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Comment by Tarball10 | Hacker News Reader

California's JA8 certification requires LED bulbs to meet specific criteria related to efficiency, lifespan, and light quality.

- Efficiency >= 45 lumens per watt

- CRI >= 90

- R9 Color Rendering value >= 50

- Rated life >= 15000 hours

- Minimum dimming level <= 10%

- Flicker <= 30%

Theoretically if a bulb is listed as JA8 compliant (and the certification isn't fake) you know it at least meets these thresholds.

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> - Rated life >= 15000 hours

And what do you do when the lightbulb burns out after only 3 years? The product has long since changed SKU, the manufacturer gets to claim they fixed any deficiencies (and it'll take years to find out if they are telling the truth), and you long since lost any proof of purchase.

Yeah there's not much you could personally do, other than maybe report it to the California Energy Commission. Bulbs need to be lab tested and the results submitted to the CEC, but I'm not sure how the lifespan testing is actually done, how accurate it is, or how easily it could be manipulated.

> CRI >= 90

This one was a little tricky for me when I was buying bulbs last year. I prefer warm-colored bulbs, and I was kind of confused why Amazon kept on saying it was refusing to ship bulbs to me. It took me a while before I realized it was because I'm in CA and the CRI was too low, and Amazon didn't have a way to just filter by CRI. Eventually my wife just ended up finding some warm-ish LED bulbs at a local store.

It's crazy to me that in 2023, Amazon still refuses to offer meaningful product filtering. The miscategorization of items has been written about many times, and the best explanation for why they're not fixing it is basically "people like digging through piles of trash to find the good stuff". It's an infuriating experience and these days I typically use Google to search Amazon because their basic search will many times fail to show the product when I search for the exact product name or model designation, even when they do in fact carry it. On Google it'll be the first result. Google obviously can't filter Amazon products by category, let alone other parameters, but it's just so frustrating vs using other sites like McMaster-Carr, DigiKey, etc.

What does it mean to specify flicker in percents?

> Light source in combination with specified control shall provide “reduced flicker operation” when tested at full light output as specified in JA10, where reduced flicker operation is defined as having percent amplitude modulation (percent flicker) less than 30 percent at frequencies less than 200Hz.

https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-2...

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