> Back in the prehistoric era a person would have to gather, chop and burn wood for roughly 10 hours a day for six days straight in order to produce the equivalent light of a modern lightbulb shining for about an hour.
This feels like a very odd comparison/metric. It doesn't really matter how many lumens/watts it has, I think a better metric is "How much does it take to 'comfortably' light a single room for 1 hour". Surely the amount of wood that would take is not the amount needed from chopping for 10 hours a day/six days straight. Even more than that, I am really suspicious of these numbers. 60 hours worth of wood chopping would give me a giant inferno bonfire that would last much more than an hour, so how was this comparison done?
The fact that modern technology is so relatively cheap means that we can afford to waste it or use it to unnecessary extremes, but that doesn't mean we should really use that as the base measure of comparison. I of course understand the overall point the article is trying to make, but the attempt at quantifying the numbers feels like comparing apples to oranges.
This is why I resent the laws banning incandescent lights. I consider myself an environmentalist, and am very careful about wasting electricity. I love the warm dim light from an incandescent and think it helps me fall asleep... the light from one incandescent dimmed to about 20-40W is all I need after sunset, and all I want. It's like sitting near a campfire. My house is solar powered, and I keep a window open without even heat even in the winter - my utility bills are negative from my solar array.
Yet it is "normal" to create massive light pollution with hundreds of watts of LEDs, heating and lighting an entire house including unoccupied rooms, and nearly everybody has LED lights on the front porch and backyard that they leave on all night long. Pisses me off that lighting and electricity are so cheap that people have no regard for it, and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant
There was an article posted here earlier this year[1] that pointed out the flaws in modern LEDs, and just how hard it is to get one that matches the color you want. It's a pretty long read, but the author does a really good job of showing just how much trouble he has getting comfortable lighting that actually lasts a long time.
As I mentioned in some other comments, I settled on a lamp with a fully adjustable color and brightness. It’s lots of diodes, and the net effect is very nice.
In other words, I’m agreeing with your article that the fixed bulbs typically don’t hit the mark.
Are you sure that your "fully adjustable" bulb is giving you the spectrum you think it is? Syonyk's posted a few RGB bulb reviews recently, and they tend to have a lot more blue light than you'd think. And if you use the RGB functions, they tend to get REALLY spiky instead of having a smooth emissions curve.
Except people have already done these experiments, and it turns out trichromacy is quite common among humans.
If you actually dislike LED lighting then you should also notice issues with LED screens not just lightbulbs. Instead you like most people dislike bad LED lightbulbs which are common because most people are buying them without testing em. Which means most manufacturers don’t actually optimize for light quality.
If the spectrum of the LEDs match the sensitivities of the eyes, then everything is fine. But LEDs are narrow spectrum; they won't reproduce color the same way as a broad spectrum light source will.
As for LED screens, those are emissive and work great for simulating any color. However, they are not good light sources for lighting objects because they're narrow spectrum.
If the object you're lighting up is broad-band reflective (like paper with broadband black pigments), then everything is good. But as soon as you get narrow-band pigments, colors are going to be distorted.
You also run into the same issues with the images displayed via an LED screen.
There is no such thing as non distorted colors because even sunlight is also reflecting off objects in the environment. We are just used to seeing a decent approximation of what stuff probably looks like in full sunlight. It might be an old hack but changing a filaments temperature is only approximating what happens at different times of the day as the sun’s actual temperature and thus black body spectrum is constant what’s actually changing is the amount of atmosphere involved.
The truth is everyone doesn’t make the same corrections, individuals are simply fairly consistently with their approximation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
I worry we’ll find the high speed strobe almost all LEDs emit are harmful for humans or animals. We’re told they strobe too fast for us to perceive (sometimes true, sometimes not). But unperceptible doesn’t mean it’s not harmful.
A lot of people that use their iPhone’s slow motion video function indoors at night are surprised to see they are surrounded by a disco of blinking lights.
An incandescent has 10-15% brightness flicker at 120Hz. LEDs... vary. Some flicker a lot harder at 120Hz, some (mostly LED Christmas lights) are awful and flicker at 60Hz with a 50% duty cycle because they're a single diode rectifier.
Most LEDs flicker far faster, in the kHz range, which is theoretically beyond human impact, but we don't have many studies on it.
Incandescent flicker is also related to bulb wattage. A higher wattage bulb, with a thicker filament, will flicker less because it has more thermal inertia.
Filaments are slow to respond to alternating current. So they do wobble in brightness a bit, but they do not blink like an LED does, which fluctuates between 100% off and on.
A 240fps high speed is more than enough to observe a variety of LED flickering behaviors. Some flicker none (Bedtime Bulb is remarkable in the lack of flicker), some flicker at high enough frequency you can't really make out details, and others are just... gross.
Incandescents were "Deprecated but still available, and not many people worried about it" for about the past 7 years or so, and you could still find them at stores, if you cared.
Trump expressed his dislike for LED and CFL lighting, so, of course, the Biden administration went about actually banning sale of incandescents. I expect a robust black market in them for decades to come.
The overall energy use numbers really depend on how the bulbs are used - in many areas, lights are mostly used in the winter, when the heat is welcome. Saving energy on lighting and having to burn more natural gas or electricity for heat pumps is perhaps some savings over electricity, but not nearly the 5-6x often cited as "savings." In the summer, when the heat is unwelcome, the sun is up longer, so a well run home won't be using nearly as much artificial light.
I’m more familiar with the advancements in CRI in recent years than dUV (this is the first I’be heard of that) but LEDs can now be purchased with equivalent CRI.
The context of this discussion is incandescent color/perception/experience.
My point is that CRI alone isn't sufficient. Nor is CCT (correlated color temperature). In practice, two bulbs with the same CRI and color temperature can have drastically different tints.
It all boils down to how these measurements work. In practice, the vast vast majority of LED bulbs do not even remotely come close to the color reproduction of halogen. Not to mention the flicker response to 60hz wall power.
There are a handful of companies that produce extremely color accurate LEDs but they're expensive and have limited lifespan.
I can’t recommend Waveform Lighting’s 95 CRI products highly enough!
The wonderful warmth of incandescent (depending on your color temp prefs) with no wasted IR energy in the form of heat. What’s funny is that your mind will perceive it as hot because we’ve been conditioned to expect it from light at that color temp.
Reasonable price, too, but more expensive than bulbs from the big box store. For something that lasts 10-18 years, it’s worth it to me.
Well OK, I was more speaking in the context of a reading lamp. And I wanted more to point out that an LED lamp with smooth color and brightness spectrums allows for you to find a better sweet spot for comfortably reading at night.
It doesn't look or feel the same to me. Maybe something to do with CRI (I don't really understand that).
I am not switching to LEDs... It would be wasteful to throw away something that works great and replace it with something new that doesn't work as well. I like incandescent, and my 40 year old reading lamp and a few extra bulbs will last forever running a few hours a night dimmed to ~20W.
I used to be in this camp before branching out and trying some different LEDs. Unless it is literally the glowing filament that you like looking at, which is reasonable, you can definitely find a bulb that looks and feels the same.
That was my point in repeating myself saying that it 100% exists. If you’re not in a place to financially experiment with a few bulbs that’s different. Stating that LEDs can’t produce the color you want is wrong. I would go as far as to say that you can find an LED that produces a color you prefer over incandescent.
It just seems like a solution looking for a problem... incandescent lights are exactly the perfect solution for my use case, I am completely happy with them.
The whole problem LED bulb mandates are trying to solve is mostly a problem of unnecessary and excessive lighting which is causing tons of light pollution, interrupting peoples circadian rhythm, etc. If people used a very dim light near their body just between sunset and sleep it wouldn't matter much how efficient it is.
Brightly lighting up our cities and houses is totally unnecessary and terrible for us, and terrible for the planet regardless of how efficient and cheap we can make it. It lowers quality of life for us, and other animals affected by the light pollution.
I would have no problem affording LED lights I don't want, but cannot afford to move someplace with enough land to escape the neighbors light pollution from their cheap LEDs... which makes it harder to sleep, impossible to enjoy the stars, etc.
Making it more efficient just means people will think even less before brightly lighting things up all night long that either don’t need lighting at all or don’t need it so bright. LEDs are so efficient and cheap that the result is massive light pollution. The solution to energy waste is to make light dimmer and more localized.
And I can't help but think my neighbor with literally hundreds of watts of LED bulbs around the outside of their house might not decide to light the night quite as often if they were all incandescents. I can read a newspaper by their lights, which aren't even aimed at me, about 3/8 mile away. It's absurd.
I live in a village of <100 people and its almost impossible to see the stars here. I can make out planets/brighter stars but most dim stars are obscured. We don’t even produce a whole lot of light pollution by ourselves, it’s mostly from nearby towns. And it’s only gotten worse in recent years.
I settled on an adjustable-temperature/brightness standing lamp. I don’t know the model, sorry. Being able to change the color/brightness on a spectrum is very nice.
Planning to buy some e26 bulbs that connect to Apple’s home automation. It’ll be the same process of buying all the popular models on Amazon that have fully adjustable color/brightness and settling on what I like best.
They're not obvious visually when they switch from the white emitter, which has "some blue" to the RGB emitters, which have "lots of blue" as you head out in the red/orange spectrum, but your body's "blue sensors" certainly notice.
Unfortunately, our visual system isn't sensitive to the same things our melatonin inhibiting system is sensitive to, so without a spectrometer, you can't really tell what you're seeing.
Sounds like you're looking for a color temperature even lower than 2700 which is usually the low end for standard bulbs. Two options that might work for you are 'smart' color changing bulbs that you can set to much warmer and dimmer values OR 'vintage' or amber glass bulbs, typically in a narrower bulb shape and sometimes with a smaller base (adapters are available).
If you run a 100w incandescent lamp dimmed to 30 watts, it's lifespan will be increased to easily 100 years. (Aging is highly nonlinear with temperature)
So you will never have to deal with the inability to purchase a replacement.
> and yet my minuscule usage is nowadays categorically illegal /rant
No, even when the efficiency rules go into effect, using noncompliant bulbs will not be illegal. Stock up on your inefficient bulbs before August, and you can use them as long as you like.
While I appreciate your reluctance, I’d recommend trying to find one of the Philips LED bulbs that dim like an incandescent bulb. I’m not sure they’re easy to find now, and to be honest I don’t remember the model name, but if you can find them they are wonderful. Basically they have multiple sets of diodes within them that dim at different rates which is an incredibly convincing “incandescent emulation”. They are a “whiter” light at high brightness and a nice warm glow at low brightness with a nice smooth transition between them.
They seem to be obsoleted, all I can find for them is new old stock anymore. Which I've bought up a bunch of, because the damned things keep failing on me. I've had a set of 5 in service for about 6 years, and so far I've had to replace 4 of them for various failures. They're facing down in a hanging lamp with glass globes around them, and I guess that's close enough to "recessed or enclosed" that they fry themselves. I have them in a few places, though I've also purchased... "some" incandescents, before they went out of availability. I should be good for the rest of my life at this point, especially since I run my incandescents dimmed. The wiki article on bulb rerating is informative - as you reduce power, lifespan is "fraction of rated power" to the -12 or -16 - it's some stupidly high exponent, and it's why a lot of people empirically noticed that "bulbs on dimmers never seem to burn out."
I resent the banning of incandescent light bulbs for a practical reason: Heat.
In colder regions it's been common sense to use an incandescent light bulb to keep a space heated so it's just above freezing (above 0C or 32F) during the winter months.
This is to prevent things like plumbing and sensitive machinery from breaking due to ice formation. A full blown heater is generally complete overkill and impractical for this.
Unless someone has a drop-in replacement for incandescent light bulbs for heat generation purposes, I want them back. And no, LED light bulbs do not work: LEDs don't produce significant heat.
> Surely there are other, more reliable ways, to keep a space heated during winter months?
Sure, there are plenty of other ways to keep a space heated.
They're all radically more expensive, and radically more failure prone, than a 60W or 100W bulb burning constantly, back when the bulb was $2 and the trouble lamp cord was $10.
And before anyone chimes in that "burning constantly" is a waste of electricity, most bulbs used for this purpose are behind a mechanism that opens and closes the circuit according to the ambient temperature so the bulb doesn't burn if it's warm enough.
I just found this stackexchange post[1], that claims 350g of wood would be enough to power 1Kwh, but a user points out that half the heat would be lost in exhaust.
Maybe that's what the article was referring to, a significant loss of energy to the efficiency of extracting meaningful work from burning wood, with stone age tools.
Indeed, you also can burn thousands of gallons of jet fuel and the tyres on a 747 actually spin fewer times than the tyres on a Citroen 2CV do just going to the supermarket.
The power in a fire is mostly released as heat, both because they're "compact" piles of burning stuff, and because they're more or less "red/yellow" black body radiators. If it was all released as visible light, burning 3 kg of wood (about 12kWh) over 10 hours would be about the brightness as several kilowatts of metal halide stadium floodlamp.
I think they meant a fire itself would need to burn 10 hours a day for 6 days a week - the chopping to support that fire. The light over the duration is as much as a lightbulb for one hour.
I can't see any combination, length of time burned or length of time to gather the material, where it takes 60 hours to get a fire that outputs as much light as a single lightbulb over one hour.
However, a 60W incandescent bulb puts out about 800 lumens, which is about 64 candela. So one bulb-hour is indeed about 60 candle-hours. This is omnidirectional output, useful output may be less.
The original paper reports a 21 pounds of firewood was measured to produce 2.1 foot-candles (22 lux) for 3.4 hours. Overall useful fireplace output was estimated at about 1.7 lumen-hours per pound of wood, which is 10 lumens (just under 1 candela) on average for that 21 pound fire.
By focusing on light output, and not the heat output, I still think it's an incomplete comparison, as an LED bulb may be very bright and cheap to run, but it won't keep you very warm in a cave in prehistoric Zhoukoudian.
This is why i dont like these kind of studies. Clearly it does not take 60 hours to find a dead tree in the woods, break it down, and light it on fire.
Might not be far off if you don't have very effective tools (Peking Man had simple stone tools) or you've exhausted nearby suitable wood supplies like sticks you can just pick up or trees you can tackle, so you have to travel out and drag it back.
The original study estimated 10 pounds (5kg) of wood foraged, trimmed and dried per hour of labour. That sounds low with a saw and an axe (and very low with a chainsaw), but might be about right with primitive tools including travel and processing and wood stack maintenance (no tarps either).
This entire article is total bullshit, and could easily qualify as propaganda. The fact is that everything has gotten far more expensive, not cheaper. 30-40 years ago people used incandescent lights everywhere, AC transformers with pitiful efficiency and gas-guzzling V8s and nobody had to weep over their energy bill. Electricity and fuel has become staggeringly more expensive. It's only due to technological advances and higher efficiency that we can still somewhat afford that stuff at all.
This feels like a very odd comparison/metric. It doesn't really matter how many lumens/watts it has, I think a better metric is "How much does it take to 'comfortably' light a single room for 1 hour". Surely the amount of wood that would take is not the amount needed from chopping for 10 hours a day/six days straight. Even more than that, I am really suspicious of these numbers. 60 hours worth of wood chopping would give me a giant inferno bonfire that would last much more than an hour, so how was this comparison done?
The fact that modern technology is so relatively cheap means that we can afford to waste it or use it to unnecessary extremes, but that doesn't mean we should really use that as the base measure of comparison. I of course understand the overall point the article is trying to make, but the attempt at quantifying the numbers feels like comparing apples to oranges.