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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.
Someone needs to use this tech to make fake nixies, they'd look great.
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
Given that shorter wavelengths suppress melatonin production, that "bug" may actually be a feature we want to retain.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Yeah well I like my porch light attracting bugs. Bugs attract geckos and geckos are fuckin' awesome.
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 cost of the 40W, as it would most likely burn out a few times in 20 years but you get the point.
LED's have other positives: no warm up time, dimmable, low heat generation, no electric hum and I don't need to climb a ladder to replace a burnt out one every few years! The last one is my favorite.
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?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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... is the basis for the Kruithof curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... 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.
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.
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.
Oh, please. I have had far more hassle from dead CFLs and dead LED bulbs than incandescents. Face it: when a 30 cent bulb dies, not a fuck is given. When a $8-$20 bulb dies in 8 months when it was supposed to last 20 years, fucks are given.
Have you ever read the fine print on LED bulb warranties? Need a receipt *and* the UPC, plus sending it postage paid. Designed to make it untenable to redeem.
Let's see, in the past year I've had... 2 dead CFLs (1 year old), four dead LED bulbs (flickering, globe failures, etc). Don't try to tell me my TCO is a win. No doubt you'll assert I'm "holding it wrong" or some other retarded result of your confirmation bias.
Oh and BTW, DIAF you statist.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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