, the heat transferred can be three or four times larger than the electrical power consumed, giving the system a coefficient of performance (COP) of 3 or 4, as opposed to a COP of 1 for a conventional electrical resistance heater, in which all heat is produced from input electrical energy.
Translation: If your heating is all electric, with resistive heating you get a watt of heat per watt of electricity. With a heat pump you get more that one watt of heat per watt of electricity.
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That's an odd way of measuring efficiency. It's like saying my car is more efficient than yours because I parked mine at the top of a hill.
Nope. If you consistenly could find your car at the top of the hill for no extra effort, that would be great. And should be included in the efficiency (why not?).
It's not as if a heat pump has to put the heat back into the ground/air/water after you're done heating your house, like you would have to with the car if you ever drove it down the hill, so not a good car analogy, but points for trying.
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Are you familiar with air conditioners? They take in air from somewhere, blow cold air into the house, and release heat outside (either by blowing hot air or some other means). They make the house colder and the outside hotter. By conservation of energy, the energy heating the outside has to be equal to the energy consumed by the device plus the heat energy removed from inside the house.
Now, when it gets uncomfortably cool in the house, turn the air conditioner around. It makes the outside colder and
Do what the rest of us do (Score:2)
They are available at retail (Score:3)
https://www.superbrightleds.co... [superbrightleds.com]:
Layers of imitation. (Score:4, Insightful)
These are really cool. But it did make me chuckle when the article talked about how current LED candelabra bulb in particular are quite ugly. The candelabra bulbs were made to (poorly) mimic the shape of candle flame, and now we are attempting to mimic that imitation because we have gotten used to the way it looks :)
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The candelabra bulbs were made to (poorly) mimic the shape of candle flame, and now we are attempting to mimic that imitation because we have gotten used to the way it looks :)
In 1910 Sears. Roebuck was sold both (portable!) gas and electric lamps and chandeliers. Sears, Roebuck Home Builder's Catalog: The Complete Illustrated 1910 Edition [amazon.com]
It has never been easy or cheap to change the way you illuminate your home. Think of the ways light affects how we perceive food and table sevice, skin tones, colors and textures in wall coverings, fabrics and so on.
Analog is actually digital (Score:3)
... but on a very micro scale
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Neat, hope the datasheet is right (Score:3)
This is a bug not a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
They look almost exactly like Tungsten filament bulbs
In my house there are three consecutive rooms: one with an incandescent bulb, the second with a compact fluorescent and the third one with a LED light. I asked my kids which one they prefer and to my surprise, they both chose the LED light. Then I bought a somewhat "warmer" LED and put it in the corridor next to the white LED room. As an old timer, I prefer the warmer LED. Not my kids. They describe it as artificially yellow and again to my surprise they choose the whiter LED.
The only reason we prefer the ugly yellow hue from indandescents is because we are used to i. It isn't "warm", its sucky. Same with thing happened when gas lighting was first replaced by incandescents: people pined for the soft orange glow of gas lights but within a few years people realized how bad that hue was.
My kids, young and unencumbered by tradition prefer the LED lights. So will everyone else rather soon, as we slowly transition to whiter more sunlight-like hues that are now possible with LEDs.
Re:This is a bug not a feature (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that shorter wavelengths suppress melatonin production, that "bug" may actually be a feature we want to retain.
Re:This is a bug not a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
For the entire history of the human race nearly all the lighting we have encountered has been block-body radiation, and a black body spectrum will always look better and more natural to us than other light spectrum. So florescent and sodium vapor will finally die off as LEDs become less expensive, but variations in color temperature will never go away. Warm lights will always feel more cozy and intimate just like campfires and candles have always been. Cool light will always feel a bit dreary, like an overcast day. And Daylight spectrum will always feel bright and cheerful. Opinions on whether a living room should be bright and cheerful or warm and comforting may vary. But unless we somehow stop experiencing natural lighting whatsoever, and evolve into Morlocks, variants of black body light will retain their historical associations.
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When there aren’t other temperature lights for comparison the human eye/brain adjusts. A fully tungsten-lit room looks just as normal as a fully daylight-lit room after a minute or two. In darker rooms, warmer lights don't kill night vision like cooler lights, so you can see dimmer areas better. (That's why astronomers and soldiers in the field use red lights to illuminate their maps.) Also warmer lights resemble a fireplace or candles. Both those factors are comforting -- the former for practical rea
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We went through this when we converted all our lights to LED. Room by room I swapped in 7000k LEDs. Initially we felt it was stark and sterile but then over time we started to associate the "yellow" rooms with being a bit dirty / dingy. For about 3 months we were only going to go 7000s in the main living areas and leave the warm white in the bedrooms / lounge. Now though we are white throughout the whole house. The best part is it is so close to daylight that when it is gloomy outside during the day th
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Lights on during the day?
You don't need 7000k LEDs, you need a house with windows.
Good luck with your circadian cycle in the meantime! (I'll just leave this fuckton of citations over here [justgetflux.com].)
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Seriously are you saying that you never have days where it is a bit miserable and gloomy outside and you would like a little more light inside??
Christ half my house is glass and I live in Brisbane where it is sunny most of the time and I still get days where it is dull and crap outside.
As for my circadian cycle no one in my family has trouble sleeping. Never has and we have had these lights for over 2 years now.
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Yep, same here. We converted our whole house to daylight bulbs. Initially it felt a little weird...when you entered the room, it just seemed strange. After weeks you get accustomed to it, and then it actually starts looking a lot better then the crappy yellow lights.
The weird part about the whole process, though (at least for me), is that you don't just get accustomed to the color of the light...you get accustomed to the color of the light in that particular space. We'd convert one room, and after we adjust
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And did you have the strange sensation of having the yellow light bleed into a white light room and look at the yellow light and think "that just looks BAD". And not in a poor taste way but in a something doesn't look right there, perhaps I should steer clear. Kinda as if it was a deep red and was a door way to hell.
Re:This is a bug not a feature (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree that the preference for low color temperature illumination indoors is to some extent a matter of past experience, I claim that there is also a physiological basis for this preference, and that this too contributes (although does not entirely explain) to the reason why people like tungsten light.
The Purkinje Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org] is the basis for the Kruithof curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... [wikipedia.org] which quantifies a relationship between the color temperature and illuminance of a light source that is regarded as pleasing/comfortable for human vision. That is to say, at lower illuminance, human color vision is mesoptic (a blend of photopic or "cone-based" and scotopic "rod-based"), and so is less sensitive to longer visible wavelengths than shorter ones than at high illuminance, where photopic vision dominates. This partly explains why, in a dark room, blue LEDs frequently seem almost painfully bright compared to red ones (another component is that the blue LED may actually be brighter). Therefore, for the purposes of indoor illumination, our eyes tend to find high color temperatures to be "harsh" or "glaring."
Nevertheless, to a certain extent, this perception can be overcome with exposure and time. But I do think that the evidence suggests it is not simply a matter of what generation one grew up in, or that such preferences have no physiological basis.
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My kids, young and unencumbered by tradition prefer the LED lights.
You can get any color temp you want with LEDs same as old fashion bulbs. If your kids prefer a higher color temperature this may only indicate they prefer a higher temp bulb rather than a useful comparison between LED and Incandescent. If the test isn't apples to apples its worthless.
So will everyone else rather soon, as we slowly transition to whiter more sunlight-like hues that are now possible with LEDs.
No, different people have different color temperature preferences. This isn't changing anytime in the foreseeable future. Huge markets for both high and low temperature bulbs not going away anytime soon. LED changes nothin
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Huge markets for both high and low temperature bulbs not going away anytime soon. LED changes nothing.
Huh? for most of the last 100 years we pretty much had a single temperature choice: yellow incandescent. A bit more recently we had halogen (relatively successful) and CFLs (not really). What is this huge temperature market you talk about?
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The only reason we prefer the ugly yellow hue from indandescents is because we are used to i. It isn't "warm", its sucky. Same with thing happened when gas lighting was first replaced by incandescents: people pined for the soft orange glow of gas lights but within a few years people realized how bad that hue was.
Yep, your mind prefers what you already know and like. Another example...120 hz TV's with the motion smoothing feature. You would think a smoother motion video would be preferred by your mind...after all, it's used to seeing reality most of the time, which has an infinite frame rate (or whatever the biological limits are...close enough to infinite). Yet, a good number of people (myself included) prefer the choppiness of 24Hz or 30Hz video. I don't see anything technically wrong with the higher frame rate pl
Re:This is a bug not a feature (Score:5, Informative)
The conclusion that your childens' stated preference is based on color alone is non-sequitur, at best. At worst, it's a blatant red herring.
Except for the minor fact that they said so themselves. Here's the quote again for your benefit "they describe it as artificially yellow".
I also gave evidence that this has happened before, when we transitioned from gas light to incandescent light. Lastly even today people prefer the somewhat whiter hue of halogen over regular incandescent yellow, indicating that the present yellow isn't really all that is made to be.
Now, and here's something you don't seem to be aware of, constructing an argument is different than a logical proof. E.g. "he had a gun, motive and opportunity. He was at the scene of the crime and was seen running away after shoots were fired". It does not logically follow that the person did the crime and it would be a logical fallacy to state as much, yet it is the reasonable and logical conclusion nonetheless.
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I can trivially create an environment wherein any common general-purpose light source appears to be artificially yellow. Or blue. Or green. Or pink.
I can also show you two objects of two decisively different colors that appear to be identical under different types of artificial light.
The eye can do some strange things [brainden.com].
That my kids might be able to tell me why they prefer chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream over vanilla ice cream does not lend itself toward an empirical forecast of any merit about the f
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Yes and possibly my kids where kidnapped by aliens while they were asleep and hypnotized into believing that LED lights are better. Care to discuss other "realistic" alternatives?
At any rate the kids part was anecdata, and only one piece in a wider argument which is "the preference for present incandescent yellow has a large historical component" and that part will go away with time.
Hello confused hipster (Score:2)
This is really going to confuse the interior-designer hipsters. "What do I do: Use new technology that looks old, or waste energy?! Ahhhhhh."
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I've already LED-ified most of my house (Score:5, Insightful)
Cree for the higher lumen stuff, and Ikea (dunno who makes theirs) for the 200-lumen stuff.
Both the Cree and Ikeas I get are 2700k, and trust me on this.. I was a huge tungsten snob, it's all about the color temperature.. I bought the LED lie hook line and sinker.
All of mine are opaque (soft white) and when they're in the fixtures, they're indistinguishable from the tungsten.
My power draw for my lighting (all-up) was around 550 watts. Now it's around 56. (both figures calculated by totting up all the wattage from all the fixtures)
There's also a knock-on effect, the LEDs run so much cooler I suspect the AC runs less. Maybe not a lot less, but any less is welcome.
The only thing I haven't LED-ified is the home cinema, due to the lighting requirements there it's all MR-16 mostly 10* 20w spots on a dimmer, rarely run them brighter than 50%. For now I refuse to give these up.
Oh the bathroom is also still tungsten. Four huge 25w globes. These new filament-type LED may just the thing to LED-ify the bathroom.
And yes.. I've also noticed a lack of bug-attraction with LED, as evidenced by the two 1000-lumen LED monsters in the garage. Barely any bugs wander in. A moth maybe. A bee, once. But nothing near the bugstorm induced by my very brief fling with CFL. Very brief. Like 2 days. I hate them. Hate hate hate!
LED FTW
Choice is good, but I will pass personally (Score:2)
That's like a LED TV inside a bulky CRT box. The enclosure is not necessary and adds to price and environmental impact unnecessarily. Also an extra hazard if it's glass. I would rather have modern minimalistic look and creative shapes enabled by technology. Is it really necessary for bulbs to be changeable now that they last for lifetime of the fixture? And why not have one central transformer for the whole chandelier (if not low voltage outlets in the room)? Got to be more efficient.
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I've bought a couple of LED replacement fixtures for less than the cost of putting LED 'bulbs' into the old ones, rated for the same amount of light even.
I agree, design the fixture for the type of light, and consider replacing the whole fixture. By the time the thing dies, I might be tired of looking at that design anyways.
I'll note that due to the extra space of having the light come from a fixture rather than a 'bulb', the concerns about heat-sinking are generally eliminated.
One thing I did do, however,
Not just for the retro look (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting that there are sound engineering reasons behind this shape, not just the retro look. The filament shape solves the 360 degree light distribution of most LED lamps but raises the issue of how to cool it effectively when not in contact with a heat sink. Helium has a much higher heat conductivity than air and moves the heat effectively to the envelope. Holding the helium for years without leaking is difficult requires something more gas tight than plastic. Forunately, there are many factories for glass bulbs that would otherwise be closed due to the decline in incandescent lamp sales. The technology for the glass envelope and sealed leads is a result of many years decades of development and probably would not have been worth the investment just for this purpose but these factories are already there with trained personnel and fully depreciated equipment.
Re:Not just for the retro look (Score:4, Informative)
TFA talks about the filament temperature: 60C. This is no problem. It does use a special gas to keep the temp that low but TFA does not explain what gas because the writers do not know. Presumably helium.
Holding helium for years is easy. Sealed glass is traditional in bulb manufacturing and is sufficiently helium tight. Incandescent bulbs have that, because the filament would not survive oxygen.
Typical He leak rates for stainless steel tubing with good welds and good flange connections is 10^-8 mbar*l/sec (my job).
I assume serial produced sealed glass bulbs can achieve the same with ease.
I'll assume the envelope is 0.125 l and the over pressure is 1 bar. That leak rate then means that the pressure will drop to 0 bar over in 1.25*10^10 seconds. That is almost 400 years.
Don't worry about leaking the helium from a well sealed glass bulb. By that time we'll have full RGB spectrum luminescent plants that detect your mood and adjust their spectrum accordingly.
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> TFA talks about the filament temperature: 60C. This is no problem.
It's "no problem" because someone has done the work to solve it. A filament has a very small surface area to dissipate heat. Air is a very poor heat conductor. Glass too. Without the helium fill gas and a sufficiently large bulb envelope area the filament equilibrium temperature for the same electric power would be much higher and greatly reduce the efficiency and lifetime of the bulb.
> Holding helium for years is easy. Sealed glass i
Re:Doubtful (Score:5, Interesting)
Eh, we got a bunch of LED lightbulbs on discount through our power company.
Compared to compact fluorescents, they're pretty nice... less fiddly without the ballast issues and dimmable. The light appears warmer and flicker-free.
Compared to incandescents, they use a lot less power, and feel a lot less fragile. Haven't had one burn out on me yet.
I suppose if I wanted to use it for heat, I'd prefer an incandescent or halogen bulb.
Re:Doubtful (Score:5, Interesting)
I've only killed 1 LED bulb so far.. Well wounded is more like it...
It spent 6 months in a sealed shower light fixture before it started to flicker after it was on for 10-20 minutes.
I moved it to a desk lamp and it's happy there.. Another LED is in the torture box and doing fine.
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How about the 3-way Cree bulbs that Amazon sells: http://smile.amazon.com/Cree-B... [amazon.com]
Would that meet your requirements?
Re:Doubtful (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's almost certainly the electrolytic cap causing the issue, and it's where people that claim LED's have a longer life than CFL's are wrong unless they're talking about a DC environment because the weak link in both LED and CFL construction is the enclosed electrolytic capacitors. If you tear down either type of bulb and look at the spec sheet for the cap and compare the rated life at the actual operating temperature you'll see that almost every manufacturer is lying about expected lifetime (often by a fac
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$40???? Amazon has name brand, dimmable LED bulbs for under $10.
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Only for multi-packs of 800 lumen lamps: http://www.amazon.com/Cree-9-5... [amazon.com] what if you need a 1600 lumen lamp?? Also off topic why does Chrome think lumen is a spelling error?
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$40???? Amazon has name brand, dimmable LED bulbs for under $10.
$10???? eBay has no-name LED bulbs for under $3 direct from China, with free shipping. They are identical to the brand name bulbs except for the logo. I switched over my entire house last year, and have had zero problems so far.
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Re:My LED bulb didn't last! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm gearing up for phase 2, which involves replacing 4 or 5 of the big CFL tube bulbs with LED replacements. The current tube bulbs are at least that old, too. I'm going to have to rewire a bunch of ballasts to put the new LED lights in. The LED tubes in the store put out easily as much light as the CFLs they're replacing. So, um, maybe you just have shitty power or something.
Re:My LED bulb didn't last! (Score:5, Informative)
Same here. I don't have a single CFL or incandescent left in the house except for the light that is in my oven and the lights in my bathroom heatlamps. The one in our stairwell is on 24/7. I have not had a single one flicker or dim let alone blow.
I replaced all our light fittings with sealed unit flush mounts. They cost me $25 AU from a retail store. I went for day light white though rather than the yellow, takes a little getting used to but now I would struggle to go back to warm white.
Re:My LED bulb didn't last! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is where I'm at as well, although I may just replace the fluorescent fixtures themselves with ones designed for LEDs.
My first LED bulbs were installed in April 2011. I saved the box and receipt because I wasn't sure they'd last. Since then I've been gradually replacing the (often crap) CFL bulbs with LEDs. I've yet to have an LED bulb fail. I've even started replacing our three way incandescent bulbs in the torchieres with 3 way LEDs because the tech has won me over - sure they're pricey, but three way bulbs are more expensive anyway and don't last long at all.
Except for the kitchen (where the fluorescent tubes are) we're pretty much converted.
Oh, and at Costco I can get three packs for under $15 right now.
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I wonder if its a problem with the power supply quality - some houses get bad power spikes
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I converted the whole house to LED about a year or two ago. And yes, that required rewiring some of the fluorescent fixtures. It's generally not a big deal, although it took a bit of effort to rewire the fixture in our range hood. Thank God for pop rivets :-)
But I just saw that Home Depot has started selling LED lights that apparently are compatible with electronic ballasts. They no longer require rewiring of the fixture. I am a little skeptical and haven't tried them myself, but Home Depot has an excellent
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I have also had to replace several in much less time than they were supposed to last, so perhaps they're working better for some homes than for others.
I wonder if it could be more to do with how often they're switched on/off. Looking at the other comment branch describing good experiences, it looks like they often leave those lights on for long periods of time.
Re:but do they (Score:4, Insightful)
cost about the same as incandescent light bulbs?
Over time, they should end up costing less. Unless you don't pay for your electricity.
Re: (Score:2)
cost about the same as incandescent light bulbs?
Over time, they should end up costing less. Unless you don't pay for your electricity.
If these things lasted 20 years, I definitely would want to have to wait until year 18 for them to "cost less" due to their amortized costs. Please do not include amortized costs of electrictiy in your calculation of bulb rices; you can't possibly predict what electricity will/won't cost of that time frame.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously just because they burn a few extra watts doesn't mean they need to be fucking illegal.
A few extra watts? That is understating it dramatically.
Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually agree - it's useless legislation. LEDs are so much more efficient, and so much longer lasting that they are quite capable of phasing out incandescent lamps without regulatory help. With the economy of scale and decreasing manufacturing costs, it won't be long until LED lamps are almost at price parity with incandescent lamps, which means the latter won't be manufactured except for a few decorative purposes. It's one of the rare times where the invisible hand is actually working as advertised.
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.
LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.
There's still a large number of people who just don't like LED's or CFL's... and some even claim that the high efficiency halogens just aren't the same, it could take decades for those people to make the switch to LED's without legislation that makes it more difficult and more expensive to purchase incandescents. If even 1 out of 100 people want to stick with incandescents, that's over a million households in the USA alone, still plenty of room for economies of scale to keep prices reasonable.
Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.
LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
Another thing to consider is that the one LED will use about 1/8 the power of those incandescents, so unless your power is free, you're now looking at 240-1000x the total operating cost for incandescents compared to LED's.
My next-door neighbor has very little money, so back in 2009 she bought a big SUV because it was $1200, compared to $3000 for a subcompact... and then couldn't afford the gas to get to work. People are really lousy at looking at anything other than the initial purchase price.
A third thing to consider is that as fewer people buy incandescents, the cost of maintaining tungsten-drawing machinery and other lightbulb-specific manufacturing equipment is going to rise. Vacuum tubes are hard to make well, and while we have a century of experience in doing so, silicon is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.
Re: (Score:2)
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
I haven't seen where LEDs last any longer than regular bulbs. If you look at total time before every single diode stops firing then it probably will last longer than incandescent, but when you start to look at the lowering of light output due to failed diodes, it starts going down pretty quickly. You don't notice it as much in most bulbs, other than they get dimmer, but if you look at traffic lights, for example, you can see that pretty quickly after they are installed, individuals diodes start to fail.
Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is a pretty nice failure mode instead of losing the entire bulb like before. Anecdotally that's meant a shift to scheduled maintainance where the lights are inspected and the ones in worst condition replaced instead of having to rush out each time an entire halogen bulb goes. It will be interesting to see a real comparison to find out if that's really the case.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your theory is that eventually a transformer and rectifier and a semiconductor, will be about as cheap as a wire filament? Or that humans are particularly good at spending their money in the present to save more in the future?
Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score:5, Insightful)
Tungsten.
Very high melting point, very high strength and a bit of effort to go from ore to wire.
You don't have to look at Wolfram Alpha to get the first idea about Tungsten.
Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score:4, Insightful)
CFL were forced on us by legislation
No, CFL is just one of the options. The choice is between CFL, LED and halogen. And LED is clearly starting to take over the CFL market after just a few years.
Re: (Score:3)
Lightbulbs haven't used vacuum for decades. They're typically filled with an inert-gas mix (predominantly nitrogen or argon, possibly with small amounts of other gases) at atmospheric pressure. Not only does this allow use of a thinner, lighter envelope, it also makes the filament last longer.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Going with your numbers, the 40W bulb costs about $5.48 in electricity per year, the 4W $0.55. So factoring in the cost of the bulb initially, after year 1 the cost is: $6.28 to $12.55; year 2: $11.76 to $13.10; year 3: $17.24 to $13.64. After just three years you saved almost $4 by going LED. So, if the LED specs are true and they last 20 years you would end up paying $104.95 for the 40w vs $22.42 for the LED (and that includes the initial cost of the bulb).
Also note I didn't include the replacement cos
Re: (Score:2)
But there are a couple of drawbacks: First of all, the light color isn't very uniform. I have a bulb where one of the two "filaments" is more bluish than the other, and there's also variability between bulbs. Secondly, they flicker with the mains frequency (50Hz in Europe). Thirdly, there are no matte versions because the illumination is not evenly distributed and this would show up as shadows on the matte bulb. Of course this also means the room isn't illuminated evenly, so they are best used in lamps with several sockets, where this effect evens out somewhat. They are great for chandeliers and other lamps with exposed bulbs though. IMHO the flickering is the biggest problem.
IMHO, it's the coloring. I read a lot of real books, and in so doing, I prefer a particular (fairly broad) spectrum of light to prevent eyestrain.
The uneven illumination distribution could be fixed in a matte bulb, but you'd be paying a lot for the bulb due to the expense of the interior diffusive coating to achieve the effect.
The flickering is the driver circuitry (as aXis100 said), but it's because the bulbs are being designed primarily for the U.S. market, which means 110v 60Hz, and they tend to operate
Re: (Score:2)
The ones I got flicker too. If you check the teardown vids, some of them have a smoothing capacitor on the end of the driver circuit, which eliminates this flicker. This should be standard imho, but so far the market isn't very well defined.
Re: (Score:2)
Why worry about color rendition, we're not reading paper books and newspaper any more. We're staring at backlight screens on our monitors, phones and kindles.
The good ones are shit, the bad ones... (Score:3)
80 CRI is awful. Greenish, bluish, pinkish, yellowish - you can have a pastel disco party if you don't re-lamp all at the same time. Anything less than 80 is more industrial quality than residential. Especially give that they *can* make 95-98CRI lamps.
Sylvania used to make a PAR20 with a 95CRI and, I'll tell you, they're dead ringers for the incandescent they replace at full power. They don't make them anymore. Could be they were 10W (vs the 50W halogen they replace), or it could be they were $40 when bough