Atrios links today to a Wirecutter piece that says you no longer need to worry about turning off the lights when you leave a room. Modern bulbs are so energy efficient it barely makes any difference.
This reminded me of the great Obama light bulb panic of 2011, highlighted by Michele Bachmann (remember her?) and the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act. Yes, that was a real thing. As it happens, the phaseout of incandescent light bulbs was signed into law by George Bush, not Barack Obama, but no matter. It was his Energy Department that wrote the enabling rules.
And the new bulbs were horrible! Flickery, bright white, expensive, and temperamental. Complaints were endless from conservatives, who stockpiled ruddy incandescent bulbs so they'd have enough to last a lifetime even under the new fascist rules.
In 2022 the final phase of regulations went into place and in 2023 incandescents were effectively banned for good. But guess what? The new regs had done exactly what they were supposed to do: spurred innovation and made light bulbs better than ever. Today you can get LED bulbs of any temperature from incandescent to sunlight. Not only that, you can buy 'em from Costco by the dozen for a few bucks apiece and adjust the temperature on the bulb itself. LED bulbs last a long time, they hardly use any electricity, and they don't flicker. We are living in a golden age of light bulbs.
Does anyone even care anymore? Not that I can tell. We're all happily saving a bunch of money and lighting our houses just like we used to. All that panic was for nothing.
Sigh…. We’re a strange species because we can look at ourselves and know we’re strange
The really strange people are Trump supporters. They aren’t worried about lightbulbs anymore because they are like Trump — too busy worrying about flushing their toilets. Of course the problem isn’t the toilet, it’s that they are so full of feces.
Net balance notwithstanding Kevin, how many of these wondrous lights are made by unionized Americans in good-paying jobs?
And, you should still turn-off lights when not in use…
LEDs can use as little energy as sensors to detect motion.
You can keep those motion sensors. At least in a residential setting. They are a royal PITA, with a penchant for triggering just by someone walking down the hall past the room. At night, when one's eyes are already dark-adapted...
Heh. My fire alarms double as motion sensors giving off the softest of glows so my dark adapted eyes can actually see something.
We're very happy with our motion-sensor lights. They get triggered by wildlife and heavy winds occasionally, but that tells me they're working.
So tell me you don't know how sensors work without telling me how sensors work, rick...
Hardly.
How many of the old incandescent bulbs were being made in the US?
This is more about how any and all possible jobs get sent overseas, not just this one kind of job.
At least half the ones which used to be in my house were. Doesn’t mean they haven’t been replaced. But I wanted to remind Kevin how no good deed goes unpunished.
That's dumb, megara.
Should we still have horse drawn carriages, then? Buggy whip manufacturing?
No, not for nothing.
But he's old!
Right wing hatred for improving things cannot fail. It can only be failed.
The right wing MAGA folks (new name for the GOP as taken over by Orange Jesus), hate all government regulations and rules, except for those involving control of women's bodies, what we can read in the library, what our children are taught in public school, providing water to folks working in the hot sun all day and/or on a line to vote, control of what private companies (Facebook, X, TikTok) can publish or decide not to publish, what entertainment parents allow their children to see, and what non religious training a private company can require its employees to attend, which consenting adults can marry, what consenting adults can do their bedrooms (or wherever).
Since we're on the topic, what do folks think about sunlight bulbs vs the more conventional yellow light? I feel like the yellow light is warmer than sunlight.
In my opinion, bulbs with a color temperature of around 3000K look better for residential use. At Home Depot, there was a choice of about 3 or 4 different color temp bulbs for each type.
I like 4000K myself, but nothing higher.
I use 3500 indoors, but I like the 5000K for outdoors. It makes my security lights seem brighter and harsher.
Yeah, they're terrible on your neighbors' sleep cycles and attract all the insects to your home.
I agree!
But this is exactly the problem with our sucky media. When LED light bulbs were new (radical!) and kind of expensive, and the trumpy loudmouths hated them, that hatred -- I mean "controversy" -- got media coverage.
But now they are so much vastly better, use 10 times less electricity, and are inexpensive, there is nothing to report. There's no more controversy. The pesky regulations have pushed industry into a wonderful cycle of innovation and improvement that has been a SUCCESS!
And reporting on government success is forbidden. Commentators ON the media make excuses like "It's not news so of course they can't talk about it."
And now we're back to the universal postulate that "Government can't do anything right, all they do is waste taxpayer money on useless programs. The most terrifying words in the English language: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help!' Hahahahaha, so funny!"
hello, i'm from your isp/cell/health insurance/cable/streaming service and i'm here to help!
You'd think these people had never heard of a "feature story".
Something I appreciate is that you can put REALLY bright bulbs in fixtures now that were previously limited by the heat put out by incandescent bulbs. So you can 2-3-4 times the light in your house where once were limited to dimmer bulbs.
Of vice versa, you can have just a watt of LED lighting where an incandescent used to be just annoyingly bright.
yeah, i have a low-watt led behind the tv to use as theater lighting at night; works great
I was going to replace some sconces lighting a stairway, but I installed LED's about 4 times brighter than the original incandescent bulbs and now they work fine.
Not only that, but it's made a lot of electrical panel upgrades unnecessary since the lighting load is no longer there. Leaves a lot of space of changing out other end uses to electric as they make sense (not all make sense with California's insane electric rates, but that's another post).
Panel optimization is catching on all over the place rather the just upgrading the panel and waiting months for your utility to come out and bless the project (or deny it if there's a service upgrade required on their end).
An amusing side-effect of the LED light bulb revolution is that "W" on a light bulb box (40W, 60W, 100W, etc) no longer indicates the power consumption of the bulb. Now it is simply an informal measure of brightness...
i'm guessing that goes away once us old folk die off; eventually it'll just be lumens
(60w incandescent is ~800 lumens)
I worked on the roll out for LED and trying to get people to associate lumens to brightness was just not happening, maybe in another 30 years.
Damn metric system!!!
😉
Drives me crazy: "This 60w light bulb uses 12.5w." wtf?
Amazon decided to ban any heat lamps being sold to California, rather than complying with the efficiency limits.
Which is just a weird tantrum way to deal with it if you ask me.
Even so, wasted energy is wasted energy. If you live in a place where energy is not green, you're adding excess CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. The commercial building code still requires automatic lighting controls for a reason.
Thank you.
C'mon and turn off your lights - geez, how lazy can one be? Do we really need to be encouraging Americans to be worse?
Imagine if every home in America just leaves on just one light (which sounds light), how many would that be? That'd be about 125 million bulbs.
I manage construction. For more than five years now every single lighting submittal that I have reviewed has called for 100% LED lighting, interior and exterior.
I love the 21st century.
"... and they don't flicker. .."
Is this true now? It certainly hasn't been true for the LED bulbs I have tried to use in my light fixtures with dimmer switches. Even with the dimmer switch as far up as I could set it they would start flickering especially when there were two on the same circuit. It was extremely annoying.
Yeah, your dimmers and bulbs are mismatched. You can get dimmers which work with any dimmable bulb, but make sure your bulbs are dimmable, some aren't.
Some LED bulbs also interfere with FM radio reception if they are too close to your reciever.
rumor has it: garage door openers too!
If you have a hand-cranked emergency radio, you can put it near a led bulb and hear the radio pollution it's emitting.
My husband's a ham radio operator, and lots of new electronic stuff (solar panels, for instance) often put off a huge amount of noise. These things don't have to; but it requires a bit of extra gadgets (ferrous iron rings, usually) to filter it and that drives up costs.
Some LED's are compatible with dimmer switches, others aren't. Check before you buy.
Most cheap old dimmers only work with incandescent bulbs. A hot glowing wire doesn't heat up or cool down fast enough to flicker visibly.
"Most cheap old dimmers only work with incandescent bulbs. ..."
So I am going to have to pay hundreds of dollars to get them replaced? Will take quite a while to get that back in electricity savings.
Last time I replaced a dimmer for my dinning room it was less than hundreds of dollars and the cost was mostly because I hired an electrician to do it for me. If you are the least bit DIY you could turn off the breaker and replace the dimmer switch for dirt cheap.
"Last time I replaced a dimmer for my dinning room it was less than hundreds of dollars and the cost was mostly because I hired an electrician to do it for me. ..."
I have three of them and I would be surprised if it comes to less than two hundred dollars here in central New Jersey. As for doing it myself I don't mess with electricity..
I'll bet there's a Youtube for that, and that a middle school kid could do it for you if you don't think you're up to it.
Unless he gets sued by the kid's parents after the kid gets electrocuted.
So he should hold off until after the GOP grants employers of children immunity from consequences.
"Unless he gets sued by the kid's parents after the kid gets electrocuted."
Or I get electrocuted because the grounding wasn't done right. Or my house burns down because something wasn't done right.
LOL! Replacing wall switches is about as simple as it gets. Turning off the circuit breaker guarantees you won't get electrocuted, and if you just pay attention as you remove the defective switch, you can replace the connections the same way. Most electricians have at most a high school diploma.
Yeah, I replaced all the bulbs and switches in my mom's house. It only takes a little smarts to keep stuff pointed the right way.
Re: Flicker
Just like fluorescent bulbs, the light output of most LED bulbs in the USA goes to zero 120 times a second when the AC power crosses from positive to negative, and then back from negative to positive. In Europe, it's 100 times a second.
If there were market demand, one could design the AC-to-DC power supply for the bulbs with a bit more electricity storage (i.e. capacitors) and have continuous light output. But that would make them more expensive, and we know how much market demand there is for that.
Just this morning I was at an estate sale and I noticed several incandescent bulbs, still in original package, for sale for a couple of bucks. Today was day two of the sale.
This being Indiana, those bulbs would have sold out in the first few hours at a higher price just a few years ago.
Heh. Getting close to 15 years ago that I bought a bunch on LED bulbs for my home. The ones in my ceiling fan/dining room light are still fine, although I use them rarely. The ones in my living room and bedroom have been replaced with smart bulbs about 10 years ago, still going strong, although one had to be replaced because the power supply went wonky. And one is screwed into my range hood and has been on 24/7 since I bought it 15 years ago.
LED bulbs have been great for a long time and have only gotten better. Never did understand all the bitching about them, I suppose it was more about "owning the libs" than any real problem.
CFL's were a problem--they didn't last as long as advertised and are considered hazardous waste for disposal. Note: they were much less hazardous than mercury released by coal burning plants--but people don't have to directly deal with coal emissions. They were phased out as soon as LED's became widely available--and it was mainly due to market forces.
If you have 33 minutes, this YouTube video, Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED, is fascinating because of the personal story and the engineering aspects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M
And note (as you know doubt know) that "white" LEDs (whatever their color temperature) are blue (really, violet) LEDs plus phosphors. In that way it's similar to fluorescent lamps except it doesn't use a toxic metal vapor to generate the energy that excites the phosphor.
My biggest complaint is most of the bulbs are made in asia and don't come close to their rated lifetime. The LED's may last forever, but the internal solder joints fatique and crack, causing an annoying flicker in the light level.
You have to be a picky buyer of bulbs, I cycled through a bunch of disappointing bulbs then I spent a bit more to get really good bulbs on Amazon that are working great in enclosed fixtures no less.
"LED bulbs last a long time, they hardly use any electricity, and they don't flicker. We are living in a golden age of light bulbs."
You get these magic bulbs at Costco you say? I gotta stop shopping for them at Home Depot. They overheat and don't last anywhere near as long as claimed. The bulb I bought today was advertised as a replacement for a T12 florescent. I now have a burned out led bulb that took out the florescent light fixture at the same time.
If the claim is that the LED is a drop in replacement for a fluorescent tube, either you're being lied to or you're not correctly understanding what the package says. There are LED fixtures that can replace fluorescent fixtures, but fluorescent tubes run on way higher voltage than LEDs
There are LED tubes that can replace fluorescent ones; but if the ballast was on the edge of its life, or the LED strip fails, it can take both of them out,
The ballast is just changing the voltage, it's nothing fancy.
Some led tubes cannot be put in the florescent fixture until the ballast is removed from the fixture. Sounds like you bought the wrong tubes. Anyhow it's a no brainer to just purchase a new fixture and get it installed rather than retrofit an old one for most settings.
One thing I'd like to add it an experience I had replacing and installing new ceiling fans recently: after walking around in the Lights Plus store, I realized I didn't see hardly any fixtures with bulbs anymore, just vague, large white dome or something. Asking the saleperson about it, few fixtures are being made anymore with bulb sockets, just one LED light installed as part of the hardware. So soon: no more bulbs period!
I figure manufacturing something with fewer parts saves the company money, but then when some part of this solid state system goes out, then I'll have to replace the entire thing, so I won't get to save anything I guess. Hopefully they're right and these LEDS will never fail and this isn't a planned obsolescence ploy.
Yeah, LEDs do slowly burn through their fluorescence.
But their cycle life is similar to the motors in the fans.
If you are sensitive to lighting issues (flickering, harshness, color, etc ) LED bulbs are still horrible. Even 2700k is noticeably harsher than an incandescent and they still routinely flicker. Quality control is all over the map. The colors will often change as they age. They will “hum” at a weird frequency.
I love the energy savings, but it’s too early to declare a “golden age.” The quality of the light is just worse.
I'm very picky about that and my sibling that I co-own my house with is even more picky than I. You MUST buy quality LED bulbs rated for enclosed fixtures and have the appropriate light switches to get a good experience with the bulbs. If your house is from the 1960s and your dimmer switch is too, yeah no LED bulb will be happy. Also cheap LED bulbs flicker in enclosed fixtures.
This is only a problem if you're buying on the cheap!
Incandescent bulbs? Pure devilry! *Real* conservatives light their homes exclusively with whale oil lamps.
The advantages of LED over incandescent of efficiency and lifecycle cost made the extinction of incandescent as inevitable as 8-track cassettes.
LED fixtures themselves are cheaper and lend themselves to superior installation- for example, a typical recessed ceiling light in the incandescent model required a large heavy fixture which often needed to be wrapped in fireproofing; The equivalent LED model is smaller doesn't need the fireproofing.
When you are building a thousand homes or apartments with half a dozen such fixtures, the choice is dictated by economics.
Not just first cost economics, there's also maintenance economics of storing a couple pallets of replacement bulbs, different ladders, insurance for falls from said ladders, time for your maintenance people just replacing burnt out bulbs in common areas...
The panic was for something. It was part of the coordinated, steady, GOP fear mongering, attacking the Democrats. Different day, different GOP faux outrage du jour. Wake up!
I feel for all the poor fools who spent a lot of money to stock up on incandescent bulbs and now have to pay the higher energy costs to use them, forever.
Not forever. 800 - 1600 hours, and then they burn out.
So I'm super pro LED light bulbs for all the usual reasons, but they DO burn out (what Ive read is that the electronics fry, not the actual bulb itself). I had a huge problem with LED bulbs in my downstairs hallway commonly dying I gave up and went back to CF bulbs. I read certain fixtures just get too hot and LED bulbs can't handle that. Am I happy I had to do that? No way, but the CF bulbs have stayed working.
If you are having a problem with LED lamps installed on *one particular circuit* then permit me to suggest the problem is in the circuit and not the lamps.
Some locations are too hot, make sure you get bulbs designed for that.
And yes, they do very slowly get dimmer over time. I have some that are decades old at this point and are notably dimmer than ones that weren't on for most of the time.
I like LED lights for their flexibility and long life however, due to the The Jevons Paradox, we won't save near as money or energy as expected. We will just use way more lighting. I see this in our neighbourhood, way more outside lighting, security and decorative, lights left on 24/7 etc. Public lighting is much more expansive as well.
Yeah, but you'd need to have 10x more lighting to use as much energy, let alone more.
Agreed. Old homes would have one central light fixture in the ceiling with two or three sockets for a total of maybe ~200W or so. Now we put in something like ten sockets with a wattage of maybe ~100 or a little more. Still better than incandescent light and the lighting is vastly more uniform. I put four 12” discs of LED light in the garage. I’m always impressed at the light. Almost no shadows.
If you really need a dimmer for a specific light like a main chandelier there is now a standard for a 10V control line. You need to do this with new construction. Probably too expensive for an existing light. The dimmer switch uses the 10V line as a control signal to the power box associated with the chandelier so that you can get really nice dimming.
They still have a finite lifespan, albeit much longer than an incandescent bulb.
I have an LED lamp above the music desk on my piano, 4.5W type T10.
I figured it would cost $5/yr to leave it on all the time, so I saved the wear and tear on the lamp switch and did so. The bulb died after exactly a year, about 40% earlier than expected. You can't win 'em all.