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Why LED lights are garbage...

I've had all LED for at least 5 yrs and haven't changed a bulb since. Have them on my wifi and can change colors and brightness with the app or the wall switch. Never had a problem and doubt I ever will.
 
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SoDakHawk said:
TLDR.

LED lights suck though. Lasts 9 years my butt. Some of these I am constantly replacing as they start flickering and give that strobe light effect inside 9 months. Do like how they don't give off heat though.
Click to expand...
I changed out my house to all LED (cheap ass ones too) back in 2013ish . Haven't replaced one yet. I'm guessing your wiring is bad.
 
Yeah, I got the blue daylight 5600k ones all over my home. Not one has ever died, been years now for every one. LOVE them.
 
tenor.gif
 
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I am a big fan of LED lights, I've been switching over for years ever since their price came down to reasonable levels. I like the fact that they can (theoretically) go ages without replacement, I like the fact that they don't shatter (sometimes in your hand trying to twist them!), the lack of heat, and I enjoy the option for the cool white in many applications, I have a preference for that kind of light actually.

That said, I have grown somewhat frustrated over the last couple years with them. I find in some sockets, some bulbs will randomly buzz, and I'll have to cycle through trying multiple bulbs to find one that doesn't buzz. It's frustrating that bulbs of the same specs might be radically mismatched if they are different brands.

With the old bulbs, I never had to worry about if I was buying a GE bulb what brands or age the other bulbs were...you could just replace them as they died. If you ended up with a 5 year old GE, a couple two year old store brand bulbs, and a brand new Philips in a light fixture, you'd never know the difference. Now, I've sometimes had to replace four bulbs from the same pack to get a matching fixture.

Never in my life with old bulbs did I have to get on a ladder and unscrew other working bulbs and check the brand to make sure I was was buying a bulb that would match and not buzz.

And trying to find bulbs that work in a particular dimmer is super frustrating.

I would never go back to traditional bulbs if I could, but I think we deserve better here. I feel like this is an area where the market moved SO fast, we're ending up with a worse product (and ONLY that product) than the consumer deserves, and if we do get improvement, it will be way slower than it should be.

And its not just government intervention, although in this particular case that's a factor, but it can be manufacturers deciding to prioritize costs/marketing, and of course consumer sentiment is a factor - it wouldn't happen unless there was substantial consumer interest in even the substandard product. It just feels frustrating when things get objectively "worse" in some areas.

This very frustratingly happened with TVs, when the industry killed plasma TVs while they still were of dramatically superior picture quality than LCD TVs (because they were much heavier, more difficult to produce, used more energy, etc). While OLED mitigated some of that issue, even while it was technically "on the market" it was excessively expensive until the last few years.

There was about a decade where TVs, in terms of their primary function (quality of picture), were objectively WORSE than what was available a decade earlier. Hell, some people still swear that a good Panasonic or Pioneer plasma is yet to be topped. That is just simply not supposed to happen with technology.

Side benefits are nice, and matter, but there is no reason to have to accept demonstratively worse performance of primary functions (or almost none - I'm not rallying to bring back lead paint). I just hate it when we end up in one of those gaps, and it feels like we're in one with LED bulbs.
 
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I actually read the whole thing because living in the NE for 30 years, the lack of light was disturbing to me in the winter.

I experimented with a lot of different bulbs, and had a halogen standing light in an office.

My preference in the family room was to have GE blue full spectrum lights. We bought LEDs for the kitchen early on and I was never happy with them after 3 weeks. They dimmed and died.

But, I am one of those older people that does not need glasses to read, provided I have light. It is called "nighttime myopia". As my pupils enlarge, my vision decreases.

So, I do appreciate the science in all of this. My husband was also a geek. I made sure the bulbs were what I wanted for a particular room.

Dim lighting is a challenge for me, but I am sure it helps me look better at my age. LOL
 
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Replaced all the lights in the house with LED 4 or 5 years ago, Have not replaced one yet. Trad’s issue has all the earmarks of user error, Likely could be solved if he brought 4 or 5 ISU fans over to help him change the bulbs.

Also

girls-sniffing-cocaine-imitation-17634777.jpg
 
bcherod said:
I actually read the whole thing because living in the NE for 30 years, the lack of light was disturbing to me in the winter.

I experimented with a lot of different bulbs, and had a halogen standing light in an office.

My preference in the family room was to have GE blue full spectrum lights. We bought LEDs for the kitchen early on and I was never happy with them after 3 weeks. They dimmed and died.

But, I am one of those older people that does not need glasses to read, provided I have light. It is called "nighttime myopia". As my pupils enlarge, my vision decreases.

So, I do appreciate the science in all of this. My husband was also a geek. I made sure the bulbs were what I wanted for a particular room.

Dim lighting is a challenge for me, but I am sure it helps me look better at my age. LOL
Click to expand...
Not sure if bot . . .

Intrigued at another potential female GIAOT poster . . . but cautious it's a trap.

giphy.gif
 
torbee said:
3. Because of my large member, charming personality, rakish good looks and considerable skills in the arena of lovemaking, my "real" job is being a trophy husband to a very successful CEO. That is one of the reasons I stayed in journalism - notorious for crappy pay - for so many years. I could pursue a passion (I do love the work, hated the job) while still living the lifestyle I've become accustomed to.


It's a tough life, but someone has to do it. :)
Click to expand...
So does this " very successful CEO " like it in the coin box or the cornhole, just asking what the rest of GIAOT is still thinking from your wouldja thread...
 
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torbee said:
Ironically, I'm not a fan of LED light either --- that is the lack of warmth and difficulty in getting adequate dimming from them. I do appreciate their longevity and relative "greener" profile.

But I'm not a poor, so I have invested in the more expensive, multi-hue ones mentioned in the article (third page, I believe, lol) that you can control with a phone app. They are pretty cool, and you can do all sorts of nifty colors with them. My bar looks tight with them!
Click to expand...
I work out of town a lot. Every once in a while I’ll go to the app and turn the lights in the living room to a red strobe, when I know the family is sitting there, just to mess with them. Yes, I know. I’m a dick.
 
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Chuck C said:
I work out of town a lot. Every once in a while I’ll go to the app and turn the lights in the living room to a red strobe, when I know the family is sitting there, just to mess with them. Yes, I know. I’m a dick.
Click to expand...
Blood red that flickers to the sound during a horror film usually gets me a smack to the back of the head and a huge smile on my face.
 
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Tenacious E said:
I think you need to change your light switch and/or fixtures.

diy.stackexchange.com

Do LED lights require a special dimmer switch?

I have 9 canister lights in my kitchen that I've replaced with "replacement LEDs." The lights are on a 2-way switch, one of which is a dimmer. Things were good for about 2 years, but no...
diy.stackexchange.com diy.stackexchange.com
Click to expand...

Indeed

Old, outdated dimmers will not play well with LED bulbs.
 
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Trad is standing behind his "xenon bulb projection TV" in the den; none of that "LED bullshit" flatscreen stuff.
 
bcherod said:
I'm a bot? LOL. Ask DFS or Goldmom. They know me in the flesh.
Click to expand...
Hey now, I did NOT say you were ---- and the absence of a link made me think you definitely were not.

But you have to admit the phrasing of your post was a bit bot like (I was waiting for a link to purchase high tech lightbulbs :) )

And only 38 posts.

But anyway, welcome to GIAOT and Go Hawks!
 
torbee said:
Hey now, I did NOT say you were ---- and the absence of a link made me think you definitely were not.

But you have to admit the phrasing of your post was a bit bot like (I was waiting for a link to purchase high tech lightbulbs :) )

And only 38 posts.

But anyway, welcome to GIAOT and Go Hawks!
Click to expand...

Stop being creepy, Torbes.
 
torbee said:
Hey now, I did NOT say you were ---- and the absence of a link made me think you definitely were not.

But you have to admit the phrasing of your post was a bit bot like (I was waiting for a link to purchase high tech lightbulbs :) )

And only 38 posts.

But anyway, welcome to GIAOT and Go Hawks!
Click to expand...
Rivals has a weird way of doing things, and when the Nole site changed, my status was not converted because I no longer wanted to be bcherod on WC for personal reasons. My actual years and posts are not reflected here, for whatever reason, and frankly, I don't care. It doesn't give someone "cred".

But, if you insist, there are people who will vouch for me, should you need verification.
 
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bcherod said:
Rivals has a weird way of doing things, and when the Nole site changed, my status was not converted because I no longer wanted to be bcherod on WC for personal reasons. My actual years and posts are not reflected here, for whatever reason, and frankly, I don't care. It doesn't give someone "cred".

But, if you insist, there are people who will vouch for me, should you need verification.
Click to expand...
Oh, and feel free to find me on FB. I don't hide behind screen names. I am wysiwyg. Herod is my last name. I'm not afraid of what I post on message boards, nor who I am.
 
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bcherod said:
Oh, and feel free to find me on FB. I don't hide behind screen names. I am wysiwyg. Herod is my last name. I'm not afraid of what I post on message boards, nor who I am.
Click to expand...
That makes two of us - I’m the least anonymous poster on here most likely.

And Trad, this is called “being friendly” not creepy. I know you have little experience in that arena 😉
 
The Tradition said:
If blue light is overstimulating and clammy, it’d be better for our brains to have less of it in indoors, especially late at night. But blue light is also cheaper. Adding warm tones to a blue LED requires extra material and effort. To get something in the whitish color range of traditional indoor lighting, manufacturers coat the underlying blue elements with phosphor, which shifts some of the photons to longer wavelengths — that is, greens and yellows and reds. (This coating partly explains why LED color varies over time. As the diode heats and cools again and again, “maybe the phosphor will curl a little bit,” says Royer. “And those tiny changes will allow a different amount of blue photons to escape versus yellow.”)

Last year, the New York Times warned in a front-page story that “lower-end retailers like dollar stores or convenience shops still extensively stock their shelves with traditional or halogen incandescent bulbs, even as stores serving more affluent communities have shifted to selling far more efficient LEDs.” This was, the Times fretted, preventing poorer people from receiving the benefits of energy efficiency. The studies the newspaper cited, finding incandescent bulbs on discount-store shelves, were both a few years old. I checked my nearest dollar store and discovered that there were plenty of LED bulbs to be had there. Their color temperature was 6,400 Kelvin — the harshest, cheapest possible light, a light so blue that when I Googled it, what came up were grow bulbs. The efficient future of lighting now includes poor people; it just does it by making lighting one more form of privation.

Checking for spares in my mom’s basement recently, I discovered that she had picked up a pack of 5,000 Kelvin bulbs to replace her living-room floodlights. Of all the people to have made this mistake! Mom used to teach schoolchildren about color perception, showing them how that part of their vision faded in the periphery or how a wheel of colored panels mounted on a salad spinner would turn gray. But she had no idea what 5,000 Kelvin meant, and the package had no color-rendering index at all. Had she ever put the things into her ceiling, she’d have ended up with a living room that looked like the inside of a refrigerator.

It’s true that CRI numbers are kind of useless. All else being equal, if light on an object gets dimmer — if you start with an object outdoors, in full sunlight, then bring it indoors to that same daylight, but less of it, now coming through a window — the object will appear more gray. The way color rendering is defined, the diminished light is performing at the same level as it did outside. The color-rendering index scores it the same. But the object looks worse.

In lower light, people prefer to see the vividness of colors boosted, especially in the reds. Incandescent lights naturally boost reds as they get dimmer and the temperature of their filament gets lower. LEDs, again, operate in a fundamentally different way. Many cannot dim at all; those that are advertised as dimmable do not reduce their temperature or even reduce the intensity of the light they put out. Instead, a common method is to adjust how frequently they switch off and on, which is dozens of times per second. Extra-sensitive people can sometimes detect this flicker or find themselves with unexplained headaches and dizziness. For everyone, the light gets even duller looking than before.

Royer is a fellow at the Illuminating Engineering Society (motto: “Improving Life Through Quality of Light”), which has created an elaborate alternative to CRI called TM-30. In this scheme, bulbs are classified under three separate but interrelated categories: P, V, and F, for preference, vividness, and fidelity, each of which is further broken down into subcategories indicating performance level. Manufacturers and retailers have not agreed to this new scoring system. “They don’t want to provide a lot of information that might confuse consumers,” Royer said. “But consumers aren’t going to understand information until it’s provided to them.”

If you don’t mind spending extra money — say, three or four times as much per bulb, plus a $60 controller — and fooling around inside an app, you can get color-tunable lightbulbs today. They have different colored LEDs inside, instead of simply phosphor-treated blue ones. The Department of Energy notes that programming the bulb controls “may not be intuitive,” that tunable whites won’t necessarily match any other whites, and that colors may come out “cartoonlike.” And they won’t save as much electricity. The LED industry is still trying to develop an efficient green LED to go with the red, blue, and amber ones. Royer remains hopeful and is encouraged by the continued search for improvement. Tunable LEDs may overtake phosphor-converted bulbs in efficiency by the 2030s.

Until then, there’s amber nail polish. Ordinary, transparent amber from the drugstore. “I highly recommend every person who reads this story buy this nail polish and start painting it on their LED bulbs,” said Robin Standefer. “It is a game changer.” Standefer is one of the founders of Roman and Williams Buildings and Interiors, a design company that works with Descottes and L’Observatoire. We were talking on Zoom, and behind her was a paper Noguchi lamp. “It’s the most beautiful light in the world,” she said, “but you put an LED in and it’s not that beautiful.” To compensate, she’d wrapped the bulb in a filter.

I wanted to see the best possible application of LED lighting, so Standefer said I had to go downtown. At dusk, I took a blazingly lit N train (my light-meter app reported 4,292 Kelvin) to the Roman and Williams Guild and La Mercerie, their combined retail store and restaurant on Howard Street. The light inside was opulent and gorgeous. Tall candles flickered on the dining tables, but everything else was LED. As I studied the fixtures in the store — in burnished bronzes with glass that was dark and pearly, or a delicate nude pink, and with prices starting in the low four figures — I realized that the surrounding lighting had subtly dimmed and warmed, shifting its Kelvin temperature for nighttime. In the restaurant, copper pans gleamed and a row of double-magnum bottles of rosé glowed extra pink. The bread’s crust was shaded in lush browns. Stacked white towels were creamy, and spotlights from tracks overhead threw the shadows of the candles this way and that on the tables.

It was sublime. And if I really wanted to experience LEDs at their most exquisite, Standefer said, I should see what Descottes and Roman and Williams had done at Le Coucou, another client. I walked two blocks east and stepped inside. The restaurant was wonderfully dim, the dimness alive with color and warmth. Huge chandeliers hung with rings of dozens of flame-tipped bulbs in rose-pink inverted glass cups. That glass, Standefer had told me, was Roman and Williams’s special formula for LED bulbs, the work of a septuagenarian glassblower in Brooklyn. “If she stops blowing this glass, I don’t know what I’ll do, because she’s been the only person to achieve a very beautiful color in the glass,” she said.

Inside the bulbs were the little V’s of filaments. You can do remarkable things with LED filaments these days, reviving old-timey clear bulb shapes with all sorts of whorls or zigzags. I swore they looked just like the real thing.

I was trying to figure out how to describe the particular color the light made on the white ductwork above — the color of the flesh of a white peach, I decided — when I ran into John Barclay, the facilities manager for Le Coucou and its sister restaurants. Barclay studied theater lighting in college before going into hospitality, and when LEDs arrived, he gave himself a crash education in the technical ins and outs. Now he was near evangelical about the LEDs. He ran through the interplay of the lighting sources: The chandeliers were at about 1,700 Kelvin, he said, while spotlights above the tables were at 2,400 and task lighting in the kitchen was slightly colder, at 2,700, to give the staff a precise look at the plated food on the way out.

I’d been told I had to see the restroom. I went to see the restroom. The all-pervading glow was so honeyed I couldn’t tell if the grab bar by the toilet was mere steel or luxurious brass.

Maybe I was wrong about LEDs. Maybe I just had to be patient — to wait and let this luminous future trickle down to the rest of us. Later, upon follow-up questioning, I learned that the warmly glowing filaments in the Le Coucou chandeliers are not, in fact, LEDs. They are hot wire filaments. Inside the LED-optimized glass of the chandelier fittings, the LED-forward restaurant is still using incandescents for that ineffable and as yet irreplaceable glow.

I asked Barclay how he would navigate the future. “In the near term,” he said, “I have a large stock of those bulbs.”


This guy gets it.
Click to expand...
TL;DC
 
https://media.tenor.com/ebvEWNnZeBsAAAAd/what-the-****-are-you-talking-about-leonardo-dicaprio.gif
 
torbee said:
1. LOL, not "failed" --- laid off with about 260 other Gannett editors on the "Black Monday" of April 1, 2020 as the full impact of Covid shutdown panicked the dying industry giant's bean counters to embark on more slash-and-burn idiocy that only accelerated the eventual demise.

2. Both post-ICPC jobs have been cushy, white collar gigs with decent pay - but kinda boring. I also make a fair amount doing freelance writing.

3. Because of my large member, charming personality, rakish good looks and considerable skills in the arena of lovemaking, my "real" job is being a trophy husband to a very successful CEO. That is one of the reasons I stayed in journalism - notorious for crappy pay - for so many years. I could pursue a passion (I do love the work, hated the job) while still living the lifestyle I've become accustomed to.


It's a tough life, but someone has to do it. :)
Click to expand...
Props to you for finding that “niche”, oh rakish one.
My baby brother was a paper man for years. He hit the bricks during the great purge as well and also struts about due to massive good looks and a strong woman.
 
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The Tradition said:
If blue light is overstimulating and clammy, it’d be better for our brains to have less of it in indoors, especially late at night. But blue light is also cheaper. Adding warm tones to a blue LED requires extra material and effort. To get something in the whitish color range of traditional indoor lighting, manufacturers coat the underlying blue elements with phosphor, which shifts some of the photons to longer wavelengths — that is, greens and yellows and reds. (This coating partly explains why LED color varies over time. As the diode heats and cools again and again, “maybe the phosphor will curl a little bit,” says Royer. “And those tiny changes will allow a different amount of blue photons to escape versus yellow.”)

Last year, the New York Times warned in a front-page story that “lower-end retailers like dollar stores or convenience shops still extensively stock their shelves with traditional or halogen incandescent bulbs, even as stores serving more affluent communities have shifted to selling far more efficient LEDs.” This was, the Times fretted, preventing poorer people from receiving the benefits of energy efficiency. The studies the newspaper cited, finding incandescent bulbs on discount-store shelves, were both a few years old. I checked my nearest dollar store and discovered that there were plenty of LED bulbs to be had there. Their color temperature was 6,400 Kelvin — the harshest, cheapest possible light, a light so blue that when I Googled it, what came up were grow bulbs. The efficient future of lighting now includes poor people; it just does it by making lighting one more form of privation.

Checking for spares in my mom’s basement recently, I discovered that she had picked up a pack of 5,000 Kelvin bulbs to replace her living-room floodlights. Of all the people to have made this mistake! Mom used to teach schoolchildren about color perception, showing them how that part of their vision faded in the periphery or how a wheel of colored panels mounted on a salad spinner would turn gray. But she had no idea what 5,000 Kelvin meant, and the package had no color-rendering index at all. Had she ever put the things into her ceiling, she’d have ended up with a living room that looked like the inside of a refrigerator.

It’s true that CRI numbers are kind of useless. All else being equal, if light on an object gets dimmer — if you start with an object outdoors, in full sunlight, then bring it indoors to that same daylight, but less of it, now coming through a window — the object will appear more gray. The way color rendering is defined, the diminished light is performing at the same level as it did outside. The color-rendering index scores it the same. But the object looks worse.

In lower light, people prefer to see the vividness of colors boosted, especially in the reds. Incandescent lights naturally boost reds as they get dimmer and the temperature of their filament gets lower. LEDs, again, operate in a fundamentally different way. Many cannot dim at all; those that are advertised as dimmable do not reduce their temperature or even reduce the intensity of the light they put out. Instead, a common method is to adjust how frequently they switch off and on, which is dozens of times per second. Extra-sensitive people can sometimes detect this flicker or find themselves with unexplained headaches and dizziness. For everyone, the light gets even duller looking than before.

Royer is a fellow at the Illuminating Engineering Society (motto: “Improving Life Through Quality of Light”), which has created an elaborate alternative to CRI called TM-30. In this scheme, bulbs are classified under three separate but interrelated categories: P, V, and F, for preference, vividness, and fidelity, each of which is further broken down into subcategories indicating performance level. Manufacturers and retailers have not agreed to this new scoring system. “They don’t want to provide a lot of information that might confuse consumers,” Royer said. “But consumers aren’t going to understand information until it’s provided to them.”

If you don’t mind spending extra money — say, three or four times as much per bulb, plus a $60 controller — and fooling around inside an app, you can get color-tunable lightbulbs today. They have different colored LEDs inside, instead of simply phosphor-treated blue ones. The Department of Energy notes that programming the bulb controls “may not be intuitive,” that tunable whites won’t necessarily match any other whites, and that colors may come out “cartoonlike.” And they won’t save as much electricity. The LED industry is still trying to develop an efficient green LED to go with the red, blue, and amber ones. Royer remains hopeful and is encouraged by the continued search for improvement. Tunable LEDs may overtake phosphor-converted bulbs in efficiency by the 2030s.

Until then, there’s amber nail polish. Ordinary, transparent amber from the drugstore. “I highly recommend every person who reads this story buy this nail polish and start painting it on their LED bulbs,” said Robin Standefer. “It is a game changer.” Standefer is one of the founders of Roman and Williams Buildings and Interiors, a design company that works with Descottes and L’Observatoire. We were talking on Zoom, and behind her was a paper Noguchi lamp. “It’s the most beautiful light in the world,” she said, “but you put an LED in and it’s not that beautiful.” To compensate, she’d wrapped the bulb in a filter.

I wanted to see the best possible application of LED lighting, so Standefer said I had to go downtown. At dusk, I took a blazingly lit N train (my light-meter app reported 4,292 Kelvin) to the Roman and Williams Guild and La Mercerie, their combined retail store and restaurant on Howard Street. The light inside was opulent and gorgeous. Tall candles flickered on the dining tables, but everything else was LED. As I studied the fixtures in the store — in burnished bronzes with glass that was dark and pearly, or a delicate nude pink, and with prices starting in the low four figures — I realized that the surrounding lighting had subtly dimmed and warmed, shifting its Kelvin temperature for nighttime. In the restaurant, copper pans gleamed and a row of double-magnum bottles of rosé glowed extra pink. The bread’s crust was shaded in lush browns. Stacked white towels were creamy, and spotlights from tracks overhead threw the shadows of the candles this way and that on the tables.

It was sublime. And if I really wanted to experience LEDs at their most exquisite, Standefer said, I should see what Descottes and Roman and Williams had done at Le Coucou, another client. I walked two blocks east and stepped inside. The restaurant was wonderfully dim, the dimness alive with color and warmth. Huge chandeliers hung with rings of dozens of flame-tipped bulbs in rose-pink inverted glass cups. That glass, Standefer had told me, was Roman and Williams’s special formula for LED bulbs, the work of a septuagenarian glassblower in Brooklyn. “If she stops blowing this glass, I don’t know what I’ll do, because she’s been the only person to achieve a very beautiful color in the glass,” she said.

Inside the bulbs were the little V’s of filaments. You can do remarkable things with LED filaments these days, reviving old-timey clear bulb shapes with all sorts of whorls or zigzags. I swore they looked just like the real thing.

I was trying to figure out how to describe the particular color the light made on the white ductwork above — the color of the flesh of a white peach, I decided — when I ran into John Barclay, the facilities manager for Le Coucou and its sister restaurants. Barclay studied theater lighting in college before going into hospitality, and when LEDs arrived, he gave himself a crash education in the technical ins and outs. Now he was near evangelical about the LEDs. He ran through the interplay of the lighting sources: The chandeliers were at about 1,700 Kelvin, he said, while spotlights above the tables were at 2,400 and task lighting in the kitchen was slightly colder, at 2,700, to give the staff a precise look at the plated food on the way out.

I’d been told I had to see the restroom. I went to see the restroom. The all-pervading glow was so honeyed I couldn’t tell if the grab bar by the toilet was mere steel or luxurious brass.

Maybe I was wrong about LEDs. Maybe I just had to be patient — to wait and let this luminous future trickle down to the rest of us. Later, upon follow-up questioning, I learned that the warmly glowing filaments in the Le Coucou chandeliers are not, in fact, LEDs. They are hot wire filaments. Inside the LED-optimized glass of the chandelier fittings, the LED-forward restaurant is still using incandescents for that ineffable and as yet irreplaceable glow.

I asked Barclay how he would navigate the future. “In the near term,” he said, “I have a large stock of those bulbs.”


This guy gets it.
Click to expand...
wow....you got to much time on your hands there chief.
 
The Tradition said:
If blue light is overstimulating and clammy, it’d be better for our brains to have less of it in indoors, especially late at night. But blue light is also cheaper. Adding warm tones to a blue LED requires extra material and effort. To get something in the whitish color range of traditional indoor lighting, manufacturers coat the underlying blue elements with phosphor, which shifts some of the photons to longer wavelengths — that is, greens and yellows and reds. (This coating partly explains why LED color varies over time. As the diode heats and cools again and again, “maybe the phosphor will curl a little bit,” says Royer. “And those tiny changes will allow a different amount of blue photons to escape versus yellow.”)

Last year, the New York Times warned in a front-page story that “lower-end retailers like dollar stores or convenience shops still extensively stock their shelves with traditional or halogen incandescent bulbs, even as stores serving more affluent communities have shifted to selling far more efficient LEDs.” This was, the Times fretted, preventing poorer people from receiving the benefits of energy efficiency. The studies the newspaper cited, finding incandescent bulbs on discount-store shelves, were both a few years old. I checked my nearest dollar store and discovered that there were plenty of LED bulbs to be had there. Their color temperature was 6,400 Kelvin — the harshest, cheapest possible light, a light so blue that when I Googled it, what came up were grow bulbs. The efficient future of lighting now includes poor people; it just does it by making lighting one more form of privation.

Checking for spares in my mom’s basement recently, I discovered that she had picked up a pack of 5,000 Kelvin bulbs to replace her living-room floodlights. Of all the people to have made this mistake! Mom used to teach schoolchildren about color perception, showing them how that part of their vision faded in the periphery or how a wheel of colored panels mounted on a salad spinner would turn gray. But she had no idea what 5,000 Kelvin meant, and the package had no color-rendering index at all. Had she ever put the things into her ceiling, she’d have ended up with a living room that looked like the inside of a refrigerator.

It’s true that CRI numbers are kind of useless. All else being equal, if light on an object gets dimmer — if you start with an object outdoors, in full sunlight, then bring it indoors to that same daylight, but less of it, now coming through a window — the object will appear more gray. The way color rendering is defined, the diminished light is performing at the same level as it did outside. The color-rendering index scores it the same. But the object looks worse.

In lower light, people prefer to see the vividness of colors boosted, especially in the reds. Incandescent lights naturally boost reds as they get dimmer and the temperature of their filament gets lower. LEDs, again, operate in a fundamentally different way. Many cannot dim at all; those that are advertised as dimmable do not reduce their temperature or even reduce the intensity of the light they put out. Instead, a common method is to adjust how frequently they switch off and on, which is dozens of times per second. Extra-sensitive people can sometimes detect this flicker or find themselves with unexplained headaches and dizziness. For everyone, the light gets even duller looking than before.

Royer is a fellow at the Illuminating Engineering Society (motto: “Improving Life Through Quality of Light”), which has created an elaborate alternative to CRI called TM-30. In this scheme, bulbs are classified under three separate but interrelated categories: P, V, and F, for preference, vividness, and fidelity, each of which is further broken down into subcategories indicating performance level. Manufacturers and retailers have not agreed to this new scoring system. “They don’t want to provide a lot of information that might confuse consumers,” Royer said. “But consumers aren’t going to understand information until it’s provided to them.”

If you don’t mind spending extra money — say, three or four times as much per bulb, plus a $60 controller — and fooling around inside an app, you can get color-tunable lightbulbs today. They have different colored LEDs inside, instead of simply phosphor-treated blue ones. The Department of Energy notes that programming the bulb controls “may not be intuitive,” that tunable whites won’t necessarily match any other whites, and that colors may come out “cartoonlike.” And they won’t save as much electricity. The LED industry is still trying to develop an efficient green LED to go with the red, blue, and amber ones. Royer remains hopeful and is encouraged by the continued search for improvement. Tunable LEDs may overtake phosphor-converted bulbs in efficiency by the 2030s.

Until then, there’s amber nail polish. Ordinary, transparent amber from the drugstore. “I highly recommend every person who reads this story buy this nail polish and start painting it on their LED bulbs,” said Robin Standefer. “It is a game changer.” Standefer is one of the founders of Roman and Williams Buildings and Interiors, a design company that works with Descottes and L’Observatoire. We were talking on Zoom, and behind her was a paper Noguchi lamp. “It’s the most beautiful light in the world,” she said, “but you put an LED in and it’s not that beautiful.” To compensate, she’d wrapped the bulb in a filter.

I wanted to see the best possible application of LED lighting, so Standefer said I had to go downtown. At dusk, I took a blazingly lit N train (my light-meter app reported 4,292 Kelvin) to the Roman and Williams Guild and La Mercerie, their combined retail store and restaurant on Howard Street. The light inside was opulent and gorgeous. Tall candles flickered on the dining tables, but everything else was LED. As I studied the fixtures in the store — in burnished bronzes with glass that was dark and pearly, or a delicate nude pink, and with prices starting in the low four figures — I realized that the surrounding lighting had subtly dimmed and warmed, shifting its Kelvin temperature for nighttime. In the restaurant, copper pans gleamed and a row of double-magnum bottles of rosé glowed extra pink. The bread’s crust was shaded in lush browns. Stacked white towels were creamy, and spotlights from tracks overhead threw the shadows of the candles this way and that on the tables.

It was sublime. And if I really wanted to experience LEDs at their most exquisite, Standefer said, I should see what Descottes and Roman and Williams had done at Le Coucou, another client. I walked two blocks east and stepped inside. The restaurant was wonderfully dim, the dimness alive with color and warmth. Huge chandeliers hung with rings of dozens of flame-tipped bulbs in rose-pink inverted glass cups. That glass, Standefer had told me, was Roman and Williams’s special formula for LED bulbs, the work of a septuagenarian glassblower in Brooklyn. “If she stops blowing this glass, I don’t know what I’ll do, because she’s been the only person to achieve a very beautiful color in the glass,” she said.

Inside the bulbs were the little V’s of filaments. You can do remarkable things with LED filaments these days, reviving old-timey clear bulb shapes with all sorts of whorls or zigzags. I swore they looked just like the real thing.

I was trying to figure out how to describe the particular color the light made on the white ductwork above — the color of the flesh of a white peach, I decided — when I ran into John Barclay, the facilities manager for Le Coucou and its sister restaurants. Barclay studied theater lighting in college before going into hospitality, and when LEDs arrived, he gave himself a crash education in the technical ins and outs. Now he was near evangelical about the LEDs. He ran through the interplay of the lighting sources: The chandeliers were at about 1,700 Kelvin, he said, while spotlights above the tables were at 2,400 and task lighting in the kitchen was slightly colder, at 2,700, to give the staff a precise look at the plated food on the way out.

I’d been told I had to see the restroom. I went to see the restroom. The all-pervading glow was so honeyed I couldn’t tell if the grab bar by the toilet was mere steel or luxurious brass.

Maybe I was wrong about LEDs. Maybe I just had to be patient — to wait and let this luminous future trickle down to the rest of us. Later, upon follow-up questioning, I learned that the warmly glowing filaments in the Le Coucou chandeliers are not, in fact, LEDs. They are hot wire filaments. Inside the LED-optimized glass of the chandelier fittings, the LED-forward restaurant is still using incandescents for that ineffable and as yet irreplaceable glow.

I asked Barclay how he would navigate the future. “In the near term,” he said, “I have a large stock of those bulbs.”


This guy gets it.
Click to expand...
Good lord....TLDR and LED's are fine. Rather read about brisket OP.
 
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