Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhartzer | Hacker News Reader

I am happy that small, but fairly substantive (and meaningful) policies like this still manage to get through Congress. And that not everything becomes like that "feds are confiscating our light bulbs" fight because of posturing or corruption.

This is a good regulation/law, and it's actually going to be passed. Glad it still happens sometimes.

View on HN

Not all the opposition to the light bulbs regulation was corruption and posturing. Some of it was quite reasonable objections from consumers along the lines of "hey, I buy that product, and there's no good substitute at a reasonable price point." I doubt consumers really care that much about microbeads, which makes them a lot easier to ban.

Yeah, CFL bulbs are icky blue flickering garbage, and the LED bulbs I've used (Hue), while otherwise fine, don't support my dimmer correctly. Using the Hue app isn't as easy as walking over to the light switch, and they won't work anyways, unless I rip out the dimmer - I ended up putting the Hue bulbs in the bathroom, which is at least fun for a joke.

Incandescent bulbs are just a better experience for me right now. I don't think there are any such advantages for microbeads.

There are LED bulbs on the market that have great compatibility with all dimmers. I hope that market forces eventually weed out all of the less compatible LED bulbs. At that point, LED bulbs should be truly interchangeable with incandescents for lighting (heat generation, not so much).

I've got a few of the good ones for dimmers, I have however had a problem with them still. They're too efficient, all of the dimmers I have don't got low enough to be able to actually get them dark at the low end. They're all still fairly bright and I've already gone to bulbs rated at half of what I had originally. I think it's just something that's going to take a bit to actually catch up properly.

True, but it depends. I bought a bunch (16?) of top-end Soraa MR16 bulbs at about $30 apiece to replace the halogens in my new house. This is not something everyone can easily afford.

Of course, it turns out that even though they have great dimmer compatibility, they're not 100% compatible with my magnetic dimmers. I have to trim them to 80% of peak; if I try to run them over 80%, the transformer resets and the bulb turns off. Sometimes they strobe for a few seconds when they're running at max brightness, I haven't solved that issue yet.

So unless I want to replace every transformer at ~$60 a pop or more (plus labor costs if not doing it yourself), plus likely a bunch of switches.. It's either $100 per bulb to go LED, or suffer with not-quite-perfect replacements.

Can't say I've had any experience with magnetic dimmers, but the cheaper dimmer compatible LEDs seem work fine on Triac dimmers.

I think often the answer is "you won't know until you try it". Forward-phase, reverse-phase, symmetrical... Low voltage in particular makes things more complicated.

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/print/volume-9/issue-6/... http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Education-Training/Pages/LCE/Dim...

Why can't the LED controller circuits come with a calibration feature that detects (with user help) the minimum level the dimmer will support, and makes that the all-black point?

Partly because the usual minimum level the dimmer will support is off. That is the all black point :)

I know what you mean though. It'd be nice if there was some way to adjust them to change the brightness curve to match what you'd expect. It's one reason I'm considering something like the Phillips Hue bulbs instead of dimmers in the future despite the cost difference.

NOW there are LEDs on the market. I'm a bit of bulb person and have tried all sorts of LEDs. The other problem is that many of the LED bulbs used to look bad if they were not in a shade. Fortunately that situation has also improved.

There are LED bulbs designed to work in dimmer switches. I don't remember the model, but I had one that worked with my dimmer switch in an old 1970s era building I lived in.

My current apartment came with CFLs and a dimmer switch. They work well with the dimmer. It's a pretty new building though, so perhaps the switch was designed with them in mind. It might be worth looking at new switches to see if they help with LEDs.

I installed the dimmer myself after moving into this apartment somewhat recently, so it's a pretty recent model, whatever that means for a light switch.

> and there's no good substitute at a reasonable price point

Not to mention that the CFL bulbs are poisonous and contain mercury. If they break, they're hazardous.

This is a huge point. When I was young, I broke many lightbulbs playing sports in my basement. Regular old incandescent lightbulbs were perfect for this scenario - cheap to replace, not chemically hazardous if broken, and not turned on all that often so the power consumption wasn't a big deal.

Put in some LEDs and you'll never break one again (or have to change it!).

LEDs are great, and I'm happy they're gaining popularity and their price is coming down. But I'd rather have kids break a 20 cent lightbulb instead of a $5 bulb. Still, a lot of LED bulbs now seems to come in plastic casing, so perhaps they would be more durable - good point!

Given GE's political clout, their negative income tax rate, their patents on CFL bulbs, and how quickly LED's displaced CFL's making it obvious there was a better solution on the horizon, I'm guessing the corruption was on the side pushing the CFL bulbs. It certainly wasn't the lobby for commoditized $.10/bulb incandescents.

Well, it wasn't really about light bulb pricing. It was about conservative vs liberal. Light bulbs were just a handy talking point that could be used in stump speeches as a psuedo-argumentum-ad-absurdum of the left. E.g, "And now they're trying to tell you to get rid of your light bulbs? C'mon!"

Honestly, it was because the mandate came when CFLs were still a bit buzzy (or otherwise immature technologically), so it seemed like a quality sacrifice. (no longer of course; we can probably discuss infinitely whether the mandate helped or hindered the tech).

CFLs are still a quality sacrifice if you care about ease of responsible disposal and the quality of the light. It's fascinating to me to see the divide between people who think fluorescent light is fine and people who are repelled by it.

CFLs also supposedly have a shorter life than incandescents if turned on and off frequently.

My spouse used to be one of the folks who are repelled by fluorescent light. She also failed to notice when I started quietly replacing incandescents with good-quality CFLs.

She did eventually catch on to me, but fortunately the event convinced her to reconsider her opinion.

Light quality really does depend on the bulb. A lot of bulbs are of a color temperature that's neither warm enough, nor close enough to daylight to have a nice feeling. Personally, I've found that the 5500k daylight bulbs to give a much nicer light than even incandescent, but a lot of that is subjective, and most places don't really have a good place to compare light quality.

I actually could not stand fluorscent lights for many years (I would get massive headaches). I recently moved into a new place, and after I light burnt out I was surprised to see a CFL. No issues with headaches and a nice warm white.

CFLs do release mercury, but it's still less mercury than released by coal plants powering inefficient incandescents. Not that I support the ban. And I think there are other problems with CFLs, like causing cancer and affecting sleep (bluer lights cause the brain to produce less melatonin.)

Given that LEDs were inevitably rolling out right about now anyway, helping CFL tech seems totally unnecessary and probably corrupt.

Speaking of which, what kind of light bulbs are people buying these days?

My experience with LED bulbs is that it's hard to find anything as bright as halogens. (I live in an apartment where the main light source takes candelabra-base bulbs, sigh.) They also have super dodgy power supplies and if I put too many on the same circuit the RFI causes my carbon monoxide detector to go off!

I also haven't found any with both a daylight color temperature and a decent CRI. I would like to be able to look at my ColorChecker passport and see the same colors as on my calibrated display. As it stands now if I want to see what color something is in my apartment, I take a picture, apply the profile corrections, and look at it on my monitor!

Any suggestions?

They're not as bright as halogens for sure, but I'm a huge, huge fan of my Philips Hue lights. I share an apartment and brought the lights from my old one; the biggest downer is that they're not dimmer-friendly, so I've had to replace a couple with standard soft-white LEDs, but I love the color range (yeah, they're crappy at green--I don't need green lights) and the configurability to change the way the environment feels.

> what kind of light bulbs are people buying these days

You can't get incandescents anymore in the UK, and I've just bought some halogens in the same form factor. 25× more expensive upfront, but even nicer light.

Set up a few 72W incandescents that you turn on to preview colors?

I am interested in your general question though. My Cree TW have passable colored light, but are just too damn anemic both temperature and intensity. I'm thinking of augmenting with some higher intensity non-CRI-optimized LEDS.

Just because it's a handy talking point doesn't mean it's not true. They did, indeed, tell you to get rid of your light bulbs, and back that up with a law.

(Of course, it's more complicated than partisans might prefer, given that the incandescent ban was supported/sponsored by at least some GOP lawmakers and that when they retook Congress the GOP's efforts to repeal the ban were pro forma at best. But it's still completely true that pushy nanny-state types, of either party, told people to get rid of their light bulbs.)

If they had only told us, that would have been one thing. I could then ignore them and still have useful lighting.

Of course they had to go and ban the only useful light source available.

Yeah I got an LED, because I wanted to test it because they are supposed to be the future. Turns out it is really huge (much bigger than the one I replaced) so it will only fit in some of my lamps and it is extremely yellow. Still that beats the one I tried before, which wasn't able to light anything after the sun had gone down and had such a white color it made everything look like a morgue.

In theory I am supposed to save money and improve the environment, but I have wasted a lot of money buying not good enough bulbs that were far more expensive than real bulbs and I got a car so that ruins the environmental savings times twenty.

If instead of being nanny staters they had put a tax on CO2, that might incentives me to drive slightly less, which would save much more CO2.

Alameda municiple power was participating in the "community night out" events (where you are supposed to have a BBQ on the sidewalk and the police and FD come by and reach out to the community) -- and they were handing out LED bulbs, with the goal to replace all bulbs with LED bulbs by some year.

I love the LED bulbs because I have my workshop, an area in my garage, my laundry room and my walk-in closet all with LED bulbs as I never turn them off.

I am just curious what kind of graft/riders/pork may be attached to a bill that is clearly a no-brainer that this is a good idea to pass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com