Anyone moved to LED Lighting?

Am I correct in assuming you have over 200 fixtures for these LED lights or is there some other format used?

Testing has shown white LEDs to be less efficient than CFLs and hardly much more efficient than incandescent lighting. Apparently there was a technology change a few years back that I am not familair with. I believe these use a phophourescent screen technology to re-emit the light in the colour desired.

When the gentleman said "16 LED units" that probably meant one or more "16-LED" units. Without the hyphen that one line could easily be interpreted as referring to 16 different devices.

Duh!

I really missed the punctuation on that one...LOL

Thanx Robert

All my outdoor lights are now LED. The lights for the steps were 20W halogen and had to be replaced constantly. The new LEDs are mult-LED MR16 and have been running every night for the past three years without replacement. The 18W Malibu were also constantly being replaced. I found a muli-LED bayonett replacement and all 15 have been runing for two years without any problems. The LED candelabras for the house lights are pricy (about $20 per bulb, $60 per fixture) but they are pretty. The incandecent would burn forever, and the LED replacements have been doing fine as well.

In summary, the halogens and Malibus were constantly burning out, and the candleabras were doing fine. The LED replacements are all doing fine. Out of 30 outdoor fixtures, I have yet to replace even one LED.

Indoors is mostly R40 CFL. I am constatly purchasing several 3-packs at Costco because they don't last very long. I purchased three relatively expensive R38 9-LED lights. The come on quickly (the CFL are slow to warm) and have a good amount of light, but the light is too directional which casts a harsher shadow, and the color is too narrow and greenish. Looking forward to improved LED R38 lights that will last for ten years, but for now, the light quality is too low. The outdoors looks nice, though.

Best, Christopher

"Greenish"? Stop buying the cheap Costco CFL bulbs. I have had CFLs for years and never has one burned out, indoors and outdoors.

The dimming unit I have in my garage seems to come on full brilliance even at -25C in the winter. The cheap ones take minutes to even see by at 8C.

Which R40 do you recommend?

Best, Christopher

LOL, maybe I should have used 16-LED etc. I have in total 116 GU10 fixtures.

I have to disagree the "testing"; can you cite where the results are?

The fact is incandescent are too hot to touch; CFLs get very warm and LEDs are hardly warm to the touch. So relying on the "Law of conservation of energy" LEDs should be more efficient.

I have certainly noticed that LEDS are much better now than they were

2 years ago; your statement may well have been true then.

I'll probably put some photos up on my site later, but not until our new heat pump based ventilation and heat recovery system gets installed next week.

-- John Perry

Halogen are more efficient than tungsten incandescents, also, but the bulbs still get much hotter.

Bad argument and evaluation for efficiency. CFLS have a much larger surface area. (eg. fluorescent tubes stay much cooler despite higher wattages). LEDs do not get that warm as they don't produce enough light to bother with used singly. If I used a 15 watt incandescent it wouldn't get that warm either with heat sinc on it.

Are your units the phosporescent type of LED units?

I don't use R40 bulbs. They are too inefficient for light output for some reason. They are only rated about half of the unjacketed bulbs.

I have used almost any brand I could find. Mostly, the only ones that have problems are the ones found in the dollar stores.

While I can find the original private website where an energy miser person did his own testing a few years ago, here are some interesting websites disclosing parameters. The original page I refer to discussed why white LEDs were not so efficient as the natural coloured ones but, this was based on old technology being a few years ago.

Wikipedia discusses some of the improvements increasing LED efficiency

This is an interesting website promoting LED lighting based on it's long term economy and demonstrates that LEDs are only close to CFLs and much less than Sodium and other yukky lighting methods Here is another website that discusses why LEDs are not what the "EPA" tests show for MPG. With a little research of your own I would be sure you could find much more data and how it is accomplished to promote their products.

That's a pretty big exception. As a guy who custom builds electronics by hand, I am sure that you realize that even one delicate step in a process, say soldering an SMD component to a circuit board by hand, can cause your reject rate to soar. Take a look at some of the spiral shapes of bulbs and I think you'll realize that it takes some significant heat and tooling to create narrow but even diameter glass tubes that then must be twisted into spiral shape, uniformly coated internally with phosphor, primed with mercury, and then sealed and capped with electrodes. Forgive me for taking a technical note and turning it into polemic, but this is an important issue.

Even if LED and CFL production costs were equal, manufacturing CFL's means increasing the mining for mercury and causing much more of the neurotoxin to enter the world at large. It may very well turn out that CFLs looked good on paper but turned out not to be so good when all costs are computed, just like biofuels.

While one dot of mercury might not seem so bad, almost 300 million CFL's were sold in the United States last year (or so says the New York Times in a Feb. 17, 2008, editorial). But what worries me is the even more staggering figure that CFL's are currently used in only 10% to 20% of the fixtures in residential home. That could extrapolate into perhaps 3 *billion* CFL's getting deployed after the mandate's phased in. Even when you talk about micrograms per bulbs, that's a lot of mercury going into landfills, incinerators and eventually, the bloodstream of newborn babies.

Both technologies have shortcomings, agreed, but fluorescent technology has been around for a much longer time than LEDs and if such CFL problems had solutions, one would expect them to be uncovered by now. Some say fluorescents began in 1856 when Heinrich Geissler created a *mercury* vacuum pump that was much more efficient than any other of the time. When current was applied through the "Geissler tube", it glowed. Commercial fluorescents didn't really hit the market in force until after their debut by GE at the 1939 World's Fair.

Either way, that's a long head start for fluorescents to just now be almost neck and neck with LEDs, a nascent technology that's only really been a home lighting contender for 10 years at most. Because it's difficult to sustain an arc in a fluorescent tube at low power levels, CFLs will probably never equal tungsten or LED lights when it comes to smooth, linear dimming.

My contention is that these subtle, but persistent CFL flaws (size, incompatibility with existing timers, photocell-controlled lamps, dimmers, X-10 and the like) mean that LEDs *have* to rule to roost, eventually. Competition is a fascinating thing, summed up by the old joke punchline: "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!" Even very slight-seeming advantages can add up to a killer blow over the long haul. The CFL is running hard, but true LED "cold light" will win the race, even over a characteristic as lowly as higher resistance to breakage. All the studies I've seen say LEDs have much greater "room to grow" in both efficiency and cheaper production costs than CFLs and should surpass them very soon in both categories.

I agree completely. The current landscape of LED offerings is hauntingly reminiscent of the introduction of CFLs. Cheap, crappy products and hyper-expensive products dominated the landscape; the early adopters who tried them rejected them and developed long-lasting negative attitudes towards them. This has acted as quite a drag on their acceptance.

The reports of CFL penetration say time and time again that people who try them and have issues like a smoky, stinky burnout are much more reluctant to try them a second time. My wife hates both the occasional very spectacular stinky burn-up and the frequent flickering and has had me stock up on incandescents for her sewing room and all the hallway and critical short on/off time lights that never last as long as the makers claim.

As for reliability, that's not so clear cut. Take for instance an LED traffic light. Made up of many LED elements, they are far more reliable on the whole than the tungsten bulbs they replace. CFL's are so wimpy, they need not even apply for this job! An LED element failure in a stop or tail light still leaves a lot of other LEDs elements to continue to shine. Since the LEDs can produce incredibly pure red light, there's no energy loss involved in filtering white light to get the red color.

Agreed. But they're close enough that the mercury element should make the decision between the two a no-brainer, at least if someone *really* cares about the environment. It's bad reasoning to believe that putting mercury in perhaps 3 billion consumer bulbs will magically offset mercury in smokestack exhausts. That's especially true now because the Feds are finally getting off their butts and invoking the *right* solution: enforcing mercury emission laws. Once that happens, the tradeoff fails.

Far worse, we've created a brand-new mercury dispersal system that reaches every corner of the country, even areas where they get most of their electricity from dams or other non-coal sources and there was never any value to the trade-off to begin with. Do you really want grandkids with lifelong neurological problems because you want to save on your electric bill? Or your light bulb costs? Or because the color of the light isn't quite right? I don't.

What worries me the most is the cost of remediation if we eventually find that many more than 630,000 newborns a year have mercury levels way above recommendations. Lots of folks here know the incredible costs and issues involved in removing asbestos or lead paint from a home. Mercury abatement has the potential to make removing those two hazards look like child's play. Who will pay for the care of kids born with brain damage because we didn't realize CFL's were such a hazard? We will. With yet more tax dollars.

Like climate change, these processes take time and I suspect that mercury is only now entering the environment from pre-ban alkaline batteries that went into dumps years ago. What happens when the CFL bulbs start getting to dumps in big numbers? We just don't know, and so we should consider how deeply we get into something that could make the US one giant Superfund site. We put deposit requirements on innocuous glass soda bottles but not on "special needs recycling" hazardous material bearing CFL's. That's idiotic. When the choice was just CFL v. incandescent, the tradeoff worked, but now there's a serious new contender, the LED, and it's far greener than the CFL because it uses no mercury.

On the whole, people have a hard time evaluating the threat of materials like mercury and carcinogens like asbestos and TCE because the cause and effect are sometimes years, even decades, apart. But the cancer statistics, state by state prove that certain areas produce statistically meaningful clusters of deaths. Sadly, those clusters tend to be in areas with large manufacturing operations.

We already know that trace amounts of mercury can be very toxic, especially to the fetuses of pregnant women. They have been told each year that it's increasingly less safe for them to eat any fish at all. As far back as 2004, the EPA raised a red flag:

"E.P.A. Raises Estimate of Babies Affected by Mercury Exposure - More than one child in six born in the United States could be at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother's womb, according to revised estimates released last week by Environmental Protection Agency scientists. The agency doubled its estimate, equivalent to

630,000 of the 4 million babies born each year, because recent research has shown that mercury tends to concentrate in the blood in the umbilical cord of pregnant women." Source:

It's not hard to justify if there's a hidden downside to CFLs: poisoning the next generation of Americans. Efficiency and longevity of LEDs has been increasing greatly in just the past few years. Here's a study done by Carnagie Mellon:

They concur that LED lighting still has a long way to go, but that it's closing ground fast and it's going to very rapidly overtake CFLs in nearly every category when those eventual improvements arrive. That only makes sense since commercial fluorescent technology is at least 70 years old. CFL's may be a new form factor, but the technology is considered by some to outdate the tungsten filament bulb.

Stokes at Cambridge discovered electrical fluorescence in 1852, which by some accounts makes it well over 150 years old. That's a lot of time for the damn things to remain so buggy compared to a simple incandescent bulb. And it's precisely why they'll fail against LEDs. One of the most cynical touches in the film "Blade Runner" is Harrison Ford having to flick the glass bulb of a future fluorescent bulb to get it to come on. It's a prediction that even in the future, those damn fluorescent bulbs will not have improved very much.

Yes, that's true. Asbestos also saw incredibly widespread use before people realized it was a potent carcinogen. Use for decades really doesn't mean safe. It takes a long time for waste in dumps to percolate. It takes even longer for experts to "put it all together" as in the case of asbestos, whose use continued many years after its lethal effects were *very* well known. There's already a lot of mercury seeping into the ground in landfills. While most of the environmental mercury currently does appear to come from power plant emissions, those are relatively easy fixes. Why didn't Obama and Congress spend the stimulus money on scrubbing dirty power plant stacks and not on million dollar "retention" bonuses for fat cat bankers?

While most mercury in CFL's appears just a trifling few milligrams, some sources claim that 5mg of mercury can contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking water. This site talks about some of the common sense things we so easily overlook:

"It's kind of ironic that on the one hand, the agency [EPA] is saying, 'Don' t worry, it's a very small amount of mercury.' Then they have a whole page of [instructions] how to handle the situation if you break one . . ."

When you start to talk about 2 or 3 billion light bulbs, that 5mg (or even

1mg in the newer bulbs) becomes a significant amount in the aggregate. Couple that to Americans and their incredibly low recycling compliance (last I checked it was 6% or so), it's very likely to spell serious trouble, especially if the conclusion that only 5mg of mercury can contaminate 6,000 gallons of water proves true. I haven't read the paper they're referring to, but based on EPA's schizoid recommendations on CFLs, I have no reason to doubt it.

That's only because the EPA under Bush was basically prevented from cleaning up the dirtiest of the coal plants. Didn't the "indirect approach" of the Feds giving money to the banks that created the financial meltdown have little effect on the foreclosure rate? That should tell us that indirect methods tend to be political creations that can't be relied upon. Clean up the stacks and the alleged tradeoff that people so frequently tout turns into nothing more that a new vector for getting toxic mercury into every garbage dump in America.

Do we really want to condemn 10's of thousands or more children to living with birth defects because we want lower electric bills or we want a slightly warmer-colored light no matter what the environmental cost? Not me. It's bad enough that we're laying the cost of the bailout, two failed wars and a fraud-riddled Medicare system on them. Must we poison them, too?

The Mellon study referenced above, among others, looked at those very questions by examining every step of the process and how much power it used. Look on page 25 for the graph that compares production costs of CFL, incandescent and LEDs. Scientists are a lot better at accounting for the real costs of items these days, looking at the entire life cycle of a product to determine what it costs, money and environmental hazard-wise, to produce items like LEDs and CFLs.

A lot of Pacific ocean mercury comes from the stacks of the Chinese coal plants powering the manufacture of CFL bulbs. The US stood poised to lead the world in developing LED technology, but instead, we're shoring up banks that caused the mess we're in.

Ironically, those banks, with lots of help from the same Congress that's mandating the new bulbs, have turned that wonderful, "seems like a good idea" invention called the credit card into the near downfall of the world's economy. Not every new idea is a good idea and some of them, like giving women estrogen to prevent breast cancer, turned out to be EXACTLY the wrong thing to do. Actual studies, rather than "feel good, should work" guesses showed that the treatments actually increased the risk of breast cancer and they were stopped.

Nothing I've seen in the literature so far suggests that LED bulbs contain anything as near as toxic as mercury. In the past LEDs contained arsenic compounds, but most of the newer diodes do not. Because the world is generally awakening to the idea that little amounts of poison add up, Apple stopped using arsenic in its LCD panels in 2008. Remember, LEDs fulfill the same promise as CFLs of reduced power plant emissions, but they do it without the insane tradeoff of involving a known deadly poison whose levels are so high pregnant women are told not to eat tuna.

Sometimes, the marketplace isn't the best determiner of what's good for society. That lesson seems abundantly clear in the aftermath of the current financial mess we're in. If we know that mercury is toxic and that scientists believe great improvements in LEDs are coming, does it make sense to push a bad technology like CFLs forward by government mandate? This is toxic stuff and George Orwell wouldn't be surprised at how easily we now swallow big lies like "adding mercury will take away mercury." Here's how the indirect solution is working out in the real world:

Why not write a book while you're at it! 8^)

bob_v

I will stay with old fashion bulbs as long as I can. My wife can't be exposed to florescence bulbs. People with immune problems (arthritis or lupus or fibromyalgia) react badly to the CFL type bulbs. They emit ultra violet light like the sun does.

Cue Twilight Zone theme...

Think you could trim your post to post a snipe, in future?

bob_v

Interesting. Everything I have ever heard says the opposite about fluorescents, of the right colour.

How can UV from the sun affect these maladities? Sun exposure usually affects many maladities in a good way. Breast cancer is one that is statistically reduced, big time.

The flickering of fluorescents was always blamed for some problems but the sun doesn't flicker at 120Hz.

I have arthritis, and my rheumatologist has never suggested that I avoid fluorescent lighting.

Nevertheless, I am trying to replace CFLs by LEDs -- but for the energy savings, not for anything related to health.

Perce

And you would benefit from less foul language.

Was wondering the same things. About the only thing I could think of was that some medications make you more sensitive to UV radiation and thus more susceptible to sun burn. But I haven't seen anything in 25 years of nursing to support that as a problem outside the sun or tanning booths.