Banned in the U.S.: Healthy Light Bulbs | Hacker News Reader

Banned in the U.S.: Healthy Light Bulbs

psychologytoday.com

84 pointsjosephcsible60 comments

I understand the issue at the heart, but this article does a horrible job of explaining any sort of practical realities of this new rule.

- "blue-pump" LEDs are not defined.

- Specific examples of things sold today that would not be allowed to be sold in the future would be helpful.

- A chart showing a 5000K bulb having what appears to be a spike in the blue spectrum greater than a 3000K bulb (though how could we be sure, since the axes aren't labeled) implies that certain color temperatures are worse, but is this always the case, or is it the consequence of a particular product sampled?

I'm walking away from this wondering if I won't be able to buy 3000K LEDs anymore, or if things like dim-to-warm will be banned. I hope not, but I just cannot tell from this woefully lacking write up.

I get the impression the writer's opinions are extremely niche. In the case of blue pumped LEDs he's referring to bulbs that use a short wavelength LED in combination with phosphor that absorbs the light and reemits it at lower, and broader, wavelengths. So long as the desired CRI and color temp is being produced, I'm not seeing the issue with method to get there.

> In the case of blue pumped LEDs he's referring to bulbs that use a short wavelength LED in combination with phosphor that absorbs the light and reemits it at lower, and broader, wavelengths.

This was part of my suspicion, but I'm not familiar enough to know if that was correct.

> I get the impression the writer's opinions are extremely niche.

I'll be the first to say "citation needed" to what I'm about to say, but I feel like we went through a cycle of "the science is clear: blue light is bad for sleep!" to "actually a lot of that was not good science", so I'm unclear of where the consensus actually is (if I ignore this article).

If blue pumped LEDs rely on short wavelength emitters and phosphor excitation, how similar is the light spectrum to that of fluorescent lamps?

As you may know, fluorescent lights are not used in museums because the UV light from them damages things. Incandescent lights were used for a long time, but I've been told that now LEDs are recommended because the emission spectrum is sufficiently safe. I'm wondering if blue pumped LEDs will cause a reversion.

I just felt a jolt of anxiety reading this. I feel physically unwell when in a room lit by 6000K "daylight" bulbs, and even imagining being in such a room gives me a twinge.

I don't know how I respond to these "blue pump" LEDs; are they currently on the market? How would I know whether a given bulb uses this technology? Maybe I'm OK with them (fingers crossed).

The difference between LED bulbs cannot possibly be a major contributor to CO2 emmissions. If they're going to be draconian about this, look forward to "15 minute cities" where you're not allowed to drive outside of your zone, since that would save orders of magnitude more energy.

> I feel physically unwell when in a room lit by 6000K "daylight" bulbs

I think most of us share this vulnerability.

I have an inverse issue where I get uncontrollably tired from warm colored lighting to the point of needing to nap.

Same here. I have bright daylight lights in the kitchen part - it looks like a lighthouse because this is a place I need to see.

The living room is warmer but still very much daylight, otherwise I would sleep there all the time

Yeah man I seem to be sensitive to both: red lights (or red shifted monitors) during the day make me feel fatigued and sluggish; white and blue lights at night make me feel anxious and vulnerable.

> How would I know whether a given bulb uses this technology?

made a small "high CRI desk lamp" using a portable LED light brick and a flexible gooseneck stand (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1713648-REG/smallrig_... / https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1580737-REG/raya_frb_...)

you can change the temperature of the light using the small OLED display on the back and the dial to tune it, it's not super accurate but it's enough for me to be able to tell say when I set it to 4000K, it gives me a reference when comparing to 5000K or something

I'm surprised to read your description of 15 minute cities. The idea behind them is to make daily neccesities available within 15 minutes of travel by foot, bike or public transport. Not allowing people to drive (cars) out of some designated zone would be kind of silly, since the idea is to make stuff that would be within such a "zone" available without a car. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city The way you describe them sounds similiar to the "Conspiracy theories" section.

Anyone care to recommend a specific household lightbulb to stock up on while it's still legal to express our preferences in the marketplace? I remember how rough the initial transition from incandescents was.

100% of all name brands and uncommon brands and bs brands I’ve tried have sold me LED bulbs that buzz annoyingly or fail within 1 year. Literally no one is willing to make an LED bulb that lasts as long as the tech is capable of.

The least shit brand is Philips.

Cree

It’s frustrating. The early LED bulbs I bought are still working; anything more recent has already been replaced more than once. In my fantasy world there is a government that actually advocates for consumers…

In late 2017 I replaced nearly every 40 W, 60 W, or 100 W incandescent in my house with "Great Value" bulbs from Walmart. An instant rebate deal Walmart had with Puget Sound Energy that made the 40 W and 60 W equivalent bulbs only $0.17 made it cheap enough that even if it turns out the bulbs sucked and I had to put back the incandescents I wouldn't be out too much.

They are all still working fine.

Most of them don't get heavy use, but my bathrooms both have several of the 100 W equivalents and those get used several times every day.

I'm a big fan of LIFX bulbs.

I have a large installation of them in my home and have custom programming for circadian rhythms.

Works great technically speaking. Subjectively I think it organically works great too. Definitely when waking up at 4am for the bathroom having a 5% dim 6500k light to aim by instead of a super bright 2500k light is way better.

I can't believe a lightbulb costs $50 now, and it doesn't even come with the power spectrum (the information that would be necessary to determine, as per the linked article, if it would mess up your sleep cycle if used in a night lamp).

I have zero interest in programmable light bulbs, I just want a cheap warm-temperature bulb (similar light to an incandescent).

I guess you could just buy brighter bulbs and put a blue-blocker filter on them.

You can get an 8-pack of Philips 2700K non-programmable bulbs off Amazon for $18. No need to get incandescents or filters.

Sure the cost is (maybe) 10x. But the lifespan is 20x+ what an incandescent would be. And it's on-the-fly configurable to preference.

The marginal cost of intelligent/smart bulbs is 3x or what not. Given how long they last, for many folks it seems like an easy win. The adaptability is great. Yeah you can eskew it & just do a thing, & yeah many consumers just won't get there, but damn, it's so nice having per-bupb adjustable brightness & color temp everywhere. For pretty minimal addition vs where we had been.

Eh, “configurable”. LEDs are one of the reasons the world feels so dull right now.

LEDs are advertised to have amazing lifespans, but I haven't seen that in real life. The LEDs I purchase tend to last two or three times longer than an incandescent bulb, but sometimes I don't even get that much.

Fwiw, I have never had an LED bulb burn out.

> I'm a big fan of LIFX bulbs.

And they all seem to be "smart" and "color".

Any options for non-smart and "white" (≤3500K)?

Not exactly what you are asking, but I quite like "Technology Connections" videos on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections/search?query=...

Lots of great data points (and a little bit of snark)

I was impressed with Sylvania bulbs with TruWave Technology.

PDF Link https://assets3.ledvanceus.com/media/resource/original/asset...

If you’re into smart home stuff, it’s hard to beat singled for the price (specifically their zigbee lights, don’t clog up your WiFi with lighting).

I’m sure their normal LED lights are great (and cheaper), but I went all in on RGB lights. They stay in “normal” daylight mode most of the time, but I like having the option.

In the EU "traditional" light bulbs have been banned for a decade. You may not sell/buy them. ... however you may buy special heaters that you absolutely may not use as a traditional light bulb.

But they are weak (< 60w) and I personally haven't seen them in stock recently.

On a slightly unrelated note, why do we manufacture "bulbs" that contain their own ballast/inverter that screw into a 110 socket? Why do we sell everything with an external or built in adaptor, to plug into a 110 socket? It seems to me it's just legacy compatibility layer middleware, I can't think of anything outside of a kitchen that actually needs 110. Why don't we just start building houses with 12v connections for LED strips, since they run on that anyway? One inverter in the garage, some low voltage wiring around the house, done. It seems it would be cheaper, more efficient and more versatile to do this rather than wire a whole house for 110/220 and then every appliance have it's own AC -> DC and step down transformer to account for the fact that our electricity needs have drastically changed since 100 years ago.

Yes, precisely … but I think there is an issue with the transformer which would need to be energized 24/7 and uses power sitting idle …

I forget - I did look into this - but somehow the 110 to 12v conversation using normal components eats up the energy savings?

Well, with people doing whole home solar, that wouldn't be an issue. You'd just need an inverter to power some appliances in the kitchen. At the very least, LED lighting hardwired into the home would drop electric usage by double digit percentages.

I definitely want to find the correct solution for this ... if not for my (already built) house, for our society in general.

In addition to the electricity savings, there is an enormous gain in simplicity and elegance in removing a lot of high voltage wiring throughout every room of the house.

As I mentioned, the high voltage hard-wired smoke detectors are another unnecessary set of high voltage circuits ...

So green LEDs do 235 lm/W and red LEDs in a reasonable mix do 150 lm/W (all theoretical limits) so the reds have to put out 1.5x the power to match.

https://donklipstein.com/led.html (this website is pretty fantastic)

The new limits are 120 lm/W. So it's going to be quite tough. Perhaps those 150 lm/W LEDs are not yet in commercial production. Definitely an interesting thing. I wonder what this means for things like the Phillips Hue line etc. Those have to be consuming way more power.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-finalizes-efficiency-sta....

I'm afraid this will be the plastic straw of consumer electricty, minimally effective while drawing a huge backlash.

If this is a big concern, look into aquarium lighting with LEDs, where the color spectrum is a constant subject of discussion. I doubt such specialty lighting will be subject to regulatory restriction, so it should be available indefinitely (if perhaps a bit pricey), e.g.:

> "This combination of LED and phosphor is a proven technology with good performance but not perfect. An obvious disadvantage of this led is the lack of red-related color light components. The color temperature (CCT) of the light emitted by this led is relatively poor and the color rendering index (CRI) is relatively low. Combining YAG phosphors with other materials will increase red luminescence, leading to the availability of “warm” white led plant light, but at the cost of hard-won efficacy. (CRI is a measure of the degree to which an illuminating light source reproduces the color of an object compared to sunlight, whose CRI is 100. Despite the obvious shortcomings, the CRI of an incandescent bulb is about 95. In contrast, cold white led plant lights usually have a CRI of 70 to 80.)"

https://www.mokolight.com/blog/led-grow-light/phosphor-works...

What ever happened to that research on incandescents that were more efficient than LED about 5 years ago?

https://inhabitat.com/mit-makes-a-warm-incandescent-light-bu...

I assume there's a bit of outdated information in that article, or the annoyingly common issue of journalists misunderstanding actual research results - the claimed efficiency of ~14% for LEDs seems much too low, the latest LED lamps produce 10-15x the light per watt as incandescent, not the 3x claimed there.

And that's already including the power supply, which is where the majority of the loss is rather than the LEDs themselves, which generally are 80-90% efficient. But that's mostly a cost limit rather than a technology issue, as there are known better designs, just more expensive to implement.

I'm seeing about 2% efficiency for incandescent, 20% for LED, and 40% (claimed) in that article for the experimental incandescent. That tracks with your 10-15x number and would still be twice as efficient. I am assuming it would be cost related, but can't find any info and wanted to see if others knew.

I really like the Philips Sun Filled LED lights. I have a stockpile of incandescents, and they're the first one that's come pretty close that I've found that's worth replacing them with.

Policy-wise, lighting, post LED transition, is a small part of overall energy consumption. Trying to squeeze efficiency even harder isn't going to accomplish much, and it will only annoy people more and if this article is true, maybe damage their health.

Cannot find any “Sun filled” products for Philips. Are you sure they’re called that?

Sun filled is GE: https://www.gelighting.com/sunlight-light-bulbs

My mistake, it's GE. They make a daylight and a soft white, I like the soft white. It's very close to incandescent light.

Research suggests that the color/temperature of light doesn't cause sleep issues, rather its brightness.

Let the hoarding of light bulbs begin.

They tried to force LED/CFL lights in the UK, but couldn't as people with skin cancer said the new lights are dangerous to their health. No to mention migranes, and other diseases worsen by the flickering lights. And these even predate the vilification of blue-spectrum light in recent years.

Is health really trumped by ideology nowadays?! The people so passionate behind green deals are funding the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which have a pretty big CO2 footprint!

I'm pretty sure they enjoy the picture of burning Russian refineries and totally ignore what actually goes into the atmosphere!

Another reason I’m hoarding incandescent bulbs. I bet you’ll still be able to get them in Asia. Meanwhile proles in the country that invented light bulbs will be stuck with crappy LEDs.

I wish I had bought more, I had a couple of dozen that I got for about $0.25 each before they were banned.

I’m seriously considering candles or oil lamps.

Where in Asia specifically ? south east / east asia now mostly use LED, even CFL is starting to run out of stock.

You can still find them from Chinese sellers.

I have dimmable, clear incandescents bookending my dual OLED monitors (providing most of the ambient light in my environment as I type this), and they're wonderful.

If the US wants to do something about energy they should stop the perverse tax incentives driving the proliferation of oversized vehicles which also happen to be unsafe for pedestrians due to the huge front ends. YouTuber FortNine even managed to fit his body inside the engine bay of one of these things. But nope, light bulbs it is! Straight out of the CIA field sabotage manual: "Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw." Think about that next time you're waiting for your restricted faucet to fill a bucket.

Even more energy intensive than oversized individual vehicles is spread out living, and it has to be by a multiple since spread out living has a knock on effect on all other aspects of life.

Apartments for everyone, and no detached single family homes would be far more energy saving than basically all other energy saving measures combined. Well, I guess except for reducing the population itself.

> Apartments for everyone, and no detached single family homes

You've described my hell.

> Well, I guess except for reducing the population itself.

Perhaps the population will decrease from the crime and depression of being crammed into a city where you can't see the stars at night, nor hear the wildlife by day, and there's no such thing as silence anymore.

The purpose of my comment is to point out that we all like consuming energy and carbon emissions, and that too much energy or carbon emissions is always consumed by someone else. So is a 5k sq ft lot too much to live on? A 10k sq ft lot? 20k?

In order of impact, reducing energy consumption/carbon emissions on individual level is

0) suicide 1) not having children 2) having a smaller earth surface area footprint 3) traveling less 4) buying less material things, including smaller vehicles in which to travel

At the end of the day, we can’t escape basic physics. Energy = mass * acceleration * distance. The less mass and the less distance you move the mass, the less energy you consume and hence less carbon emissions you produce.

Exactly. Squeeze a few drops of energy efficiency out of consumers so that you can chalk up a win without having to try and fight the producers. Anyone care to break down the comparison of carbon reduction from this energy savings vs the carbon emissions from the world’s dirtiest 100 cargo ships?

Our Taylor Swifts Tour’s Jet pollution?

https://x.com/tvan123456/status/1782431987992555601?s=46

Wow I was waiting for it to end. This map is just the tip of the iceberg since the fans must have collectively travelled millions of miles to be at the events.

> If the US wants to do something about energy they should stop the perverse tax incentives driving the proliferation of oversized vehicles which also happen to be unsafe for pedestrians due to the huge front ends.

Agreed 100%, for energy and especially urban livability concerns.

For energy in particular, an even more effective stroke will be to finally begin scaling back our empire; the US military carbon footprint is an absolute shame.

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