Anyone moved to LED Lighting?

We have just converted our bungalow to run off LED lighting.

All incandescent and fluorescent bulbs are out and in their place are

100 GU10 LED lights that consume 3W each. Not all lights are on at the same time. I have put them in fire cowls that normally house 50W halogen bulbs, but since these lights give off very little heat, the cowls can be covered with fibreglass and can be unventilated.

I'm very impressed with the results and have decided not to use X-10 to control them.

Comments?

Reply to
John Perry
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It seemed that LED lights were the coming thing, so I installed several of them here last year. One was a 120V 4W Lumoform. The others were different types of 12V MR16 bulbs for the landscape lighting. The one with 9 SMD LEDs worked the best.

All produced an impressive amount of light for the wattage. However, the narrow spectrum didn't render colors very well. Even though they were supposed to be "warm white", the landscape lights turned our red gravel gray. The Lumoform did somewhat better, but it was a horrendous noise source sitting almost exactly at 120KHz. It pretty much killed any X10 control on its circuit. That has since been moved to a desk lamp powered through a XPPF filter.

I have since converted all the landscape lighting to 12V MR16 CFLs made by Feit. While they pull slightly more power than the LEDs (5W versus 3-4W), the color is improved, and the wide beamwidth works much better in the landscape lights. They also cost only about 1/3 as much as the better MR16 LED bulb.

In summary, LED lighting may be the wave of the future, but in my testing they did not do as well as much less expensive CFLs.

Jeff

Reply to
jcrare

There was a person on here (or a similar newsgroup..possibly alt.energy.renewable) a few years ago doing there own testing and found that white LEDs were less efficient than white incandescent bulbs. When pushed to a decent brilliance LEDs had a short life also.

Reply to
Josepi

Sure. Have you tried them with X-10? If so, what were the issues? What will you be using instead?

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

From the gentleman's first post: "I'm very impressed with the results and have decided not to use X-10 to control them."

Reply to
Robert L Bass

No, not using them with X-10 as they use so little power. The best ones I have found are 78LED and 12 SMD LED devices; 12 GU10s light my study very well. I use warm LEDS in all rooms except one where I am using daylight LEDs. Also, no failures in 20 GU10 LEDS installed 2 years ago. We have 116 GU10 LEDS in the house using no more than 3W each and never more than 33% on at a time. A significant cost saving.

Reply to
John Perry

Reason is, no cost saving to control them. I have tries CFLs, but they get too warm; the LEDs run virtually cold.

Reply to
John Perry

Understood. I only reiterated the original post because Booby G asked if you'd tried them with X10. For me it's a non-issue as I don't care for X10. There are some here who use it extensively and are very pleased with it. I had bad experience with it years ago and have not bothered with it since.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Do you have any efficiency specs onthese unit you are using? Some previous test found white LEDS to be much less efficient than CFLs. IN fact people found white LEDS to be less inefficient than incandescent bulbs.

I understand some new technologies have changed that in the last few years. I would be interested in what technology you are using and what the colour, brightness and efficiencies are if you are aware. You seem happy with them so they must be half decent.

Reply to
Josepi

Less inefficient is *not* a bad thing (tm)

Reply to
Tom Stiller

ooops. My bad.

Is that a biodeisel nickname?

Reply to
Joseoi

As posted here over a year ago, I tried 12V MR16 LEDs for our landscape lighting. Even thought I bought warm white bulbs, the narrow spectrum turned our red landscape rocks gray. And the relatively narrow beamwidth didn't work quite as well as the 20W halogens. The one with 9 surface mount LEDs did the best. I also tried a 120V 4W Lumoform inside. It worked well for 4 watts. However, it did get too hot to touch, and radiated a lot of noise right at 121KHz. That pretty much killed X10 control on that circuit until it was isolated with a X10 filter.

Early this year I ran across a 5W 12V MR16 CFL made by Feit, and I tried a couple of those in the landscape lights. The broad beamwidth and warm color worked better than the LEDs. They also cost less than half as much as the better LED bulbs at that time. (The LED bulbs have dropped significantly in price since then.)

I replaced all the 20W halogens with the 5W Feit CFLs. There have been a few early failures with one lot (2 right out of the package), but they have been very good with the warranty service. The CFLs are a better match for my application, especially because of the wide beamwidth. Only time will tell whether they are more cost effective than the LEDs.

Jeff

Reply to
JeffVolp

They ought to be with a failure rate like that! I think it's just a matter of time before CFL's join 8 tracks tape players, hydrogen filled zeppelins and biofuels in the "Museum of Things that Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time." There are some obvious reasons.

First, the fabrication costs. As the failure rate you've experienced shows, CFLs are complicated to manufacture compared to other light sources, and they still aren't getting it quite right. LED lamps are still in their infancy, especially high-enough powered ones to replace incandescent bulbs. Eventually, when LED technology matures, it's always going to be cheaper to manufacture a solid state device with very few parts than a CFL. Why? CFL's have intricately curved delicate glass tubes that need to be filled with gas, phospor coatings and a teensy little bit of poison. Then it all gets shoe-horned into a package that's *still* not small enough to fit a lot of fixtures, particularly higher wattage ones. LEDs are well-positioned to come out way ahead of CFLs, cost-wise.

Second, since LED light is "colder" than CFL's, it should work in places where excess heat generation is a problem. They should help in places where the bulbs mount base up and the electronics bay of the lamp gets cooked by the heat rising from the glass tube. LED lamps are much smaller and will fit in places where CFL bulbs give people fits.

Third, their performance should be better at low temperatures than CFLs. Tube darkening and flickering should pretty much disappear with LEDs. They will probably not suffer from the dimming problems that afflict CFLs either. The last time I checked, even the nVision bulbs that work so well with X-10 seem to lose a considerable amount of brightness once they've been running for a while.

Fourth, LEDs don't contain any mercury and that's going to become a much more significant issue in the future because mercury contamination levels are on the rise. The sad fact is that Americans are notoriously bad recyclers. While I'm sure you recycle properly, Jeff, as I imagine most people here do, the rest of the country doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to recycling. Part of the problem is that not too many people know there's mercury in these bulbs or what its effects are. Not many people know that the term " "mad as a hatter" has to do with mercury poisoning:

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and that mercury levels found in humans is increasing at alarming rates. The National Research Council (NRC) issued a report that estimates that as many as 60,000 newborns babies a year are now at risk for adverse neurodevelopmental effects from dietary mercury in the US. Source:
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One of the problems with testing and price comparing LEDs is that they are such a fast-moving target. By the time you're able to compare lifespans, LEDs will probably have taken another quantum leap in efficiency and affordability. While CFL's are a relatively mature technology, LEDs are still taking off. When the economies of scale in manufacturing kick in, LEDs will in all likelihood seriously undercut CFL's price-wise. Even now, significant price drops in LED lights are becoming commonplace and I expect that trend to continue until they become much cheaper than CFLs.

It's also hard to make a fair price comparision at this point because power companies have been "underwriting" (taking money from all their customers and handing it over to light bulb makers) the cost of many CFL bulbs. There's a movement afoot in some states (that still have viable, unco-opted public service commissions) to stop that particular involuntary redistribution of wealth:

"C.F.L.s subsidized by California ratepayers are "being resold on eBay all over the country and even in Canada," said Mindy Spatt, spokesperson for the Utility Reform Network. "The utility companies need to do more to provide real, on the ground savings to consumers, not just dump a few thousand light bulbs imported from China at Home Depot. Source:

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Even if most of the factors above didn't exist, the mercury in each bulb is the final nail in the coffin. Yes, I know the mercury in CFLs is *supposed* to be counter-balanced by mercury NOT going up the stack of coal-fired plants. But there are two major fallacies in that argument.

One is that old plants *are* being forced to scrub mercury at the stack, thus changing the equation.

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Once we clean up the dirty smokestacks, the mercury in CFLs won't be "offset" anymore, it will just be a brand new vector of mercury poisoning. Not everything new is good or better by default. Take, for instance, aluminum wiring in the home. When first introduced, it promised to be a great money saver. When analyzed over the long run, it had to basically be banned in homes because it caused a serious uptick in house fires.

And how about that miracle substance asbestos? Oops. Turns out to cause really nasty cancers. Yet before anyone knew, it was in brakes, insulation, clothing and even in the Micronite filters of Kent cigarettes!!

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Thousands of people died every year for decades before the truth got out. It's disasters like these that should make us think before we spread a potent neurotoxin like mercury to hell and back in a product found in every home in America. I grow especially nervous when I hear CFL's touted as the same sort of "miracle" product. I guess since we're involved in another Vietnam-like brush war and on the brink of another world-wide Great Depression the plain truth is we rarely learn from our mistakes, even those as serious as asbestos, meaningless wars and financial collapse.

Which brings us to the second fallacy, the indirect v. the direct approach. Indirect approaches often have some serious blowback. Politicians assured us deregulating electricity pricing was going to result in lower prices for everyone as an indirect result of increased competition. Anyone out there notice any serious reductions in their rate per kilowatt hour? I haven't. My rates have just about tripled in 5 years. And in California, where the power companies learned how to take generators off line (for alleged "maintenance") to limit supply, the effects were even worse.

Credit default swaps were *supposed* protect against losses investors might face when buying collateralized debt obligations. I leave it to the reader to figure out how well that indirect approach to limiting risk worked out for the average citizen. There's a reason why Rube Goldberg contraptions are so funny. We *know* that humans have a general tendency to over-complicate solutions. Anyone who doubts that just has to look at how the government is "fixing" the mortgage crisis by giving boxcar loads of money to the people who caused it in the first place. That's derangedly direct. And woefully wrong. As wrong as the plan to reduce mercury by

*adding* it to disposable items found in every home and business in the country and hoping some magical tradeoff occurs. The proper course of action is to force power plants to clean up their emissions.

And there's worse to come with the carbon trading systems. Just like mixing prime and subprime mortgages, the result will be to mix up polluters and non-polluters in a system so complex, so confusing and so corrupt that it will make the banking debacle look like a rounding error. Yeah, I want to let Charles "you mean everybody doesn't get interest free jumbo mortgages like me?" Rangel decide which firms get big exemptions right out of the starting gate.

On the plus side, though, a lot more people have become aware of the "deal with the devil" tradeoff of CFLs. Hardly a green site on the web lavishes the praise they once did on CFLs and amny now admit that adding mercury to commonplace household goods is NOT the solution. Many are casting a more hopeful eye towards LEDs.

What troubles me the most are the folks that insist that every little milliwatt we save of electricity is a good thing, but ignore every little bit of mercury that gets into the environment as nothing to worry about. If "a little is a lot" in one case, why not the other?

I suspect by the time the "mandate" forcing consumers to switch off incandescent bulbs arrives, Congress will have little choice but to extend the deadline or repeal the law altogether as more and more people realize the dangers involved. The mercury content issue will give them the "cover" they need to back down from the mandate.

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has this to say about the surprisingly low penetration of CFLs in the US marketplace:

" . . . in regions where C.F.L. campaigns have been heaviest, 75 percent of screw- based sockets still contain incandescents. Nationally, about 90 percent of residential sockets are still occupied by incandescents, D.O.E. has reported."

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Except for the "intricately curved delicate glass tubes", 120V LEDs have essentially the same production and noise issues as CFLs. That Lumform 4W MR16 LED gets too hot to touch, and is a very strong radiator of 121KHz powerline noise.

I read a lot about LEDs before trying those initial 12V MR16 landscape lights. The DOE CALiPER reports on Solid-State Lighting indicate that reliability and brightness fall-off are major problems for LED lighting. Progress is being made, and eventually another technology will supercede CFLs. From my limited testing, the LEDs aren't there yet. There is a brighter 12V MR16 LED available now, but it costs 3X as much as the Feit CFLs. It is hard to justify replacing an inexpensive halogen with a $20 LED having unknown longevity.

People harp on the mercury used in CFLs. Mercury has been used in fluorescent lighting for decades. One report I read said the mercury used in fluorescent bulbs is much less than the amount that would have been released into the environment by burning coal to produce an equivalent amount of incandescent light. As we move away from carbon based fuels, that tradeoff will diminish. And it is even better with LEDs. But do we know for sure that trace elements used in LED production will not also turn out to be harmful to the environment?

There are companies working on a new generation of lighting. One is still based on CFL technology. Only time will tell whether one of these becomes dominant in the marketplace.

Jeff

Reply to
Jeff Volp

It does not show any such thing. The only thing proven is that there have some early problems with one manufacturer's products and that the manufacturer has behaved responsibly.

You and Houston been rather outspoken in your opposition to all things CFL for some time. Like Dave, any negative information becomes the justification for a lengthy discourse of the evils of CFLs. The reality is that CFLs do reduce overall mercury contamination in the air and that is a good thing. They cost more initially than conventional lights but life cost with quality units is less than incandescents.

Speaking of incandescents, I just installed two 3-way lights in reading lamps because a family member bought a package for her use. Out of 2 units, one failed within 3 days. If I were as strongly opposed to incandescent lighting as you are to CFLs I'd now have to post a 500-word essay on how complicated to manufacture they obviously are, how all that packaging is filling the landfills, etc., etc.

Give it a rest, Bobby. CFLs are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future and all things considered, that's a good thing.

Reply to
Robert L Bass

manufacture compared to

some early problems

some time. Like

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with quality units is

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days. If I were as

post a 500-word essay

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future and all things

Robert,

You missed one of the most important problems with incandescents: when they break, the vacuum they contain sucks in valuable air we need to breathe.

Oh the humanity!

;^)

Eric Law

Reply to
Eric

Hysterical!! :^)

Reply to
Robert L Bass

Is he saying that incandescents are not atmospheric pressure neutral?

Reply to
Josepi

I think he's just having some fun with the silliness of this protracted discussion. :^)

Reply to
Robert L Bass

I Know...LOL Just love the word games though.

Here's one to retort to some of the greenwashing going on today.

Don't clean your copper conductors. The copper oxide is where the green energy travels.

Reply to
Josepi

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