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Comment by beala | Hacker News Reader

This is a tangent, but I feel like we can't talk about LED christmas lights without linking to this video by tech connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBFPJ3_6ZWs

the tl;dw is that most color LED lights work by emitting a single frequency of light. Compared to classic christmas lights, which are incandescent filaments filtered through dyed glass, the LED lights look a bit... radioactive.

My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled "warm" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting.

Of course, this is all a matter of taste, but once I became privy to the difference, I could no longer ignore it. I guess I'm just a millennial nostalgic for the lights of my youth.

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> My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled "warm" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting.

I completely agree. This is true also for all household LED lighting. I prefer cold for kitchen food prep areas and bathrooms, but warm everywhere else.

Warm everywhere for me. There’s something about cold white that is very depressing. You would think more blue would mean less depressing but not in my experience.

Funnily enough we're currently in the process of replacing warm lights everywhere in our house with white lights. The warm lights make us feel sleepy and depressed especially in the winter, where there's already very little sunlight up here in Canada.

Yeah, this aligns with me too, as a Swede living in Spain. In the winter time, I need strong indoor lightning that many would describe as cold and almost hostile, otherwise my body seems to go into hibernation-mode by itself. In the summers though, warm lightning is just cozier and doesn't seem so draining anymore.

What works for me is the combination of warm lights that are very bright.

oh we could write a depressing song called "blue christmas"

I'm weird and want it to change based on the time of day :)

Morning/evening is for warm (and in some cases dim) light, during "work hours" I want the whitest of white lights and as bright as possible.

I just got Phillips Hue bulbs and they can do this, it's great (you need a command center thing, but it works pretty seemlessly).

Warm light in the morning make me sleepy, while cold light in the evening make me... uncomfortable.

I solved the issue with the "Natural light" scene from Philips HUE. Not only it manages the temperature for you during the day, but also the intensity.

It only requires the "White Ambiance" lightbulds, cheaper than the "Color" ones.

I think definitely a matter of taste sprinkled with nostalgia.

I wanted to get the incandescent opaque-paint-covered lights I grew up with but the power consumption - and the number of outlets required if you follow the "don't chain more than 2 or 3 strings together" guidance - was (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) WAY higher, so I just found the closest LED version I could find.

They look pretty decent at the end of the day, and one pro is that you can get more brightness and vividness out of them (helpful if you have other newer, bright-LED decorations).

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