Why is LED light so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Why is LED light so bad?

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13 pointseatonphil9 comments

Not all LED light is bad, architectural-grade LED fixtures that have external drivers, 0-10v dimming, 90+ CRI, plus reflectors and diffusers output high quality light. They’re also designed to last for 50,000 hours or more.

Most consumer grade LED lamps are shit, the driver is built into the base and they can’t shed enough heat so they degrade quickly and die, and a lot of people just buy 5000k lamps that put out 1500 lumens which looks harsh and artificial. A 2700k lamp that puts out 800 lumens will look much closer to an incandescent lamp, I buy Philips lamps personally and they work well.

The most insulting thing about LED lightbulbs that the author touches on is the claim that "they last at least 10 years", when in practice about 50% of them in my experience go bad within 2 years. Granted I should probably buy better quality bulbs, but given my experience, I am hesitant to drop more money on a potential failure.

To offer a counterpoint, I switched over to GE and Sylvania LED bulbs a little over a decade ago, and only one has burnt out (the most heavily used one, unsurprisingly). Almost all of my lamps and light fixtures are open, though, and the few closed ones do not get a ton of use -- I've heard that heat build-up in enclosed fixtures can do a number on LED bulbs.

It's the power converters that break down from what I've heard, not the LED themselves. So light bulb companies can make the 230V -> 1.5V conversion brittle and have you rebuy lights over and over "as designed".

I've seen a lot of other sorts of failures. On the LED bulbs where individual filaments are visible, sometimes a single filament fails, or flips on and off.

I had one LED bulb that just burned, which was interesting.

I am one of the people that perceive flicker even at high frequencies. Slight variations in color temperature also drive me bonkers. It has made me incredibly picky about the type of LEDs I light my home with. I have invested in costly dimmable LED drivers and gotten to the point where I can live with the results but I have a boneyard of reject bulbs in the basement.

I purchased a violet pumped LED from Soraa to light some artwork and the results are quite pleasant but they are still super expensive.

It's because the buyers did not check the independent lab tests of their LED bulbs, available from https://lamptest.ru/ (sorry, available in Russian only).

I wonder what it would take to standardize household lighting on low voltage DC? Seems like there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained from that.

I think what we actually need is a new standard for light bulbs with modular separate driver electronics, smart controls, and the actual LEDs.

Low voltage would mean a whole bunch of extra cables and connectors and single points of failure, and then you'd probably still need switching regulators at the point of load anyway.

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