LED lights are meant to save energy. They’re creating glaring problems
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Spoiler alert: They do. They save up to 90% energy, and quality LED lighting can last much longer. Incorrectly installed LED lights cause light pollution, which is not so much an LED problem, as it is a fixture-design-and-installation problem.
Anecdotally I saw the switch from normal bulbs to LEDs in my life and the lights break for me about as often. (One light broke in past month, still too lazy to buy a replacement.)
So how much more do I need to pay for 90% more efficient LED light that delivers on its "works forever" promise compared to a regular bulb? Also doesn't have flicker?
By the way, how dirty is its manufacturing compared to regular bulb?
The overall ecological impact of using LED bulbs is significantly improved over incandescent or fluorescent lamps.
Unlike regular bulbs it's hard to find out manufacturing details for LED, but they usually seem plasticky (= oil and all that) and I guess a lot depends on the kind of phosphorus used etc.
The significant reduction in energy use as well as the long lifespan of the lamps more than makes up for the metals used in the manufacture of the lamps.
If this genuinely interests you there is plenty of research available from reputable sources.
I meant manufacturing. Longevity we already discussed. LED lamps die on me on the regular and I am not buying a Hue, I need a dumb bulb with a single dim warm color without flicker that's all.
> If this genuinely interests you there is plenty of research available from reputable sources.
I could not find a good summary on LED manufacturing after cursory search, if you don't really know yourself then it's okay to admit it (but maybe don't claim they're ecologically better without knowing the impact of their manufacturing).
That’s cherrypicking, and also leads me to believe you are not genuinely interested in having and informed debate.
> I am not buying a Hue for that money.
> I could not find a good summary on LED manufacturing after cursory search.
I have, you must not have been looking hard enough.
I don’t know what to tell you, buddy. Enjoy your high electricity bills, or alternatively your life with expensive, flickering, poor quality LED bulbs, I guess.
I don’t really see this discussion going anywhere for either of us, so good luck with it all.
It's not cherry-picking since my very first comment raised this issue. If you don't read attentively before replying that's on you.
> I have, you must not have been looking hard enough.
A position like "I know it's true but I'm not going to substantiate it" doesn't contribute much.
> Enjoy your high electricity bills
When it's dark I use a couple of dirt cheap dimmed regular bulbs and bills have been bearable so far ;)
So yes, it is cherry picking to single out LEDs while ignoring the far bigger impact of every other electronic device in the home. It's the same as people concerned about wind turbines killing birds while ignoring power lines, windows, cars and cats. The argument sounds very insincere.
Why rarely? Where I am it's pretty dark every night.
> But if you have issues with the ecological impact of the manufacture of LED bulbs, you can't use anything involving plastic or silicon, including computers.
Bring it up when we make computers of comparable capabilities from glass and tungsten I guess?
> cherry picking to single out LEDs
So sorry for sneakily cherry-picking LEDs (of all things!) in a thread about alternatives to LEDs under a link to the article that talks about LEDs and their downsides. Let's discuss plastic bottles and other environmental hazards instead.
So if you have a storage shed that you're only going to look in once a week during summer, and then only for a minute or two, incandescent bulbs may be a great choice. But not for a living room where light is going to be on every evening for hours.
They use less energy if they are dimmed than when they are blasted at full power. They also allegedly last loads longer (will see).
Also, I am yet to see supporting evidence that LED bulbs are e2e more environmentally friendly in terms of manufacturing and clean recycling than say tungsten bulbs.
> So if you have a storage shed that you're only going to look in once a week during summer, and then only for a minute or two, incandescent bulbs may be a great choice. But not for a living room where light is going to be on every evening for hours.
The opposite. If I need to find something in a dark storage shed I need very bright white light for assistance. That's not great for the bulb. While the key benefits of the bulb is it's easy on the eyes, dims with absolutely zero flicker, easy to wind down to sleep. Completely wasted on a shed.
That's true for anything, and not a difference between LEDs and incandescents.
> If I need to find something in a dark storage shed I need very bright white light for assistance.
Which you can get from a bulb.
> That's not great for the bulb. While the key benefits of the bulb is it's easy on the eyes, dims with absolutely zero flicker, easy to wind down to sleep.
Which you can get from a LED.
Both LEDs and incandescents can be bright or dim, both can be dimmable if you want them to be. LEDs offer a lot more control (some can switch between different colours, different colour temperatures), incandescent are more limited, but cheaper. And not as durable, and they waste a lot of energy when you have them on a lot when you don't need the extra heat they give.
So they're great for short periods when you need something simple, like in a shed, and not so great when you want them on for a long time or you want something unusual.
Yeah, except LEDs don't dim, they just flicker on and off very quickly.
> Which you can get from a bulb.
Turning a bulb on full power suddenly reduces its longevity. That's the moment when most bulbs fail. I'd go with a LED in a shed. I'd go with a bulb if it's a room I am in often and I care about my eyes and sleep quality.
LEDs run on DC, so connected to AC power they need to turn that into DC. If you do that without a capacitor to smooth things out, you get flicker, which may be the case in cheap LEDs, but good LEDs will have a capacitor and therefore not flicker.
A LED lamp consists of many individual LEDs. Dimming a LED lamp involves turning off some of those individual LEDs, rather than supplying less power to each of them. A LED lamp needs to explicitly support that or it won't work. But those LED lamps exist. Similarly, LEDs that only produce dim light for situations where you only want dim light, exist.
I know "good LEDs" exist but if we are talking a few dozens of dollars per good photography-grade LED fixture then we are at a point where the savings compared to running a dirt cheap regular bulb approach zero or even go negative. At least in reasonable time periods, maybe such good LEDs are cheaper in the very long run but that's not for sure (faulty units exist) and even if it was I probably wouldn't even live that long.
Incandescents break constantly. Fluorescents occasionally. LEDs almost never, except in very specific cases.
If you do have a LED light break within a decade, my advice is to replace the fixture. Or maybe try a very different type of LED (a weaker one with different heat management) in it.
I only use dim warm lights and dirt cheap regular bulbs work great. They last pretty long in that scenario (depends on the unit but that's also true for LEDs) and consume less energy too.
I do think fighting light pollution is a worthy goal, but LED lights aren't the enemy. At least not specifically LEDs; all light are. But more careful use of LED lights could help us to shine that light only where we need it, and let less light escape. But it's going to require strict regulation; lots of companies don't care and just shine lights everywhere they can.
> LED lights emit more blue light than regular bulbs.
They don't have to. Rather famously, there are red and green LEDs. Blue ones are the most recent ones, but popular because they allow us to create any colour we want by mixing different colours. If you want amber LEDs, you can. Just turn down the amount of blue.
No one used incandescent street lights! Instead compare LEDs to sodium vapor lights and they don't come off so well. In fact they are worse, but the street looks nicer (it's in color).
Streetlights aren't for doing your makeup, they're for seeing hazards in the roadway that are beyond the range of a vehicle's headlights. Orange is the ideal color for outdoor lighting, because of the way the light-sensitive proteins in our eyes are 'tuned' ('cones' and 'rods', 'photopic' to 'mesopic' and 'scotopic', etc). My notes from a few years ago: https://teslabox.com/2020/01/color-vision-night-vision-notes... - tl/dr: peripheral vision is tuned to blue, 2 of the 3 color-sensitive proteins are highly sensitive to orange light.
Curious: why did you link to that particular thread? 66 comments, including one by yours truly. imho, this is the best of that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19855545
Colour rendering doesn't have to be perfect for this use but having full spectrum coverage does have its advantages.
I do believe though, that LEDs for such industrial applications don't or shouldn't suffer the same issues as the little LED bulbs we buy for the home, due to better QC and construction.
Also, they have high pressure sodium bulbs that widen the color, and then I don't think there are any objects you won't see.
In my city the main streets (commercial mostly) are white LEDs and the side streets (residential) are sodium, and I like it that way.
I linked the thread because it's old, and has exactly this topic.
> Many people use much brighter LED lights than necessary, especially outside.