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Comment by muser8 | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic summary!

I wonder if the economics will make enough sense to overcome entrenched interests and the legislation backing them.

It be great to have efficient incandescent light and put the failed promises of LED longevity behind us.

As far as I know, there isn't a law banning incandescent lamps. The law stated that such lighting needs to achieve a certain level of efficiency or greater, which in effect banned existing 1% efficient incandescent lights.

> It be great to have efficient incandescent light and put the failed promises of LED longevity behind us.

In my experience, the main failure mode of LED bulbs is the power supply -- they engineer every penny out of them even at the cost of reliability. Second, nearly all bulbs are dimmable, which complicates the power supply, because customers faced with dimmable vs non-dimmable will pick the dimmable one.

Another factor is if you read those claims about 20 year lifetimes and such, often there is a footnote saying something like "assuming it is on for 3 hours a day or less".

Finally, you are assuming that this new technology won't suffer the same fate as the LED bulbs. If they take off, they will be cost reduced at the expense of longevity. I saw the same thing happen in the era of floppy disks -- over time the price was reduced by a factor of 20 but reliability went down in parallel.

It's the pure penny pinching form of Muntzing (just cutting parts out to see what still works).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

There seem to be two dominant pop commercial successes, those where brand means everything and cost is increased well beyond any utility to signal wealth, and brand AND reliability mean nothing (because like your mattress it'll be a few years later anyway) which is just a race to the bottom.

My heuristic is to just buy LEDs made by Phillips or GE, since invariably any generic or store-brand LED I've tried seems to lack rectification and/or filtering and stobes at 60 or 120 hz. I haven't tried any fancy/expensive "smart" programmable bulbs, but plain ones I do get seem pretty reasonably priced.

I have a 60w Phillips Endura LED bulb that has been continuously lit since about 2014. Quality parts last.

It’s an aptly named product then. Quite rare these days.

IIRC, it was a product designed for a huge Federal RFP. So it was built to meet a meaningful standard.

The facilities guys at my former employer were very excited about it as they did an LED pilot previously that didnt go well.

Undoubtedly it is not producing the same color spectrum as new, as phosphors fade over time, its blue spike is getting wider and taller, so it is always producing more and more blue light, slowly permanently blinding you while disrupting your circadian rhythms, increasing your chances of having diabetes and heart disease, and taking years off your life. But at least you saved a buck.

Sunlight contains much more blue light than the output of any LED bulb. This scaremongering about blue content has no scientific backing at all.

Only because the sun is much brighter than any LED, but when comparing the colors of the spectrum output, the sun's color spectrum is flat compared to LED, which has what is known as a "blue spike." Most of the light a high efficiency LED outputs is blue because all high efficiency LED are blue LED. Only phosphors allow it to output other colors. And the more the LED is used, the more the phosphors fade, the more the output spectrum shifts to blue. And there is more and more scientific backing showing the problems with LED becoming more concerning. Here is a summary of one scientific study.[1] There are myriad more, and more and more are being published.

[1] https://lightaware.org/2018/01/led-lighting-may-be-contribut...

I've so far had good success with the ones Yuji sells; they are conceptually like buying a PC directly from Intel: Yuji makes LEDs (I'm not aware of them fabbing the semiconductor wafers in-house, nor synthesizing the phosphors in-house, but they develop them) that pride themselves in optical quality (using double and triple phosphor systems for CRI 95+ and CRI 98+, respectively) to justify their ~1$/W (electrical) price tag for strips of the lower grade (about double for the higher grade).

My main ceiling light is a now-discontinued remote phosphor 10W bulb, where the LED chip is covered by a loose plastic dome that is infused with the phosphor. The scattering gives a really wide and even light cone to partially illuminate the ceiling for extra diffusion. IIRC it was rated 20k hours probably due to the PSU, though I operate it uncontained for best (passive) cooling (and because I don't look at the socket it's hanging from anyways, lest I get an afterimage of the dome on my retina from staring at the lamp, so the non-fancy fixture doesn't bother me).

The PSU I got for some ultra-warn-white (iirc 1900K) strip (5m of 20W/m 24V PWM-able) from them (a knob on it does PWM dimming (iirc) just past the audible range)) was like 80 or 90 bucks, on top of the iirc ~110 bucks for the strip itself.

Given they don't seem to sell in normal retail stores, I'm not worried about brand inflation/"paying for the name", given their marketing is focused on spectrum measurements and color performance with the listed prices being "affordable" (1$/W @ 20ct/kWh means it costs as much to buy as the next 5000 hours of runtime will cost in electricity; I take "twice as much total operating cost than with literally free/gifted bulbs" as "affordable").

> the failed promises of LED longevity

LEDs last remarkably long if used correctly. You can make a light that will easily last thousands/dozens of thousands of hours. What doesn't last is a typical LED lightbulb for legacy sockets, because of the planned obsolescence/race to the bottom, and because it's a complete device (power supply, heatsink etc) which is far too powerful for its form-factor. Not sure what of that you expect to change.

LED phosphors begin to fade immediately. Within dozens of hours of use it will produce noticeably different light, getting bluer and bluer over time.

Check out Dubai Lamps: https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

> Dubai Lamps are special LED lamps designed by Philips for high efficiency and very long operational life. A simple design change reduces stress and excess heat that otherwise significantly lowers the mean time before failure of regular LED lamps

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