Light bulbs (household)

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Guy at Home depot was telling us that the next Gen LED was coming soon, would impact costs positively. Not sure how much of this is based in fact or fiction?

That said, I agree with many that bulb life seems to be all over the map these days.
 
I buy mine at Ikea mostly because I see them all there and think, "Hey, I could probably use some of those." Bought a pile of CFLs from there but then when they started to burn out they literally all went at once, which was rather annoying. Last time I was there I could only find LED. They were about the same price as the ones on DealExtreme from China but 3x brighter. They do also seem to get hot enough to burn you, though. So far I'm happy with them. I was happy with the CFLs as well. I haven't purchased an incandescent bulb in ~10 years.
 
My parents have Par56 CFL's that take ~3 minutes to get up to full brightness (super annoying, no idea why). I bought them a Phillips LED to replace one, it works beautifully (but is was $50+).

I have had bad luck with dimmable CFL's (expensive and don't last) and CFL's in enclosed fixtures (don't last long). Now that LED's are dropping in price, as CFL's burn out I am replacing with LED's.

Any LED I have looked at so far says it cannot be used in enclosed fixtures, how are they making enough heat that an enclosure is a problem? Maybe that's just a CYA statement and they will work fine, but it an expensive test if they don't last.
 
Most of my house is led now (lots of gu10), mainly phillips but some ikea bulbs also, and I like both fine. Still need to do my dining room fixture that has something like 18 candle bulbs - probably use the ikea ones there as they are only 2w each.
 
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GreyGhost said:
Any LED I have looked at so far says it cannot be used in enclosed fixtures, how are they making enough heat that an enclosure is a problem? Maybe that's just a CYA statement and they will work fine, but it an expensive test if they don't last.
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I'm a rebel.
I've got 3 LED bulbs enclosed, inside the house, and, I've got 3 of them enclosed outside, where they're not meant to be used either.
No problems to report so far. ~6 months of steady usage.
 
GreyGhost said:
My parents have Par56 CFL's that take ~3 minutes to get up to full brightness (super annoying, no idea why). I bought them a Phillips LED to replace one, it works beautifully (but is was $50+).

I have had bad luck with dimmable CFL's (expensive and don't last) and CFL's in enclosed fixtures (don't last long). Now that LED's are dropping in price, as CFL's burn out I am replacing with LED's.

Any LED I have looked at so far says it cannot be used in enclosed fixtures, how are they making enough heat that an enclosure is a problem? Maybe that's just a CYA statement and they will work fine, but it an expensive test if they don't last.
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Some leds have a transformer to step down the voltage. Leds are also dependent on heat sinks to get rid of the heat from resistors. All leds require resistors
 
RockerGuy said:
Some leds have a transformer to step down the voltage. Leds are also dependent on heat sinks to get rid of the heat from resistors. All leds require resistors
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All that makes sense, but if they are only consuming 13W, you wouldn't think the temp rise inside a fixture would be enough to kill them.
 
GreyGhost said:
PWM probably (or something similar to only deliver power some percentage of the time)
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Nice, was nice reading about it. I used to think PWN regulated the current like AC voltage but it shuts it off & on for a fraction of a second, pretty interesting concept.
 
Looking for a well priced 25w equivalent dimmable e12 candle bulb. The 4 dollar ikea ones are not dimmable.
 
RockerGuy said:
Nice, was nice reading about it. I used to think PWN regulated the current like AC voltage but it shuts it off & on for a fraction of a second, pretty interesting concept.
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It just turns it on and off really fast so it looks dimmer. The on and off times are adjusted for different brightnesses. If the frequency is too low it will give people headaches, though. Interestingly, it tends to work for incandescents as well so if you had a circuit that was based on PWM you can theoretically use either although for incandescents it would have to support a lot more current.

This does not get around having a current limiting resistor on your LED. An LED is a diode and without some kind of current limiter it is practically a short and will burn out very quickly. I'm not sure what daught was referring to. I suppose there are probably other ways to limit the current to the LED or maybe you could make it unnecessary with PWM but even when we made PWM circuits for LEDs in college we put resistors on them.
 
unL33T said:
It just turns it on and off really fast so it looks dimmer. The on and off times are adjusted for different brightnesses. If the frequency is too low it will give people headaches, though. Interestingly, it tends to work for incandescents as well so if you had a circuit that was based on PWM you can theoretically use either although for incandescents it would have to support a lot more current.

This does not get around having a current limiting resistor on your LED. An LED is a diode and without some kind of current limiter it is practically a short and will burn out very quickly. I'm not sure what daught was referring to. I suppose there are probably other ways to limit the current to the LED or maybe you could make it unnecessary with PWM but even when we made PWM circuits for LEDs in college we put resistors on them.
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You might be able to get away with pwm and a capacitor to average the output so the led never saw more than a few volts. I haven't played with circuits in a long time. If you are truly interested, "thedirty" seems to know his stuff but he hasn't been on in a few months.
 
RockerGuy said:
Nice, was nice reading about it. I used to think PWN regulated the current like AC voltage but it shuts it off & on for a fraction of a second, pretty interesting concept.
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I'm a Cinematographer/Director professionally and I hate the LEDs that use that tech. It causes huge flicker on the recorded video and because its not like hz I can't just adjust shutter to remove. I'm finding now I will carry incandescent bulbs and just replace on site so that any lights in the shot don't flicker like crazy. There is an interesting debate in the film community as classic light colours are changing due to technology. The days of warm classic streetlamps will be replaced with a cooler LED bulb soon. They are doing that in California now and it changes the entire look of a street. They have to add new warmer lights to the scenes when they shoot movies now to get the look everyone is used to.


On a home note I have replaced all my lights almost with LED's. I have bought different brands (Ikea, Phillips, Noma) and out of those 3 the Noma ones were the brightest. The Ikea ones were middle road and the Phillips ones flickered terrible on the dimmer. I have since moved them to non dimmer lights. I always hated compact fluro due to the warmup time. The insntant on of LED has been great and I don't miss incandescent outside of filming situations.
 
I switched out all our lights to CFL over 10 years ago except the long cylinder press fit halogens. have a couple halogen lamps i'd love to find a LED type bulb for and a light fixture for the back yard. I think i've had 3 out of a houseful of CFL's burn out in 10 years. Bought a bunch on sale, also have a number of those old incandescent bulbs in a box which i think the sale of is becoming banned soon or has already. Great for easy bake ovens.

Other than the xmas tree we haven't switched out to LEDs yet, will be probably doing that as the CFLs need replacement. Dad did switch out his halogen lamps that have the small thumbnail sized bulbs with LED bulbs he got off ebay but within a couple days he had to put the halogens back in as they all burnt out. Unfortunately it was going to cost more to ship them back for exchange and feedback was already left when he received the bulbs. He did get some dimmable LEDs from a big box store here using coupons from hydro they were almost free, he's been happy with those purchases but it's only been 2 months.
 
unL33T said:
It just turns it on and off really fast so it looks dimmer. The on and off times are adjusted for different brightnesses. If the frequency is too low it will give people headaches, though. Interestingly, it tends to work for incandescents as well so if you had a circuit that was based on PWM you can theoretically use either although for incandescents it would have to support a lot more current.

This does not get around having a current limiting resistor on your LED. An LED is a diode and without some kind of current limiter it is practically a short and will burn out very quickly. I'm not sure what daught was referring to. I suppose there are probably other ways to limit the current to the LED or maybe you could make it unnecessary with PWM but even when we made PWM circuits for LEDs in college we put resistors on them.
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From what I've read, pwm can also restrict the amount of current entering.
 
A lot of automotive LEDs use PWM ... and on the earlier GM vehicles that used it on the taillights, they screwed up and made the PWM frequency too low. If you are looking straight at the bulb, it doesn't bother most people, but if the vehicle is moving across your field of view or if you change where you are looking and the taillight is in your field of view, it's extremely annoying. I believe they have fixed this with newer designs.

I understand AdRath's point, too ... late model Mercedes vehicles (and probably others) use PWM for the white DRL LED strip and they look strange when they are on video.
 
There must be a glorious markup on these new "fancy bulbs ... 15.99 regular ... 12.99 sale on-line ... 7.99 with coupon ...... that tells you why I am very slow to adapt to these new bulbs. they should not really cost more than3-5 bucks. It's crazy that anyone would pay close 16$ for one freaking bulb.
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