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A Tale of Two Tests: Why Energy Star LED Light Bulbs Are a Rare Breed
cylonlover writes "Just over a week ago Gizmag reported that Philips' 22 W LED light bulb, designed as a like-for-like replacement of a 100-W incandescent light bulb, was the first LED bulb of its type to receive the stamp of approval from Energy Star. But looking at the Energy Star requirements reported by Philips in its press release, it seemed a little strange that Philips' product is the only one to have been certified – given that products long on the market appear, at face value, to meet those requirements. Since then, Gizmag has spoken to LED light bulb makers Switch Lighting and other industry players to find out why they're apparently playing catch-up."
TL; DR: the testing requirements for Energy Star for LED light bulbs require running them for 9 straight months, and one company was out of the gate first and this is the first and only one certified as energy star for its 100-W-equivalent LED light bulb. Other point: light distribution must be uniform radially for " 170 degrees of radial [sic] flux": sounds like just a smidge under a half-sphere of radiant flux which is probably what was really meant. I can't find any definition of or any other usage of the term "radial flux".
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I use "half-sphere" to mean ($2 \times \pi $) steradians, and you can pretty much visual what I mean by a half-sphere. So I guess an "A-bulb" has to radiate light almost uniformly over 8/9-ths of that solid angle.
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"Radiant Flux" is the term used to describe the radiant power : the measure of the total power of electromagnetic radiation (including infrared, ultraviolet, and visible light). The power may be the total emitted from a source, or the total landing on a particular surface. So neither "radial flux" nor "radiant flux" makes sense in that article. Wrong units either way. Spatial distribution of radiated light would be measured in steradians.
To get the Energy Star certification, the bulbs need to have a projected lifetime of 25000 on-hours (where lifetime means the bulb can emit no less than 70% of its rated light output during that time). If there's going to be planned obsolescence, it's going to be from better bulbs replacing them even though they're still working.
Yea, fuck those ROHS, UL, and FCC certifications!
I'm glad to see a high bar set for the certification of LED bulbs. CFL lights rarely hit their expected life span, among other problems
I hate changing light bulbs, and frankly don't care if the LEDs cost a lot. I'd pay more just to not have to change light bulbs. I bought a bunch of the Philips 75W equivalents. While they provide the same intensity of light, the spectrum is considerably different, and very noticeable. The LED casts a cold spectrum that to my eyes is just a yellowish version of what florescent light emits. In the middle of the room, in ceiling cans, it looks fine. But one the side when it casts against walls or shelving, it really makes everything look cold.
One other odd fact, LEDs do still throw off a lot of heat, and they take much longer to cool down than incandescent lights.
Actually, RoHS is most certainly a scam. The net effect on the environment has been horrible. Rather than the electronics manufacturers engineering in planned obsolecense, the EU did with RoHS.The environmental impact is literally an unmitigated disaster in parts of China. The cost of aerospace grade components has increased substantially (yes, we have an RoHS exemption for aerospace applications; tin whiskers are a stupid cause of death) and we've got a different set of more toxic metals accumulating in the benthic muck and getting "recycled" with 3rd world environmental standards. What a fucking win for the environment.
"Also companies fall out because they don't have the full light distribution required. For example, with an 'A lamp,' you have to have, to get the full Energy Star standard, 170 degrees of radial flux or light distribution all around the product at generally the same intensity all the way around," he added.
This is just stupid. The light distribution needed should be a matter of application. Efficient lighting also means not wasting light in directions that do not need to be illuminated. Instead of the 170 degree standard, the bulb should be quantified to what degree of lighting coverage it does achieve, and must be marketed accurately.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you are investing in a light source that will not need replacement for a decade then why, exactly, do you care so much about it being shaped like a light bulb?
LEDs don't like heat. Packing the equivalent of a 100W incandescent in a shape that pretty much minimized surface are to volume ratio is a very bad idea for heat dissipation.
LED light panels make much more sense.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The actual Energy Star requirements are for "Luminous Intensity Distribution," and call for:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The "ugly and harsh light" is described in the industry as Color Temperature. I'm not sure if it is a requirement to include but most bulbs come with a Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating. It's a scale from 0-100 (100 being a reference incandescent bulb) to rate the Color Temperature of a bulb. LED's are harder to quantify using this method however so a new method is in development called Color Quality Scale (CQS). Who knew a simple light bulb could be so complex? I found a really good read at Jason Morrison's web site with cool pictures and everything!
But to answer your question...it depends on the LED bulb. Since LED's come in several colors but white isn't one of them LED bulbs make white using a couple of different methods. So there are some LED's that have the same harsh temperature and others that are very close to the warm glow of an incandescent. Philips just announced a new process that will bring near incandescent quality with better efficiency (200 Lumens Per Watt (LPW)) than existing LED technology but it is still a few years from production.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Could we contain this radiant flux for later use, in some sort of storage device? I'm thinking of something much like a capacitor.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
There's a consensus of sort that power supplies are often the most underengineered things out there in any electronic device. Well, guess what, in a CFL or a LED the entire electronics are the power supply, there's nothing else. When a CFL fails, it's not because the bulb has failed, it's because the power supply is dead. It's certainly possible to engineer a power supply that will last, but such know-how is rare and expensive, and engineering management often doesn't understand that it takes real effort to make a long-lasting power supply. You have to qualify every single part, pretty much -- there's no such thing as letting the purchasing loose to get the best deal. If you want to make a CFL or a LED lamp that will last as long as the life of the light-emitting element, you need to do proper design, then qualify sample parts, then do extensive testing on prototypes, then purchase a batch of parts for a production run, then re-qualify all of those parts again, then have the boards assembled, then qualify the board assemblies, and only then you ship. That's what it takes to get a quality product out. That's what it takes to get a lamp out that will be so old by the time it gets replaced that the house might have changed owners a bunch of times in the meantime. Guess how it's done in real life on consumer CFL/LED bulbs, LOL.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yes. Yes.
http://www.ecaa.ntu.edu.tw/weifang/led/Effects%20of%20Frequency%20and%20Duty%20Ratio%20on%20the%20Growth%20of%20Potato%20Plantlets%20In%20Vitro%20Using%20Light-emitting%20Diodes%20--%20Jao%20and%20Fang%2039%20(2)%20375%20--%20HortScience.htm
*ANY* lamp will emit IR. That's a natural side-effect of thermodynamics.
Whether or not the frequency pulses will trigger your TV or not is a different story.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The Philips 22W bulb needs to *replace a standard bulb*. That is, the complete unit including the power supply needs to fit in the space of a regular bulb, and it needs to radiate in a certain pattern. If you're not limited by the standard bulb form factor then a bunch of different options open up.
Also, your comparison with the MK-R are misleading. According to their web page, a single Cree MK-R uses 15W to put out 1800 lumens (which is what the Phillips bulb puts out). Only the 2700K/3000K versions are available in a 90CRI version, and the higher the CRI the lower the lumens/Watt.
Speaking as a horticultural and interior lighting research director.
Now that's a pretty impressive euphemism for a marijuana grower.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
To get the Energy Star certification, the bulbs need to have a projected lifetime of 25000 on-hours (where lifetime means the bulb can emit no less than 70% of its rated light output during that time). If there's going to be planned obsolescence, it's going to be from better bulbs replacing them even though they're still working.
As it is with CFL's it will likely be true with LED's. Sure the bulb will last that long or meet those requirements. The cheap electronics controlling it though is another story and is the reason many of my CFL's from various brands have failed. YMMV.
Well, yes and no. It's not "engineered to break" - it's engineered to be small and compact. That it happens to be susceptible to drops is an engineering tradeoff, not a design goal. There are rugged phones on the market, but they make up a small niche because they are bulky and awkward, or at the least, expensive compared to more dainty devices.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The "ugly and harsh light" is described in the industry as Color Temperature. I'm not sure if it is a requirement to include but most bulbs come with a Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating. It's a scale from 0-100 (100 being a reference incandescent bulb) to rate the Color Temperature of a bulb.
CRI doesn't measure color temperature; it's an indirect measure of the fullness of the spectrum given off by the bulb.
Color temperature tells you how reddish or bluish the light is -- does it look more like incandescent light (reddish) or daylight (bluish)?
CRI tells you how well the light given off by the bulb will allow you to see a range of colors. A CRI of 100 means perfect color fidelity. A CRI of under 90 or so and you will notice that some colors don't look right, because the bulb has dark bands in its spectrum. The CRI measuring process takes color temperature into account -- both warm white and cool white bulbs can have similarly high CRI scores.
For an example of extremely poor CRI, see low pressure sodium bulbs that used to be used a security and parking lot lights. Everything illuminated by them -- cars, clothing, faces -- looks either yellow, black, or dark purple.
I read about that awhile back and forgot it, then a month or so later I installed a couple of LED bulbs in a room of my house close to my TV antenna... and I lost a channel in the VHF band.
Later on I remembered about the LED bulb RF emission problem, and I realized that my TV reception was impacted negatively by the LED bulbs I installed near it. So I moved my antenna and got my channel back.
VHF and UHF TV are not that relevant anymore, but some folks still choose the free option rather than pay for crappy limited expensive options from other providers, so this LED bulb interference could be bad as more people install them.