Slashdot Mirror
New Crop of LED Filament Bulbs Look Almost Exactly Like Incandescents
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.
Is it 3D printed? No.
Is it the Internet of Things? No.
Is it Elon Musk? No.
How can anyone think this will work?
Seriously just because they burn a few extra watts doesn't mean they need to be fucking illegal.
Someone needs to use this tech to make fake nixies, they'd look great.
I purchased an LED bulb. It cost around $40, and the manufacturer claimed that the bulb would last decades. Unfortunately, it only lasted 6 months!
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.
kicking and screaming into the age of efficiency ?
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.
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.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
i want to go LED so bad but waiting for a good price point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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?
https://www.superbrightleds.co...:
- The Sigless Wonder
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.
cost about the same as incandescent light bulbs?
Forget those new fangled light bulbs, I still burn whale oil to light my house. A little pricey to import from Japan, but well worth the effort in the end.
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 :)
Yeah maybe. But actually no, you're wrong on both counts. They exist and they look good. I read about them months ago on the Budget Light Forum site(flashlight stuff mostly, but cover just about anything to do with LEDs).
Hey, look at this. Ali Express lists 4217 results for 'led filament bulb'. Guess this isn't really cutting edge news.
... but on a very micro scale
"Color temperature" is a meaningless concept with the crazy spectra put out by LEDs and fluorescents. They're getting away with murder making those claims.
77V average forward voltage with 10mA of current and delivers 102 lumens. The high voltage somewhat simplifies the driving circuitry. I'm assuming its around 20 forward elements in series per filament. The overall bulb efficiency is probably 70% of the filament. Overall a pretty nice spectral response from the phosphors and the light seems to look good (not sure as I've only seen video). The lack of heat problems seems believable if the efficiency is as good as is claimed.
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.
This is really going to confuse the interior-designer hipsters. "What do I do: Use new technology that looks old, or waste energy?! Ahhhhhh."
A standard 40W incandescent bulb costs about 80 cents. It makes 450 lumens, similar to an LED filament bulb that uses 4W and costs $12 (from a quick google search). According to EnergyStar, the average light bulb is on for 1142 hours per year. That equates to about 41112 watt hours (41.1 kilowatt hours) saved per year. The average cost of electricity per kilowatt hour is about 12 cents. For that new bulb to save you any money at all, it will have to be around for roughly 100 years.
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
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Are you just going into every thread today and posting retarded hate speech about 3D printers? Maybe a 3D printer killed your mother, or a maybe you're just jealous that you can't even afford a $200 RepRap.
I know you are joking but there are more efficient methods of heating than resistive heating. Namely heat pumps.
How's the color rendition? There are quite a few LED bulbs that look pleasant (from Philips and others), but they all output light only in certain frequency bands. As a result, the color rendition isn't nearly as good as with incandescent. I suspect LEDs will never be as good in terms of color rendition, but are these any better than existing ones?
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.
If you look at the fine print there isn't an LED bulb available for an enclosed light fixture for interior applications
The color temperature of a light source is the temperature of a black body which creates light that is perceived the same as the light of the light source. Spectrum doesn't enter into it, because the human eye only has three different kinds of receptors. If you want to criticize LEDs for something, you need to look at "color rendering", but then nobody claims they're perfect in that regard, and a measure of quality, the color rendering index (CRI), has been introduced to give consumers a chance to choose good quality LEDs (and other types of lights). Professionals in industries where color rendering is important have been using high-CRI fluorescent tubes for a long time because their systems are calibrated to 6500K, and that's just impossible with incandescents.
Or 3-way bulbs like 30-70-100W, etc. I have no problem with good quality LEDs, but they're strictly general purpose, they haven't done the work to get all the different varieties of bulb needed, yet.
Check the current cree bulbs, they removed the fine print.
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 haze. They dim nicely although without changing colour temperature,
The model I got doesn't have a smoothing capacitor though, so they flicker noticeably if you're moving around. I know there are better models but so far it's hard to tell which is which as there are many different sellers on Aliexpress.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
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 that goes into its power supply to heat.
And I actually don't think the OP is really joking. In northern climates, moving away from incandescent lighting will mean that more heating from other sources is required. But even with additional heating needed, it is still going to cost you less in the end at least in terms energy cost, not counting investment cost.
How about the 3-way Cree bulbs that Amazon sells: http://smile.amazon.com/Cree-B...
Would that meet your requirements?
I'm going all automated, so either GE Wink compatible or Hue bulbs. The Hue bulbs are crazy expensive so I really only use those in a few places, but I would love a candalabra sized LED bulb with the Wink wireless controlls, and some filament Wink LED bulbs.
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:
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.
Do what the rest of us do and heat the house with your computer.
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.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
It's been my experience that those who stomp their feet about swapping to the (then) CFLs and the (now) LED bulbs are doing so strictly out of spite. They know they're cheaper to operate but they are standing up against the gub'mint tellin them wut ta do. You will never get them to swap precisely because you want them to. This is why we have laws and regulations. Sometimes we have to force these people to stop holding the world back.
great info, thanks
i also like the durability. much better than bulbs or tubes, but are they fragile in any unexpected way?
and any experiences on their temperature range? i know they don't heat up, i'm talking about using them outside in the winter or in the summer, like in motion detector flood light setups for example
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually some of the energy is going into computing. Information change cost energy and is not released as heat.
You're still a snob, no offense. Throw those shitty 2700K in the trash and move on up to 6000K. Once you realize the crispness of that beautiful white light you won't want to go back. It is especially great in a bathroom and kitchen. Maybe you need to tweeze those eyebrows, pick something out of your teeth, or simply pop a zit- nothing makes the crevices, blemishes, or whatnot stand out like that crisp 6000K. You cannot get a counter cleaner. If there is crud on there, it'll show. Not only have I converted then entire house, but I've also converted my three cars to LED but used 6000K HID headlamps. When good LED headlamps surface, those will get swapped as well.
the kind of idiot that dont need the same level of heating in summer than he need in winter at night?
I have some as well. The flicker is absolutely dreadful, particularly because it is 100Hz rather than the 120Hz it would be in the US. Do not buy until they add smoothing.
Living in a stroboscope is not pleasant.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Don't you mean there are cheaper methods of heating than resistive heating?
Yes, a natural gas furnace is about 4 times cheaper. It makes a lot more sense to burn the gas and capture all heat directly, rather than having it burned at the power plant, converted to electricity (at significant losses), transport it across the country (with even more losses), and then convert the electricity back to heat.
That just seems wrong and breaches several physical laws! How can you get MORE energy than you put in?!
I think you're comparing two different things - Surely the bulb GENERATES one watt of heat per one watt of electricity, while the heat PUMP doesn't generate anything at all - It just MOVES heat from one place to another for that one watt and the heat still has to be made from somewhere!
You are assuming that gas was burned in a power station. Maybe my electric came from a nuclear power station, a hydro electric power station, a wind turbine, ... you get the picture now? Now add in the much higher energy cost of manufacture of either a CF or LED bulb and the picture gets even more complicated.
The basics are that in northern latitudes with long cold nights in winter and centrally heated houses with thermostatic control whether energy efficient bulbs actually save energy is in fact debatable, because the inefficiency of the traditional filament bulb is heat, which is in fact for the most part in northern latitudes is actually useful.
The light source is more blue than daylight, which some people find uncomfortable. Use more red-balanced LEDs and something like f.lux or refshift to change the monitor's color balance.
Oh, wait...
In fact, virtually NOTHING useful has ever come from Africans, ever.
Now add in the much higher energy cost of manufacture of either a CF or LED bulb and the picture gets even more complicated.
Who says the energy cost is much higher ? They sell LED bulbs for a few dollars now, so maybe $1 in energy cost. That's trivial compared to the electricity consumed by an incandescent bulb.
The basics are that in northern latitudes with long cold nights in winter and centrally heated houses with thermostatic control whether energy efficient bulbs actually save energy
Most lamps are not mounted in places where heat is required. A lot of it goes into the ceiling. So, at best you can get partial use of the waste heat in very specific conditions: electric heating, long dark winter nights, low mounted lamps. People with natural gas heating don't benefit, and during the summer with the A/C running, the waste heat from the lights is not just wasted, but the A/C has to run harder to get rid of it.
While LEDs and CFLs are certainly more energy-efficient than incandescents, there are some side costs.
Crafting the integrated power supply takes a lot of materials: plastic or ceramic case, circuit board, electric components, solder, potting compound, heatsink, screws.
Some lamps have a crappy power factor, which introduces need for more reactive power compensation equipment in the electric grid.
A convenience store could house a selection of generic incandescents in 2-4 different wattages from 1-2 manufacturers in a relatively small space. There is much larger selection of LEDs and CFLs. The warehouse space needed to store all the various models has become significantly larger.
But their total lifecycle cost may be less than an incandescent if they last long enough.
Reliability of a $10-30 lamp is far more critical than a $0.50 lamp. It's all well and good to say that the lifecycle cost of your 10,000 hour, $10 lamp is lower than a 2000 hour $0.50 lamp. However, if your $10 lamp dies early, and it costs $7 to ship to the manufacturer for a replacement or you've lost your sales receipt or (most likely) it's out of the 1 year warranty period, then you would have been far better off getting an incandescent.
I have 13 very high quality LEDs in my kitchen (dimmable 10W PAR20 w/ 2950K color and 95 CRI). In two years, 3 of the 13 have failed. I'm lucky that they're high end lamps with a 5 year warranty and Sylvania has simply shipped me a new lamp (no return of the old one) each time one dies. If these had been OTS, they would have been out of warranty by now, despite having a 20,000 hour "rating".
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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 bought at discount so they just didn't move them well enough. Then again, I've had a 25% failure rate of these 20,000h lamps in just 2 years (thank goodness for the 5 year warranty), so maybe that's part of the problem too.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Incandescent bulbs have always been available. Isn't the marketplace about choice? Why don't you use those and just pay the higher power bill each month? How were CFL's "forced on" anyone?
I think you're a complaint looking for a place to land.
Others mentioned heat pumps, but even an standard efficiency natural gas furnace or wood stove is likely more efficient, in that you are directly using the primary fuel for heating, rather than converting it to electricity at lower efficiency and then losing some to transmission before it hits your resistor.
I have an overhead bathroom fixture that is a combination light / exhaust / heater. I'd love to replace the tungsten with an LED, but I'm concerned if an LED can hold up to a hot environment such as this without failing or - worst case scenario - catching fire due to overheating.
If we had the balls to address the actual problem, carbon emissions, with the market solution, a carbon tax, then we wouldn't have to mess around with piece-meal progress like regulating light bulb specifications. If that $0.30 incandescent bulb added $0.75 to your power bill per month, instead of just $0.10, then the $10 LED bulbs would fly off the shelves and into light sockets just like magic. Home insulation and weatherstripping would gain magical flying powers too.
The system as a whole is far from 100% efficient. Once you add transmission losses and generation losses, electric resistive heating will be probably below 25% for the system as a whole, as most of the heat will be getting made outside of the building that's being heated.
Gas heating would be far more efficient as a system, since the losses in shipping the gas to your house to burn will be less than shipping the gas to the power station, burning it there to make heat, turning that into electricity, transmitting the electricity, then turning what's left back to heat in the building.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Because an incandescent bulb is natural? I didn't know they grew on trees *eye roll*
Sure, but in case you didn't notice our planet is a radioactive ball of rock. You can just pump heat out of the ground and the Earth, being radioactive, will replace that heat. So the heat is free and, within reason, unlimited.
If this ball of rock wasn't radioactive it wouldn't have liquid metal in the interior, it would have gone all still and quiet millions of years ago and we'd never have existed.
These aren't new. In fact, the linked article is nearly a year old.
I can buy these at my local Menards.
http://tinyurl.com/l3dfdun
I have. A Philips. Lasted about a year and a half. The light would flash 4 times with about a half second off period between each flash and then turn off for about 20 seconds and repeat the process.
For a ~$35 bulb at the time I got it, I was rather disappointed (this is for a MU10 style bulb). Sure the LEDs may last, but at least for mine the rest of the circuit appears to have had a fault.
That just seems wrong and breaches several physical laws! How can you get MORE energy than you put in?!
I think you're comparing two different things - Surely the bulb GENERATES one watt of heat per one watt of electricity, while the heat PUMP doesn't generate anything at all - It just MOVES heat from one place to another for that one watt and the heat still has to be made from somewhere!
You're the one who's comparing two different things.
With a heat pump, you put in X watts of electricity, and get 3X watts of thermal energy added to your house. The heat comes from outdoors, from latent solar heating of the air, or the ground, but that's not really relevant, since you don't pay for it. The only energy you pay for is the X watts of energy to run the pump.
Nobody said anything about "generating" anything, and it's not relevant to the point.
... now we can get back to nixie tubes, like the good Lord intended.
Given that three-way fixtures use two hot terminals with differing numbers of filaments tied to each, it should not be that difficult to build an LED bulb with this same design assuming they can make whatever switching circuitry small enough. It would simply operate like two separate lightbulbs in one housing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Use more red-balanced LEDs and something like f.lux or refshift to change the monitor's color balance.
I misread that as "redshift" -- I though that you were proposing to launch the monitor into space at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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 factor of 10 or more).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yep. It's the magic of stealing heat from somewhere else instead of insisting on generating it all at one point.
Yes, LEDs are far more efficient and use less electricity yada yada. However, it's pretty much guaranteed that this will not lead to cost savings.
Historically, every time a cheaper lighting technology came along, from candles to oil lamps to gas lamps to Edison bulbs to CFLs, people simply increase the amount of lighting and the length of time (into the night) that they keep the house lit up. I see nothing to suggest that conversion to LEDs will change this trend.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
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.
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.
Stefan Axelsson
My heat pump can move more heat with less energy than a glowing wire will emit.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I've had monitors I wanted to do that to.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Nope. LED lights look 'similar' to incandescent only until you look at the spectrum of it. Three narrow lines don't come near to the light from a 'normal', 'natural' thermal radiation. Which is the one your eyes evolved for. In LED light, everything looks grayish, dull and discolored. The only reason people don't see the difference is they don't buy the 'natural' lights anymore.
It is. When you heat something like wood or metal to a very high temperature, it emits energy as natural light. LED lights are not natural at all. It's okay if you want to use it, but many people are sensitive to the high intensity UV radiation from LED's. As such we want incandescents or CCFL bulbs to avoid LED.
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 that heat energy winds up inside. Depending on the temperatures it gets to, you can get efficient heating and cooling from one unit, depending on which way you send the heat, and the unit is usually referred to as a heat pump.
There are limits on efficiency, set by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You have to be able to make the outside colder in order to have heating more efficient than just resistive heating, and that gets harder and harder when the temperature difference rises. There's a theoretical limit to efficiency, and AFAIK no heat pump comes close. If temperatures get down to about -20C, a standard house heat pump isn't getting significant energy from outside, so it would be just as well to use the electricity in conventional electric heaters, and burning gas is a whole lot cheaper, so you usually don't see heat pumps in houses in areas where it gets really cold. I do have a portable unit, usually used as an air conditioner, and one fall it worked quite nicely when the boiler went out.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If it doesn't get very cold where you live, a heat pump will be reasonably close to as cost-efficient as burning gas, and you may wish to have one of those instead of a furnace.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Rough service" bulbs are exempt, so they will remain available for quite a while.
Oddly, in my area electricity is so over-priced compared to gas that it's cheaper to run the gas auxiliary heat than the heat pump even at a COP of 4.
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?
I'm glad your ceiling is nice and toasty. The people are usually located on the floor, though.
Yes, you can't tell the difference in the spectrum of the light when you are staring at the light, so when looking at objects whose color is purely emisive, like TVs and monitors then you can represent the entire gamut of color that the human eye can see by combining three primary colors.
But this breaks down when you are looking at objects that are reflecting that light, because the way those materials reflect light absolutely is wavelength specific. In that case if you have two lights that appear to be the exact same color when staring at them (or when shining them against a white wall), but have different spectra, then objects illuminated with those two lights can look very different because they absorb and reflect those spectra differently. A normal person won't be able to quantify why they look different, but they will know that something is "off" and may get an impression of the lighting in vague terms like mood or character.
So no, you can't fake a lighting spectrum with just 3 primaries, which is why producing good LED lighting has been much harder than producing good LED monitors.
I bet you're allergic to monoxide glutamate, too.
And different substances emit spectrum at different wavelengths when heated. And, more specifically, a tungsten filament doesn't emit the same spectrum as sunlight. In fact, a white LED is closer to sunlight if you look at the curve, except for the spike in the blue range.
So, again, there's nothing "natural" about tungsten filaments. Natural is a meaningless word, anyhow.
Natural means "Basically, the same shit we have been using since lightbulbs were invented." People who say LED lighting is not "natural" are people who just do not like change or progress of any kind.
Cree is a respected brand name. There are sellers of LED lamps that have CREE in huge bold letters on the box, but the Cree components are only the LEDs. Look carefully for manufacturer information before buying.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
surely he means natural light from nuclear explosions as being the only acceptable light?
Just as a data point I bought something like this recently (http://edisonlightglobes.com/Shop/product-category/usa-product/hardware-usa-product/120v-led/). And my wife and I both love the soft yellow led lighting for the bed room.
GP is probably referring to the continuous spectrum of a black-body emitter.
Try putting a spectrometer (eg a CD) on an LED or CFL bulb and compare that with the spectrum of an incandescent. Now, that awful banding you see on the former applies to actual objects as well, which leads to things looking "unnatural".
That said, phosphors have improved a bit lately so the problem isn't quite as bad as it used to be.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife