One thing I learned the hard way is that various older relays, timers, dimmers etc. will kill LED "light bulbs", but most of the time not instantly, but over several months/years. When we bought our current apartment 10 years ago, I had the common sense to replace the dimmers with newer "LED-approved" versions, and also replaced one of two relays because it was broken, but then the remaining relay over several years destroyed several "light bulbs" and one (fortunately not very expensive) lighting fixture with non-removable LEDs, until it dawned on me that the relay was to blame. After I replaced it ~ 5 years ago, no more problems.
Yeah, for parts of my house I have renovated I put in LED fixtures with separate drivers that sit up in the roof cavity, and none of them have failed (out of about a dozen lights) in the eight years since. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the house I have some older fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs and have been through a bunch of LED replacement bulbs for them.
I don't understand why there's no startups making open source modular electronics.
A collection of maybe 50 well chosen modules could handle at least part of pretty much everything, while allowing for upgrades as tech improves.
A microwave and a dishwasher and a dryer could all use the same controller and the same display module. A desk lamp and a flashlight could use the same LED and driver.
The current modular systems are educational or hobbyist oriented, or they try to do stuff that crosses high bandwidth links and needs lots of pins, but there's not reason we can't have standard LED drivers and other simple stuff like that.
The whole range of modules would probably be pretty cheap, it's just a matter of convincing everyone to use them, which I guess is why nobody does it.
It doesn't even have to be unrelible/cheap drivers that fail. Even name brand Cree/Phillips/etc stuff have drivers that will fail rather quickly if your wall current is at all dirty.
The effect of this is LED lightbulbs that have a shorter lifetime than incandescent lightbulbs did in my apartment. At least incandescent and halogen bulbs were just a bit of glass and wire: explicitly disposable. But LED bulbs are full of parts and boards and the like and generate far more waste.
Maybe someone can answer this question for me but I have yet to find a LED bulb that can replicate the 'full spectrum' aka sunlight feeling of a Halogen bulb. I just love the color warmth of Halogen and LED just can't seem to replicate it.
I have have bought a lot of LED bulbs in search of this. Is there something that I am missing or is LED just not capable of producing the same spectrum of color as Halogen? When I look at my items under LED and then look at them under Halogen its like the items become vivid.
The best I could find is this company called "Waveform Lighting" that sells very high CRI bulbs for like ~$20 a bulb (with the second place being Soraa bulbs) both are some of the best LED bulbs I've used but no where near the effect of Halogen. What am I doing wrong?
Granted, there is usually a rechargeable alternative to any product using non replaceable batteries. Or one can use rechargeable AA/AAA/etc. that recoup their cost within a few charges.
For the consumer rechargeable always makes sense, but I think there's an incentive for stores to not push those products - why sell rechargeable flashlights when you can sell ones that gobble alkaline cells and get your customers coming back for batteries?? Is there any way to avoid this problem besides regulation?
> unreliable drivers that fail before the LED does, or kill the LED by heat or excessive voltage
That. I have a rather enclosed (little ventilation) ceiling fixture that in theory is supposed to be specced for up to 2 x 75 W incandescent. You'd think it will handle 2 x 9 or 12 W led "bulbs" just fine, right?
It killed one averagely priced led "bulb" every 2 years until i switched to a slightly more expensive brand.
"sustainable" was incorrectly translated from the Swedish "miljövänliga" which instead means "environmentally-friendly" ("sustainable" is "hållbar" in Swedish)
When I was fiddling with LED circuits back in the 70s (!) I experimented with turning the LED on and off with a square wave. If you turned it on and off rapidly enough, your eye did not notice it, and your eye perceived it as fully bright. (Adjusting both the frequency and duration of the "on" part.)
Hence, you could get some decent power savings doing this.
I wonder if this is commonly known. I've mentioned it to a couple EEs over the years, and they were able to reduce the power consumption of their devices.
It's widely known among EEs. It's used for lots of interesting things, such as temperature control, motor control and positioning, and LED lighting. You can do it in hardware old-style with a 555 timer or hex inverter, but most modern systems I've worked with do it with a microcontroller.
An addendum to this that you may find interesting -- I've experimented with turning the LED on for a few microseconds at higher than rated current, then off for tens of milliseconds. The average current stays far below the specifications. This results in very high apparent brightness per unit of power consumption.
Using the IV curve of the LED, this also let me eliminate the typical current-limiting resistor. The power savings are more than the power cost of the MCU that controls it (modern low-power microcontrollers are awesome).
Anyway, the end result is a little LED + CR2032 cell + magnet that you stick to furniture, and it runs for about 3 years. I made it so that elderly people I know who wake up at night to go to the bathroom don't bump into furniture (especially in an unfamiliar place, like while traveling). Without creating a thing they have to think about often. If you're curious, I posted the code here: https://github.com/seanboyce/tinylight
An additional one you might like: I did PWM for LED dimming in the tens of Mhz for some 1 Watt red LEDs. This is for my wife -- when she has a migraine she prefers very dim red light to complete darkness. In the Mhz range, there's no visible flicker by a longshot (although it costs a little more power). Most PWM systems I've seen that flicker, use lower-frequency signals.
It must have been cool to play with LEDs in the 70s. We sort of take them for granted now, but they are so awesome. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
In the now distant past, all manufacturers of electronic components published very extensive datasheets, application notes and user handbooks for all the devices that they were selling.
One could typically learn much more electronics from the application notes or maintenance manuals of the vendors than from university courses.
This included LEDs. For instance Hewlett-Packard published a good handbook for their LEDs, where many useful techniques for designing with LEDs were explained, including what you mention, that LEDs may have higher luminous efficiency at very high currents, so for achieving a given luminous flux you may save energy by operating them with pulsed currents.
The use of multiplexing in the interfaces of multi-digit/multi-character LED displays (e.g for clocks or calculators) not only reduces the number of wires in the interface, but it also improves the energy efficiency, because only one digit/character is powered on, at a much higher current, but for a much shorter duration in comparison with a non-multiplexed display.
During the golden era of electronics documentation, it could be difficult to get the vendor documentation, even if it was usually free, when you were located far away, e.g. in another country.
When the Internet has appeared, for a short time it solved this problem so you could be located at the other end of the world and still access easily the datasheets, application notes and user manuals.
Unfortunately, very soon after that, towards the end of the nineties and much more since 2000, the quality of technical documentation has degraded tremendously, so you now have easy access, but to much less useful information.
Not only is this widely known, it is the main method by which multicolor RGB lights can exist, because they are actually a package with red, green, and blue LEDs in them, where each color channel is individually “dimmed” using this technique (called pulse width modulation, or PWM) to be able to produce many more colors (much like a TV or LCD/OLED display).
The white color produced by full-on of R, G, and B is quite ghastly, so modern ones come with an individual white LED (and frequently a second warm white LED) in the package for a total of four or five individual color LEDs in the single light (RGBW or RGBWW).
I watched a fascinating video of a guy explaining, in detail, how vacuum tube radios worked. Quite a joy to watch.
I'm glad I didn't take up Electrical Engineering as a major. All the fun of using signal generators and oscilloscopes is gone. Just program a Raspberry Pi to do it. or a circuit simulator on your computer. Sigh. EE is no fun without getting accidentally zapped by A/C once in a while or letting the smoke trapped in a transistor out.
It's like hotrodding a car by plugging in a laptop. Ehhh no.
I've bought 3 cheap alarm clocks and the LEDs are now so "good" the display lights up the entire room. With limited bedroom materials my inner macgyver was quite pleased with himself when he put one in a sock which has nothing to do with the topic but it did work. I can also confirm that cheap clocks are still amazingly hard to configure. By pressing multiple buttons simultaneously I managed to set one of the clocks to display the time only when a button is pressed. This is quite useless, I haven't figured out how to unset it and it isn't mentioned in the manual.
My point would be that the LEDs are now so cheap and good that the rest of the devices seem expensive by comparison and manufacturing can't resist the urge to wrap them in crap. I think I've purchased 30 bicycle lights in total. The Edison bulbs with dynamo sometimes last a hundred years (except from the replaceable bulb)
You have to admit that even though some parts of the LED bike lights might be lacking, they are still pretty awesome compared to what was available when incadescent lights were the only option.
There are some with good color rendering (CRI over 95 - 98), but they are hard to find and much more expensive than the average LED light bulb (many doesn't even have their CRI specified so probably below 70).
AFAIK None of them will ever have continuous spectrum (like the sun or incandescent bulbs), that's a limitation of the physics how they make light.
Never quite understood the color spectrum complaint, most of the incandescent bulbs I've ever seen are astoundingly red (low temperature), while I've always gotten the greatest color accuracy in my spaces from daylight-temp LEDs.
Perovskites are a particular physical structure that atoms can form together. It looks like a box made of one element, with one atom of another element inside inside the box. Perovskites are named after the naturally-occurring mineral that exhibits this structure.
Mother Nature's Perovskite is made of Calcium and Titanium. Synthetic, flourescent perovskites are made of Lead and Cadmium. You can see the problem here.
And yes, Lead is a massive problem even if the article downplays it somewhat. You can't put lead things outside, because rain will cause lead to leech into water supplies. That's bad.
Aren’t perovskites incredibly fragile? I thought the reason they aren’t used in solar panels is because they only last a couple years. Why should I believe LEDs made out if the same stuff would survive the test of time?
I don't think there are any light bulbs in my house that I have replaced more often than the LED bulbs, probably by a factor of 5x.
- light quality, especially years ago, was much too harsh. Color is still just barely tolerable for certain bulb types.
- inability to dim without flickering
- random burnouts (wasn't this supposed to take 10 years at least?)
This may be an erroneous and/or too simplistic answer, but I went through a couple rounds of using off-brand LEDs from Amazon in a chandelier, and they flickered badly when dimmed, then I finally ponied up a little more money and bought GE bulbs at Lowe's —- no flickering, ever.
Occasionally the contact plating for surface mounting is also gold-plated. I can think of a couple Nichia LEDs from work that have gold plated electrical and thermal contacts.
This is an uneconomical idea, mostly due to voltage drop. In the commercial world, you can get 158 28-watt 2x4s on a single 277V 20A circuit using #12 wire.
It seems their environmental impact was defined in terms of the (environmental) cost of mining gold. "The greatest environmental gain would instead be achieved by replacing gold with copper, aluminium or nickel, while maintaining the small amount of lead needed for the LED to function optimally."
[+] [-] NegativeLatency|1 year ago|reply
- non replaceable batteries (flashlights)
- unreliable drivers that fail before the LED does, or kill the LED by heat or excessive voltage
Happy to see people working on new LED tech but the downstream effects of selling disposable stuff has to be much worse?
[+] [-] rob74|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eternityforest|1 year ago|reply
A collection of maybe 50 well chosen modules could handle at least part of pretty much everything, while allowing for upgrades as tech improves.
A microwave and a dishwasher and a dryer could all use the same controller and the same display module. A desk lamp and a flashlight could use the same LED and driver.
The current modular systems are educational or hobbyist oriented, or they try to do stuff that crosses high bandwidth links and needs lots of pins, but there's not reason we can't have standard LED drivers and other simple stuff like that.
The whole range of modules would probably be pretty cheap, it's just a matter of convincing everyone to use them, which I guess is why nobody does it.
[+] [-] WalterBright|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|1 year ago|reply
The effect of this is LED lightbulbs that have a shorter lifetime than incandescent lightbulbs did in my apartment. At least incandescent and halogen bulbs were just a bit of glass and wire: explicitly disposable. But LED bulbs are full of parts and boards and the like and generate far more waste.
[+] [-] saturn8601|1 year ago|reply
I have have bought a lot of LED bulbs in search of this. Is there something that I am missing or is LED just not capable of producing the same spectrum of color as Halogen? When I look at my items under LED and then look at them under Halogen its like the items become vivid.
The best I could find is this company called "Waveform Lighting" that sells very high CRI bulbs for like ~$20 a bulb (with the second place being Soraa bulbs) both are some of the best LED bulbs I've used but no where near the effect of Halogen. What am I doing wrong?
[+] [-] mouse_|1 year ago|reply
> The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it's implemented in practice.
In this case, as LEDs become easier and more accessable to implement, they are implemented worse in practice.
[+] [-] Liftyee|1 year ago|reply
For the consumer rechargeable always makes sense, but I think there's an incentive for stores to not push those products - why sell rechargeable flashlights when you can sell ones that gobble alkaline cells and get your customers coming back for batteries?? Is there any way to avoid this problem besides regulation?
[+] [-] nottorp|1 year ago|reply
That. I have a rather enclosed (little ventilation) ceiling fixture that in theory is supposed to be specced for up to 2 x 75 W incandescent. You'd think it will handle 2 x 9 or 12 W led "bulbs" just fine, right?
It killed one averagely priced led "bulb" every 2 years until i switched to a slightly more expensive brand.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pjc50|1 year ago|reply
Not encountered those? You people need to get onto Aliexpress where the good stuff that takes 18650 batteries is.
[+] [-] ilove_banh_mi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|1 year ago|reply
Hence, you could get some decent power savings doing this.
I wonder if this is commonly known. I've mentioned it to a couple EEs over the years, and they were able to reduce the power consumption of their devices.
[+] [-] Saigonautica|1 year ago|reply
An addendum to this that you may find interesting -- I've experimented with turning the LED on for a few microseconds at higher than rated current, then off for tens of milliseconds. The average current stays far below the specifications. This results in very high apparent brightness per unit of power consumption.
Using the IV curve of the LED, this also let me eliminate the typical current-limiting resistor. The power savings are more than the power cost of the MCU that controls it (modern low-power microcontrollers are awesome).
Anyway, the end result is a little LED + CR2032 cell + magnet that you stick to furniture, and it runs for about 3 years. I made it so that elderly people I know who wake up at night to go to the bathroom don't bump into furniture (especially in an unfamiliar place, like while traveling). Without creating a thing they have to think about often. If you're curious, I posted the code here: https://github.com/seanboyce/tinylight
An additional one you might like: I did PWM for LED dimming in the tens of Mhz for some 1 Watt red LEDs. This is for my wife -- when she has a migraine she prefers very dim red light to complete darkness. In the Mhz range, there's no visible flicker by a longshot (although it costs a little more power). Most PWM systems I've seen that flicker, use lower-frequency signals.
It must have been cool to play with LEDs in the 70s. We sort of take them for granted now, but they are so awesome. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
[+] [-] adrian_b|1 year ago|reply
One could typically learn much more electronics from the application notes or maintenance manuals of the vendors than from university courses.
This included LEDs. For instance Hewlett-Packard published a good handbook for their LEDs, where many useful techniques for designing with LEDs were explained, including what you mention, that LEDs may have higher luminous efficiency at very high currents, so for achieving a given luminous flux you may save energy by operating them with pulsed currents.
The use of multiplexing in the interfaces of multi-digit/multi-character LED displays (e.g for clocks or calculators) not only reduces the number of wires in the interface, but it also improves the energy efficiency, because only one digit/character is powered on, at a much higher current, but for a much shorter duration in comparison with a non-multiplexed display.
During the golden era of electronics documentation, it could be difficult to get the vendor documentation, even if it was usually free, when you were located far away, e.g. in another country.
When the Internet has appeared, for a short time it solved this problem so you could be located at the other end of the world and still access easily the datasheets, application notes and user manuals.
Unfortunately, very soon after that, towards the end of the nineties and much more since 2000, the quality of technical documentation has degraded tremendously, so you now have easy access, but to much less useful information.
[+] [-] throitallaway|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|1 year ago|reply
The white color produced by full-on of R, G, and B is quite ghastly, so modern ones come with an individual white LED (and frequently a second warm white LED) in the package for a total of four or five individual color LEDs in the single light (RGBW or RGBWW).
[+] [-] WalterBright|1 year ago|reply
I'm glad I didn't take up Electrical Engineering as a major. All the fun of using signal generators and oscilloscopes is gone. Just program a Raspberry Pi to do it. or a circuit simulator on your computer. Sigh. EE is no fun without getting accidentally zapped by A/C once in a while or letting the smoke trapped in a transistor out.
It's like hotrodding a car by plugging in a laptop. Ehhh no.
[+] [-] ioseph|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] econ|1 year ago|reply
My point would be that the LEDs are now so cheap and good that the rest of the devices seem expensive by comparison and manufacturing can't resist the urge to wrap them in crap. I think I've purchased 30 bicycle lights in total. The Edison bulbs with dynamo sometimes last a hundred years (except from the replaceable bulb)
[+] [-] imp0cat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] NullPrefix|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] raron|1 year ago|reply
AFAIK None of them will ever have continuous spectrum (like the sun or incandescent bulbs), that's a limitation of the physics how they make light.
[+] [-] netbioserror|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] softgrow|1 year ago|reply
Note that extending the lifetime is key to taking advantage of their lower base material cost. Lot of work needed there.
[+] [-] ryukoposting|1 year ago|reply
Perovskites are a particular physical structure that atoms can form together. It looks like a box made of one element, with one atom of another element inside inside the box. Perovskites are named after the naturally-occurring mineral that exhibits this structure.
Mother Nature's Perovskite is made of Calcium and Titanium. Synthetic, flourescent perovskites are made of Lead and Cadmium. You can see the problem here.
And yes, Lead is a massive problem even if the article downplays it somewhat. You can't put lead things outside, because rain will cause lead to leech into water supplies. That's bad.
[+] [-] noqc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] laserbeam|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] baggy_trough|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] declan_roberts|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WaltPurvis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrowman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rob74|1 year ago|reply
Don't we all... but somehow I get the feeling that something was "lost in translation" here?
[+] [-] jonathandramble|1 year ago|reply
https://www.eea.europa.eu/help/glossary/eea-glossary/cradle-...
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Jtsummers|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] opwieurposiu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lightedman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrowman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] temptemptemp111|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hulitu|1 year ago|reply
Sustainable ? Made from tropical forest trees ?
[+] [-] ForTheKidz|1 year ago|reply