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Just use an LED that produces the same color. They 100% exist.

I agree that incandescent is better than cold LED. A little shopping and consumer research will 100% find you exactly the LED you want.

It doesn't look or feel the same to me. Maybe something to do with CRI (I don't really understand that).

I am not switching to LEDs... It would be wasteful to throw away something that works great and replace it with something new that doesn't work as well. I like incandescent, and my 40 year old reading lamp and a few extra bulbs will last forever running a few hours a night dimmed to ~20W.

"This is why I resent the laws banning incandescent lights."

and

"my 40 year old reading lamp and a few extra bulbs will last forever running a few hours a night dimmed to ~20W."

You resent the laws although they barely affect you. And it's time for me to take a break from discussion threads.

> It doesn't look or feel the same to me.

I used to be in this camp before branching out and trying some different LEDs. Unless it is literally the glowing filament that you like looking at, which is reasonable, you can definitely find a bulb that looks and feels the same.

That was my point in repeating myself saying that it 100% exists. If you’re not in a place to financially experiment with a few bulbs that’s different. Stating that LEDs can’t produce the color you want is wrong. I would go as far as to say that you can find an LED that produces a color you prefer over incandescent.

What’s your recommendation for a quality sub-2700K bulb?

I settled on an adjustable-temperature/brightness standing lamp. I don’t know the model, sorry. Being able to change the color/brightness on a spectrum is very nice.

Planning to buy some e26 bulbs that connect to Apple’s home automation. It’ll be the same process of buying all the popular models on Amazon that have fully adjustable color/brightness and settling on what I like best.

It just seems like a solution looking for a problem... incandescent lights are exactly the perfect solution for my use case, I am completely happy with them.

The whole problem LED bulb mandates are trying to solve is mostly a problem of unnecessary and excessive lighting which is causing tons of light pollution, interrupting peoples circadian rhythm, etc. If people used a very dim light near their body just between sunset and sleep it wouldn't matter much how efficient it is.

Brightly lighting up our cities and houses is totally unnecessary and terrible for us, and terrible for the planet regardless of how efficient and cheap we can make it. It lowers quality of life for us, and other animals affected by the light pollution.

I would have no problem affording LED lights I don't want, but cannot afford to move someplace with enough land to escape the neighbors light pollution from their cheap LEDs... which makes it harder to sleep, impossible to enjoy the stars, etc.

Noises of crotchety old fart grumbling in the distance

No, the problem they are trying to solve is not light pollution, it is that incandescent bulbs use several times as much electricity as LEDs.

Making it more efficient just means people will think even less before brightly lighting things up all night long that either don’t need lighting at all or don’t need it so bright. LEDs are so efficient and cheap that the result is massive light pollution. The solution to energy waste is to make light dimmer and more localized.

That would be the case if LEDs weren’t so, so much more efficient. Like 5x more efficient, easily.

5-6x, yes.

And I can't help but think my neighbor with literally hundreds of watts of LED bulbs around the outside of their house might not decide to light the night quite as often if they were all incandescents. I can read a newspaper by their lights, which aren't even aimed at me, about 3/8 mile away. It's absurd.

I live in a village of <100 people and its almost impossible to see the stars here. I can make out planets/brighter stars but most dim stars are obscured. We don’t even produce a whole lot of light pollution by ourselves, it’s mostly from nearby towns. And it’s only gotten worse in recent years.

I genuinely hate it.

Rough service incandescent bulbs are exempt and will last decades driven at a quarter power.

Sure it's a special order, but it's a special case.

They don't. Even the highest end ultra high CRI bulbs don't have the same CRI and dUV as a good halogen bulb for example.

I’m more familiar with the advancements in CRI in recent years than dUV (this is the first I’be heard of that) but LEDs can now be purchased with equivalent CRI.

The context of this discussion is incandescent color/perception/experience.

My point is that CRI alone isn't sufficient. Nor is CCT (correlated color temperature). In practice, two bulbs with the same CRI and color temperature can have drastically different tints.

It all boils down to how these measurements work. In practice, the vast vast majority of LED bulbs do not even remotely come close to the color reproduction of halogen. Not to mention the flicker response to 60hz wall power.

There are a handful of companies that produce extremely color accurate LEDs but they're expensive and have limited lifespan.

Check out this resource for more info: https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/what-is-the-difference... https://www.waveformlighting.com/tech/calculate-duv-from-cie...

Well OK, I was more speaking in the context of a reading lamp. And I wanted more to point out that an LED lamp with smooth color and brightness spectrums allows for you to find a better sweet spot for comfortably reading at night.

I can’t recommend Waveform Lighting’s 95 CRI products highly enough!

The wonderful warmth of incandescent (depending on your color temp prefs) with no wasted IR energy in the form of heat. What’s funny is that your mind will perceive it as hot because we’ve been conditioned to expect it from light at that color temp.

Reasonable price, too, but more expensive than bulbs from the big box store. For something that lasts 10-18 years, it’s worth it to me.

Their bulbs don't last anywhere near that long for me but I continue to buy them because nothing else comes close in terms of color rendition.

I find the 3700k is perfect for my tastes.

I'd thought halogens weren't being banned, but apparently they are (in the US).

Though the concern seems to be mercury content --- CFLs are also subject to the ban, according to April 2022 accounts:

<https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3463992-biden-...>

Yeah.

Incandescents were "Deprecated but still available, and not many people worried about it" for about the past 7 years or so, and you could still find them at stores, if you cared.

Trump expressed his dislike for LED and CFL lighting, so, of course, the Biden administration went about actually banning sale of incandescents. I expect a robust black market in them for decades to come.

The overall energy use numbers really depend on how the bulbs are used - in many areas, lights are mostly used in the winter, when the heat is welcome. Saving energy on lighting and having to burn more natural gas or electricity for heat pumps is perhaps some savings over electricity, but not nearly the 5-6x often cited as "savings." In the summer, when the heat is unwelcome, the sun is up longer, so a well run home won't be using nearly as much artificial light.

There was an article posted here earlier this year[1] that pointed out the flaws in modern LEDs, and just how hard it is to get one that matches the color you want. It's a pretty long read, but the author does a really good job of showing just how much trouble he has getting comfortable lighting that actually lasts a long time.

[1] https://nymag.com/strategist/article/led-light-bulbs-investi...

As I mentioned in some other comments, I settled on a lamp with a fully adjustable color and brightness. It’s lots of diodes, and the net effect is very nice.

In other words, I’m agreeing with your article that the fixed bulbs typically don’t hit the mark.

Are you sure that your "fully adjustable" bulb is giving you the spectrum you think it is? Syonyk's posted a few RGB bulb reviews recently, and they tend to have a lot more blue light than you'd think. And if you use the RGB functions, they tend to get REALLY spiky instead of having a smooth emissions curve.

https://www.sevarg.net/2023/04/08/ecosmart-smart-bulb-review... + https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/ + https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/26/feit-electric-wifi-rgb-bul...

I’m lighting a room, not a science experiment

If you're not lighting a science experiment, you are the science experiment.

(or something like that)

Except people have already done these experiments, and it turns out trichromacy is quite common among humans.

If you actually dislike LED lighting then you should also notice issues with LED screens not just lightbulbs. Instead you like most people dislike bad LED lightbulbs which are common because most people are buying them without testing em. Which means most manufacturers don’t actually optimize for light quality.

If the spectrum of the LEDs match the sensitivities of the eyes, then everything is fine. But LEDs are narrow spectrum; they won't reproduce color the same way as a broad spectrum light source will.

As for LED screens, those are emissive and work great for simulating any color. However, they are not good light sources for lighting objects because they're narrow spectrum.

If the object you're lighting up is broad-band reflective (like paper with broadband black pigments), then everything is good. But as soon as you get narrow-band pigments, colors are going to be distorted.

You also run into the same issues with the images displayed via an LED screen.

There is no such thing as non distorted colors because even sunlight is also reflecting off objects in the environment. We are just used to seeing a decent approximation of what stuff probably looks like in full sunlight. It might be an old hack but changing a filaments temperature is only approximating what happens at different times of the day as the sun’s actual temperature and thus black body spectrum is constant what’s actually changing is the amount of atmosphere involved.

The truth is everyone doesn’t make the same corrections, individuals are simply fairly consistently with their approximation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

I worry we’ll find the high speed strobe almost all LEDs emit are harmful for humans or animals. We’re told they strobe too fast for us to perceive (sometimes true, sometimes not). But unperceptible doesn’t mean it’s not harmful.

A lot of people that use their iPhone’s slow motion video function indoors at night are surprised to see they are surrounded by a disco of blinking lights.

Is this even an LED exclusive problem? I was taught this is mainly due to alternating current, and is seen in filaments as well.

Filaments are slow to respond to alternating current. So they do wobble in brightness a bit, but they do not blink like an LED does, which fluctuates between 100% off and on.

LEDs flicker differently.

An incandescent has 10-15% brightness flicker at 120Hz. LEDs... vary. Some flicker a lot harder at 120Hz, some (mostly LED Christmas lights) are awful and flicker at 60Hz with a 50% duty cycle because they're a single diode rectifier.

Most LEDs flicker far faster, in the kHz range, which is theoretically beyond human impact, but we don't have many studies on it.

Incandescent flicker is also related to bulb wattage. A higher wattage bulb, with a thicker filament, will flicker less because it has more thermal inertia.

Not new at all. Many of those blinking lights are not even LEDs.

Try it.

A 240fps high speed is more than enough to observe a variety of LED flickering behaviors. Some flicker none (Bedtime Bulb is remarkable in the lack of flicker), some flicker at high enough frequency you can't really make out details, and others are just... gross.

The color spectrum I’m talking about is just temperature, not really RGB.

I like the warm parts of the spectrum more than incandescents, which is really my whole point.

I truly cannot distinguish between real incandescent light and the "warm white" implemented on the Phillips Hue bulbs.

Visually, no, probably not.

But in terms of your body's melatonin production and sleep, the Philips smart bulbs can get very peaky in terms of blue, in the range that matters.

https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/

They're not obvious visually when they switch from the white emitter, which has "some blue" to the RGB emitters, which have "lots of blue" as you head out in the red/orange spectrum, but your body's "blue sensors" certainly notice.

Unfortunately, our visual system isn't sensitive to the same things our melatonin inhibiting system is sensitive to, so without a spectrometer, you can't really tell what you're seeing.

Sounds like you're looking for a color temperature even lower than 2700 which is usually the low end for standard bulbs. Two options that might work for you are 'smart' color changing bulbs that you can set to much warmer and dimmer values OR 'vintage' or amber glass bulbs, typically in a narrower bulb shape and sometimes with a smaller base (adapters are available).

> and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant

No, even when the efficiency rules go into effect, using noncompliant bulbs will not be illegal. Stock up on your inefficient bulbs before August, and you can use them as long as you like.

I resent the banning of incandescent light bulbs for a practical reason: Heat.

In colder regions it's been common sense to use an incandescent light bulb to keep a space heated so it's just above freezing (above 0C or 32F) during the winter months.

This is to prevent things like plumbing and sensitive machinery from breaking due to ice formation. A full blown heater is generally complete overkill and impractical for this.

Unless someone has a drop-in replacement for incandescent light bulbs for heat generation purposes, I want them back. And no, LED light bulbs do not work: LEDs don't produce significant heat.

Simple Deluxe 150W Reptile Heat Lamp Bulb

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Deluxe-150W-Reptile-Heat/dp/B0...

This almost sounds like the popular xkcd around CPU overheating being a feature: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Surely there are other, more reliable ways, to keep a space heated during winter months?

> Surely there are other, more reliable ways, to keep a space heated during winter months?

Sure, there are plenty of other ways to keep a space heated.

They're all radically more expensive, and radically more failure prone, than a 60W or 100W bulb burning constantly, back when the bulb was $2 and the trouble lamp cord was $10.

And before anyone chimes in that "burning constantly" is a waste of electricity, most bulbs used for this purpose are behind a mechanism that opens and closes the circuit according to the ambient temperature so the bulb doesn't burn if it's warm enough.

While I appreciate your reluctance, I’d recommend trying to find one of the Philips LED bulbs that dim like an incandescent bulb. I’m not sure they’re easy to find now, and to be honest I don’t remember the model name, but if you can find them they are wonderful. Basically they have multiple sets of diodes within them that dim at different rates which is an incredibly convincing “incandescent emulation”. They are a “whiter” light at high brightness and a nice warm glow at low brightness with a nice smooth transition between them.

Philips Warm Glow.

They seem to be obsoleted, all I can find for them is new old stock anymore. Which I've bought up a bunch of, because the damned things keep failing on me. I've had a set of 5 in service for about 6 years, and so far I've had to replace 4 of them for various failures. They're facing down in a hanging lamp with glass globes around them, and I guess that's close enough to "recessed or enclosed" that they fry themselves. I have them in a few places, though I've also purchased... "some" incandescents, before they went out of availability. I should be good for the rest of my life at this point, especially since I run my incandescents dimmed. The wiki article on bulb rerating is informative - as you reduce power, lifespan is "fraction of rated power" to the -12 or -16 - it's some stupidly high exponent, and it's why a lot of people empirically noticed that "bulbs on dimmers never seem to burn out."

You can buy Edison bulbs at Home Depot. They are very popular.

Don't they have "appliance" bulbs in your locale?

These are incandescent lamps designed to work in ovens, a territory unlikely to ever be colonized by LED bulbs.

Other than the slightly smaller wattage, they should fit your needs just fine. They work in normal sockets.

If you run a 100w incandescent lamp dimmed to 30 watts, it's lifespan will be increased to easily 100 years. (Aging is highly nonlinear with temperature)

So you will never have to deal with the inability to purchase a replacement.