The Dubai Lamp: The “World’s Most Efficient” LED Light Bulb
kbelectricpa.com
kbelectricpa.com
Dubai is a city of over 3-million in the middle of the Arabian desert. They have air-conditioned bus stops, even though they are under-utilized because everyone drives.
Nothing in Dubai is sustainable. Changing LED lamps is Dubai in the name of sustainability is the very embodiment of greenwashing.
This is cool tech, but it's absolutely pointless.
Edit: I didn't mention the elephant in the room that the entire country's economy is based on cheap fossil fuel extraction.
I have a friend who lives in dubai, Ill ask her about where their power comes from as well..
I wonder how many datacenters are in dubai.
We bought a new house this year, and replaced all the lights with LED lights - and our power bill is really low.
in 2001 when the Enron fiasco happened, I received a power bill for $900 for one month, and my usage behavior didn't change from previous months. It was during the dot com crash and I wasn't working - and I couldnt pay the bill had my power shut off and had to borrow money from my parents to pay the criminals.
So I am very power conscious...
Oil as well I believe. Also the water is reverse osmosis derived. Which also requires a fair bit of power
> It pumps around 2 Bcm of gas per day to the UAE.
http://www.gasprocessingnews.com/news/qatar-has-no-plan-to-s...
So Qatar was being punished for supplying natural gas to UAE? Why and by whom?
Also why is Yemen being genocided by the sauds with US MIC weapons? (When I worked at this RFID company - and we were bought by Lockheed - several muslim employees quit and said "we will not work with a company that sells weapons to kill arabs/muslims)
Also why are Uyigar children being raped and beaten and murdered in China?
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS WORLD.???
Also, the flat rate on your power bill is 5% of annual rent (split over 12 months) - it was a hidden tax that was 3/4 of (at least my) power bill. so i don't see how they're shaving 90%, unless they mean the variable part. In which case my water heater (in non-summer months cos tap water was HOOOTTTT), washing machine, fridge, etc, begged to differ.
Air con was a separate bill due to district cooling.
Beach with cooling system because it's TOO HOT on summer!
PS: I was 15 years there and saw that you're wrote. Other example - stable for expensive horses with AC.
Yes I agree that Germany has a weird relationship with science. Homeopathy is very big here. Same with plant-based remedies, which are sold (and recommended!) along with allopathic medicines in pharmacies by pharmacists. Nothing wrong with plant-based nature remedies, but they don't get the rigorous testing that allopathic medicines get.
I'm not sure that's true anymore. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Dubai) oil now accounts for only 1% of their GDP.
Maybe Dubai managed to diversify its economy with tourism and what-else but it's rather obvious to understand that such a city cannot thrive on its own (without an extensive, petroleum-based food/energy delivery system).
"Before oil was discovered in the 1950s the UAE's economy was dependent on fishing and a declining pearl industry. But since oil exports began in 1962, the country's society and economy have been transformed." (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14703998)
The question is, do you believe the economy of Dubai would decrease by more than 1% if all petroleum business within the UAE were halted tomorrow? I think it's clear that yes, the economy would react significantly. That 1% number comes from a two-year-old shill piece from Bloomberg (click through the Wikipedia citation if you don't believe me) that doesn't show its data or the breakdown by sector for all of Dubai's GDP.
Surely it's better to have a public transport system under utilized (so there are enough vehicles to meet demand) than over utilized (so everyone is crammed on like sardines)?
A quick Google search would show that oil accounts for less than 1% of Dubai's (which is not a country btw) GDP, which is less than the US on both a percentage and total monetary amount (adjusted for population) basis.
If you try to optimize the loading time of your website front-page, look at optimizing the compression of the 100MB video that's auto-loading (or even better, removing it), not the 1kB logo.
If you ever feel good shaving off a few bytes from the logo, your work is literally bulls*t.
We live in a climate emergency, there's no time for shaving a few watts to feel good while being still allowed to live in air-conditioned palaces in the middle of the desert.
Nobody needs permission to live comfortably where they're at. It is far more sustainable to live in a warm climate, with electric cooling (keeping in mind electricity comes from cleaner sources like nuclear and solar) vs living in a cold climate with gas heating.
You don't need a palace, a AC-cooled beach and a couple Bentleys to live comfortably. The people in the UAE that are using problematic amounts of fossil fuels are not just "living comfortably".
Point being, it would reduce power consumption probably 2 orders of magnitudes more to stop cooling down beaches and pools than to switch a bunch of lights to ultra-efficient LEDs.
> It is far more sustainable to live in a warm climate, with electric cooling (keeping in mind electricity comes from cleaner sources like nuclear and solar) vs living in a cold climate with gas heating.
You forgot to mention the world "palace". It is far more energy-efficient to heat 40m2 per person than it is to cool down 400m2 per person.
You are also conveniently ignoring reality. The UAE electricity production is 99% fossil fuels (mainly petrol/gas). It is also possible to live in a cold climate with electric heating (regular electric or heat pumps). Most northern countries are much more advanced in this area.
Also there aren't really all that many mansions and palaces. The median home size is larger in the USA than it is in Dubai. Add R-1 zoning and the longer average driving distances and it becomes clear that the average American has a bigger carbon footprint.
Finally, there is a difference between what is possible in theory and what is achievable in practice. Retrofitting every home and building to go from gas heating to electric heating is not very easy.
Moving electricity to cleaner sources, on the other hand, is well under way with nuclear and solar.
First, this is just not true. UAE's per capita footprint is 21tCO2eq/yr while in the USA it's 15.7 as of 2017.
Second, neither UAE nor the USA are close to the per capita footprint targets that we should reach in order to stabilize the climate (between 1 and 3tCO2eq/yr). Just as I wouldn't care much if a murderer killed 15 or 21 people. They are not an example for me to follow.
Regarding cooled beaches, here is a Guardian article about it. It cites other luxurious excesses that you're trying to brush off, such as : 30,000 mature trees are scheduled to be shipped to Dubai to help landscape a new Tiger Woods-designed golf course that will be bordered by "22 palaces and 75 mansions".
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/dec/18/artifici...
> Finally, there is a difference between what is possible in theory and what is achievable in practice. Retrofitting every home and building to go from gas heating to electric heating is not very easy.
> Moving electricity to cleaner sources, on the other hand, is well under way with nuclear and solar.
In practice, both of these things have to be done urgently, with an extra-focus on energy use reduction. It doesn't matter if rich people in Dubai don't like it. It is also much more easily achievable than building spaceships to Mars, or whatever other escape solution to the growing damage we are inflicting to our planet.
Just incredibly sad.
We should be punishing product manufacturers whose products fall in the bottom quartile of life expectancy - returns by Freepost (receiver pays the postage) and get £10 compensation + money back or replacement.
Perhaps then we could start addressing some of the planned obsolescence in low value goods.
To answer your question, it really depends. If they run cool, are a good design, and aren't defective, they will last incredibly long. Often, one or more of those things isn't true.
Customer must just be easily able to tell apart better LEDs and they can just by looking how many LED filaments per watt they contain.
I think China can make plenty of those if they become fashionable.
I would still gladly buy it if I was sure that higher prices actually pay for more undervolted LEDs and is not a marketing gimmick to "instill sense of quality".
When I make buying decisions, I often struggle with exactly that: I have no way of telling what is "good" or "bad" quality, and I have to much experience with expensive stuff being repackaged cheap crap, so I end up buying cheap crap more often than I should.
One thing I really hate are discounts.
brand: this product is worth X brand, during some random days in the year: GUESS WHAT IT'S JUST X/2 TODAY YOLO me, always: you are ripping me off during the rest of the year
IMO, interior designers and light manufacturers need to work together to make attractive energy-efficient lighting solutions. For example, recessed halogen-based spotlights are a nightmare for LEDs - there's nowhere for the heat to go. Even if you get an LED bulb from aliexpress, it won't last long because of the lack of proper heatsinking. Meanwhile there's plenty of surface area that could be utilized for heatsinking if the fixture is designed for LEDs from the ground up.
I've been using LED lighting at home for a decade+ now. Some bulbs I bought back then still work. Many of the newer ones are failing fast, obviously struggling with heat in the fixtures they're in, which has been bothering me. The bits I like best are adhesive LED strips driven by a stand alone power supply with PWM dimmer in the living room. They're mounted in aluminum backed diffuser rails. I expect that stuff will last near as long as I do. They're under-driven and run cool, and the power supply seems high quality.
That's the eternal question: How many computer scientists does it take to change a lightbulb?
ǝnssᴉ ǝɹɐʍpɹɐɥ ɐ sᴉ ʇɐɥꓕ ǝuoN
What would be interesting to me is how reliable the stated 1 Watt of those Phillips E14 Candlelights are, mine from Osram are rated at 2,5Watts. Otherwise looking very similar in specifications.
> The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs. … The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.
2 year guarantees being another example: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers...
And this is without dimmers. In the hallway, where there is a dimmer, the LED lamps (that are marked as supporting use with dimmer) dies after only a few months. Our hallway is dark at the moment, because it is just too much effort to replace the lamps.
IMHO the biggest boost for LED lamps would be for the longevity ratings to at least somewhat correlate with real world life time...
And do you keep your bulbs on 24/7? The mass market, "budget" (really, the baseline bulbs that most people buy; ~$1.25/bulb) LED bulbs are usually rated for around 10,000 hours of on-time (which is ~1.14 years).
The mass market, higher end bulbs (namely from Cree; ~$2.50/bulb) are rated for around 20,000-25,000 hours of on-time (~2.28 and ~2.85 years, respectively).
I have about 50+ el-cheapo Feit LED can fixtures from Costco installed in my house now for over 3 years without a single failure. Previously there would be a PAR13 bulb failure at least once a month.
The downside of course is no bulb-change-with-a-stick, but since we're talking 20 minutes of pulling a ladder out every 4 (or more!) years to replace a $20 fixture vs. 5 minutes once a month for a $5 bulbs I'm pretty happy.
I just got started with em in December, have already killed one, and wonder how the warranty process goes when you admit that you do, in fact, occasionally use your lights for longer.
The terms are pretty unclear.
The dimmable ones where $18 Osram ones though, and they died first of all.
edit: more specifically, a lot of this one: https://www.ikea.com/se/sv/p/ledare-led-ljuskaella-gu10-600-...
[0]: https://www.homedepot.com/p/EcoSmart-60-Watt-Equivalent-A19-...
[1]: https://www.homedepot.com/p/C-Cattleya-75-Watt-Equivalent-GU...
Bought some brand name ones recently and so far (~2 years) they are doing ok; I can't recall having replaced any since I bought them, but I only replace them when they're out. If there's room, I write in sharpie when I do it so I can see how long they go. My CFLs are often in the 5-8 year range.
The failure of the LED element itself (in the model that I put under a microscope) was an internal wire burning through. The LED elements actually contained two LEDs in series connected by a tiny wire.
I assembled a working LED bulb from two broken ones that had failed in different ways. Not that I would ever dare to use such a thing in normal operations.
Here is a bad picture of an undamaged wire, diagonally at the center. The image shows approximately 1.5x1.5mm.
The glass bulb is quite reliable, it's often the filament that dies many times quicker.
(I'm confused why so many people feel the need to differentiate the reliability of the power supply from the LED chip in this context.)
The problem is that trying to cram a tiny power supply and a hot LED chip into a small bulb without a good heat sink is inherently unreliable.
Especially if you put that bulb into a completely enclosed light.
Current "Feit Electric" bulbs - outfitted the house with them top to bottom when they were about 30 cents/bulb due to a government rebate + deep discount at Lowes, actually seem to live up to expectations. I'm not sure when I've last replaced one, and a big box of them bought later for spares (at about $1/bulb) is so far mostly unused.
The other thing is that even crappy LEDs with low efficiency and reliability save so much electricity that you come out ahead, compared to a 1000h incandescent, even if they do fail after 1000h as well. Maybe not better for the environment, but microeconomically OK.
LED bulbs from Ikea are cheap garbage and die quickly.
220V 10W E27 Osram bulbs are pricey but reliable (but I don't have as many of them, so maybe I was just lucky).
I've never had a lamp with non-replaceable, built-in LEDs die. Probably because the power supply is not directly next to the LED, and the LEDs are typically attached to a big heat sink.
The tiny GU10 LED spots are the worst and die about as quickly as the halogen spots they replaced.
Recently accidentally picked up ikea's tradfris (zigbee bulbs, dimmable (but not with dimmer), multi-white) and have gone on a zigbee spree after that. I hope they last.
Still happy to turn on the bright ceiling lights to find something/see well/etc.
The problem with E14's was that at least in Germany I knew they exist, but couldn't consistently find them. I'd regularly find 60W equivalent non-dimmable or cold white. Only Phillips and Ikea (it seems) had 60w (classically dimmable) warm E14s. They did not generally last that long
I've taken many of them back. They give me replacements if I can show them the receipt... Maybe a good counter to poor quality LED lamps is making stores perceive them as a huge hassle with high return rates.
Are you in an area with unstable power?
...but never in the home lighting LED sense.
If you look at new residential light fixtures at your home improvement store, you’ll notice that they’re starting to shift over to built in LEDs. This allows them to use larger and better thermally regulated power supplies, and to provide better airflow over the individual LEDS.
I actually believe that the light bulb form factor is going to end up dying out in our lifetime.
Also, you need to read the package, even with Cree: many state "not suitable for fully enclosed fixtures". They make ones expressly for this, and are required to prevent the lamp from cooking itself.
On top of that, many of those scammy brands say things like "x year warranty", when they really mean "1,000 hours per year" warranty. Cree warranties their bulb for tens of thousands of hours... I have a much older 100 watt equivalent that has been burning 24/7 for over 5 years (somewhere around 50k hours), still ain't dead yet.
Now that the government is (theoretically) back on track, I'd love to see the FTC go after LED lamp manufacturers that straight up lie about their lifetime estimates; I don't care if their prices go up, all they'd do is start matching Cree in price.
Fun fact: Cree isn't just the world's best LED (as in, the actual diodes) manufacturer, they're also one of the world's leading GaN power module manufacturers, and all of their own in-house knowhow is used in their own consumer bulbs.
Due to how they work, most LED lights have color rendering index[1] of 80 or below. We have the technology, and there are some that have CRI above 95 within a reasonable price, but they are not so easy to find. It would be nice if there were more LED lights with CRI above 95 especially in the 4000K to 5500K range. I have one at home and the light is just beautiful.
He says 80 is "ok" but I'm not aware of consumer lamp manufacturers that will dare go lower.
I'm glad these exist, but personally I wouldn't want them in my house. Maybe would be good for lighting prison cells or something.
https://www.usa.philips.com/c-w/support-home/support-contact...
Go to products->lighting.
Here is a direct link to the Swedish form: https://www.lighting.philips.se/support/kontakt/kontakta-oss...
Anyways, the main thing is that these lamps use more filament-strips than usual led bulb, thus allowing them to run cooler and last longer. Unfortunately, they are only available in Dubai (afaik).
[1]: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
They are rated for 15,000 hours, and so are regular LEDs.
The solution is very simple: Return any LED that doesn't last the specified time. Manufactures will very rapidly start making changes if everyone did that.
You can just write the installation date with a Sharpie on the bulb, or keep track of them in a spreadsheet.
I've been doing it for a couple years now, and based on my data I don't think I'll ever need to buy a bulb again. My bulbs last around 1,000 hours, not even remotely close to the promised 15,000 hours.
So I just return them and get new ones.
Never asked me for proof of purchase either. Replaced bulbs have worked fine for a few years now.
Agreed. I think this is why Energy Star rated LED lamps require such a long warranty. Eg, Philips Hue products have a two year warranty, unless they carry an Energy Star, in which case it's three.
It's such a common misconception I'm really shocked that EU has never made a better effort to clarify it.
EU does not enforce any warranty period by manufacturers. Zero. What it does enforce however, is the seller's responsibility for the product they sold. And this responsibility is at least 2 years(it's actually 6 years for most electronics and other products), but....it only covers manufacturing defects. That is the key word here. Any defects found in the first 6 months are presumed to be the result of manufacturing issues and the seller has to fix/replace the item for the buyer without asking for any proof of how the defect occured. But after 6 months, the responsibility shifts - it's the consumer who has to prove that the defect is a result of manufacturing problem. As I am sure you can appreciate, it's extremely difficult for most items. In theory you could call upon this law even after 5 years after buying a bulb and say that the bulb broke due to a manufacturing defects and the seller would have to replace it - but it's up to you to prove it.
You're right it is often misunderstood, in part because shops will say "oh, you have to contact the manufacturer" which is fraud AFAICT, but seems to be extremely common.
Under UK's CRA there's effectively no end to a warranty, if the product could reasonably be expected to still work. But I thought the EU Directive only specified 2 years minimum for countries to apply ... do you happen to know a reference for the 6 years, please?
LEDs themselves are very cheap.
For individual LEDs, the cost of the package costs more than the LED itself.
See 6m55s in the video.
Does it last 3x longer?
You'd get the same (longevity) gains from taking a "regular" LED bulb and running it at lower power. You'd get less light output, though.
My guess is it's very difficult to make money with superior products in this sort of consumer market without government to force a level playing field where your competitors are obliged to offer a genuinely better product and/or better price to make the sale.
Flickering can be addressed by running LEDs in DC mode and CCFLs with electronic ballasts, but both costs a little bit more money and our current society is geared for the cheapest possible product which means you have to skimp on components.
Color spectrum can be addressed by adding more phosphors (more expensive) to CCFLs. With LEDs it can be addressed by not using only blue leds with a yellow phosphor and calling it "white". True RGB LEDs are more expensive.
Every time I visit my folks place which doesn't use incandescent anymore, I am always struck by how dull and desaturated it looks because of the energy-efficient lighting.
There is more to lighting than energy-efficiency, there is also health to consider.
Our bodies didn't evolve under a flickering light source and they also didn't evolve under narrowband color spectrums.
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-536532-Dimmable-X-Filament-Ef...
It is much easier to make high CRI LED fixtures than to make incandescent lamps more energy-efficient.