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Smartest Light Bulbs Ever, Dumbest Idea Ever?
An anonymous reader writes "A spate of smart LED bulbs and light sockets are coming to market and seeking crowdfunding, following the (apparent) success of Philips Hue. But do they really make sense for lighting control? Here's a comprehensive roundup of 13 products and the pros and cons of the category." I like the idea of controllable, long-lasting light bulbs, but I haven't yet been tempted enough to pay $50 apiece.
Ok. Slightly better. But why wireless? Why internet? If you are not home do you need to control lights? If you are that bad about not turning off lights when you leave are you really going to remember once your gone? You need more than a dimmer switch? Really? Why? Why not wire all the lights to a central keypad in the home(think dedicated tablet computer). Can't wait for these to be wide spread enough to where you can drive down the street at christmas time, hack the entire blocks house lights and turn it into a spectacular light show for yourself set to music.
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
We've had LED bulbs for a while in Taiwan, and I've never seen them go above about $30usd (and even that is on the high side). I'm constantly hearing about $50 and even $80 bulbs in the states. Do you all have special tariffs on LEDs there?
Right after the holidays there are loads of xmas strings of lamps.
The color balance can range from nice to awful.
A small string can be wound around a foil covered cardboard tube with a lamp adapter at the end.
The whole thing only draws a few watts.
Admittedly not a lot of people want this but .... We have a place out in the forest... Sometimes when we arrive, it's late at night and it's _dark_ out there... I mean, if it's overcast and the middle of the winter, you can't see _anything_... So we have a yard light that I control remotely via crappy unreliable X-10.. The house is already internet connected via cellphone so I have various scripts on my webserver to let me control things like the thermostat and the X10 yard light. yeah; you could keep the car headlights on until you can get up to the door, unlock it, and turn the lights on.. The remotely controllable yard light also works well in conjunction with the security camera.. Infrared mode doesn't work all that well.
No, not life changing but a small matter of convenience.
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
Fluorescent lights give me a headache. I don't care if this is supposed to be medically possible, since it happens to me. They all do it, though some are substantially worse than others. So-called "daylight" fluorescents are the worst, e.g. ott-lite. Those give me a headache in record time.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
Only idiots believe that solar panels take more energy to make than they will produce, which has been false since the 1970s.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
My problem with IGPs is that they are from intel in which case they really are shit (I actually play games in 3d, this is no longer a corner case since the majority of the population of the USA plays video games) or from AMD in which case the drivers are shit. I've owned several systems with embedded nVidia graphics. That's in the chipset, though.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
There's at least as much support for EVs here as against.
And LED bulbs? Still new enough that you have the uninformed Luddites bitching that they cost $60 each, despite the fact that you can now buy them for under $20 regularly and around $10 on sale
How many $20 LED lamps have you bought? How many $10 ones? ALL SHIT. You must spend real money on an LED lamp to get one that even has current limiting, let alone power regulation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where you get the bullshit idea that "you need quite a few of them just to light one room" is anybody's guess.
They probably get it from reality. You can rarely sufficiently light a full room with a single incandescent. LED lamps which aren't directional are lossy and wasteful. GE has a design for incandescents which are twice as efficient as normal, I'd rather use them. Every LED lamp which isn't fifty bucks that I've seen has agonizing flicker, as well. They give me headaches just like CFLs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
CFLs? Every Slashdotter needs to walk into a room and instantly have 6500K light or people... will... die !
I find the five minutes or so they take to "warm up" a bit annoying, but what I can't live with is the poor colour rendering and unbelievable amounts of RF noise they put out. The fact that they draw slightly more power than comparable incandescents (as measured by the fuel flow meter on the generator) just puts the icing on the cake, for me.
Solar panels? Take more energy to make than they'll ever produce, and it lowers property values to have free electricity.
I'd prefer an RTG, but no-one seriously cares that they take more energy to produce than they make. What they do is they make it possible to produce energy quietly a long way from existing energy sources. In any case, the "more energy to make than they produce" thing hasn't really been true for a couple of decades.
IGPs? Sure, I only play cheesy online Flash solitaire, but I NEED A quad 7990 and an external 3KW PSU just to feed it.
Some people do need fairly hefty machines that run all the time. I suspect that most of the properly geeky people on here have a couple of machines at home that run 24/7 and are always doing *something* - rendering, compiling, encoding video or audio or even just running Folding@Home.
Electric cars? They "had to" push it home on that show with the car guys. And Elon Musk eats Christian babies.
I'm coming round to the idea of electric cars. They still need to charge more quickly, and once we work out some way of breaking the laws of physics that will come. I actually *do* use 600 miles tank range quite often, and I can easily get through a couple of tanks of diesel in a week. If I'm driving a long distance I stop every couple of hours for a break, so if I could get roughly 200 miles at normal motorway speeds out of about 20 minutes of charging (time for a cup of tea, a bit of food and a pish) then that would work pretty well for me.
LED bulbs rock, but they have the same poor colour rendering problem as CFLs. If they could get flatter spectrum phosphors they would be excellent. As it is, I keep incandescents around for working on electronic stuff because it's very hard to read the markings on tiny surface-mount components by CFL or LED.
The problem I have with Crees is th form factor. We have recessed lighting in our kitchen, mostly R30, and the fixtures are 40 years old, certainly superseded by newer standards. Regular R-30 bulbs fit perfectly. The Cree equivalents take some work to fit right, especially the ones with the built-in bezels.
That said, I love the light they produce. It's a bit brighter, and only slightly whiter than the light the 65W incandescents put out, at a fifth the power consumption.
I have one question for the pick-your-color manufacturers: Have you ever consulted an interior designer? The colors of paint, fabric, etc. in a room are all picked with specific lighting in mind, both natural and from lamps. Start futzing with it, and things will start looking crappy. Ever wonder why a hotel room looks fine under CFLs but the same CFLs in your bedroom make everything an ashy grey? It's because the colors in the hotel room were picked specifically because they complement the color spectrum put out by the CFLs.
I'm looking forward to the day not far off when I can have all LED lighting in the house, but I have no desire to make radical color changes (except for special applications people have mentioned ike aids for the deaf).