LED Light Bulbs now cheaper than Incandescent

[Stormin Mormon]

CY: Treat your self some day.... full flow shower some time.

CY: Duct tape has many uses.

[dbp]

Exactly! Furthermore, anybody dumb enough to buy from Liquid Lumberdators deserves whatever cheap shit they get. If folks want quality they should go to a quality retailer.

[danny burstein]

[snip]

Photos of a Costco twin-pack of Feit brand four foot LED tubes that somehow or other are drop-in replacements for fluorescents and work through the ballasts. As I said elsewhere, my head hurts trying to visualize the wave forms...

and

[rbowman]

Reforming the religion is also good. Thomas Cromwell and his cronies made a bundle out of the confiscated Church property and Henry got a new punch. It didn't turn out too well for Tommy. Too bad they didn't round up all the Cromwells and execute them, saving the world from Oliver.

[rbowman]

I've thought along those lines given the price of Denalis:

You get the mounts, wiring harness, relay, and dimmer module but $380 is still a stiff price. However 2 10W LEDs do shed a bit of light.

[Don Y]

Dunno. They could transformer couple to get down to a better working voltage. *Or*, just rectify and chop *that* (buck regulator) to feed the LEDs.

I'd be interested to know how efficient the system is -- watts in vs. watts delivered to the LEDs. I suspect there are still some issues (I know there have been some recalled products from "dangerous overheating" -- which suggests too much lost in heat in the process!)

[danny burstein]

Lie this one?

- they claim to have sold 700,000 of them. My mind boggles.

[Don Y]

Could well be. I forget the name of the vendor. I just remember the overheating. One has to wonder just how hot they got... *or*, if the plastic just has a low melting point.

[Robert Green]

Now you have me worried. I was just about to hit the local Home Depot but burned up lamps do not have a high Spouse Approval Factor. We've had several of the older CFL self-immolate and though nothing caught fire, the house stank of burning plastic for days.

[Don Y]

That's why it's important to know the internal circuit topology.

Most consumer kit is frighteningly marginally designed. Micropennies become significant! So, often things are designed on the bleeding edge in terms of performance (er, "safety").

I've encountered LCD monitors from (what you would *think* were) respectable manufacturers (HP?) that were actually *fire* hazards! (with this eventually publicly acknowledged). Imagine the monitor on which you are reading this "suddenly" catching fire! :-(

"Honey, the computer's on fire!"

[Robert Green]

Sometime's that not easy to come by without disassembling the unit after purchase and then it might void the warranty. I guess I'll run a test with

2 bulbs in a contained environment. I am doing this mostly to avoid having to access the 48" fixture I cleverly installed in a hard-to-reach kitchen overhang above the sink. That was a much younger and more spry me. )-:

I had a cheap USB charger disintegrate as I pulled it from the wall. The case didn't come off, oddly enough. It was a little square of plastic the metal plug tines were fitted onto. They stayed in the wall with wires hanging out of the unit.

What scares me more are the cheap LiON batteries and chargers that come from China. Very poorly made with a very little safety margin (like not using a thermal sensor that touches the battery pack to detect overheating).

Sony had a big lot of inflammable laptops (or potentially so) that occasionally melted down. They blamed their battery supplier for somehow getting metal particles into the battery chemistry. I think the technical term is "battery goop." (-:

You laugh. My wife and I both survived fires that could have easily killed us had the fickle finger of fate pointed our way. Makes you really hyper when you smell that sort of non-cooking "electronics are melting" stench.

[Don Y]

Yes. Or, spending some time with a search agent looking for a "teardown" of a similar model!

Amazing how much smarter we get as we age! I'm now at a point where I spend a sh*tload of time "over-engineering" things so that they

*don't* break *or* are easily replaced/repaired when they do!

E.g., I built a valve manifold (two sets of three ball valves) to allow the whole house water filter and whole house water softeners to be independently removed from the "circuit" (i.e., when you need to service/replace/remove the filter unit, you can shut off the water flowing THROUGH it and simultaneously open the bypass *around* it -- common sense).

But, that wasn't enough! What if I ever need to service one of those

*valves*?? :>

So, I mounted the entire valve manifold on a pair of brass unions. If *it* needs service, I can shut off water to the house, open the two unions and then remove the entire manifold to place it somewhere EASIER to work on! (and, with less risk of torch catching the wall behind the manifold on fire!)

And, dangling there, inviting you to GRAB THEM with your bare hands! :>

I'd be more worried about impurities in the actual batteries themselves! AFAICT, this is what leads to the pyrotechnic battery experience!

Yes.

One of my printers uses *solid* ink (like blocks of colored wax). It produces GORGEOUS prints! But, it's expensive to run and wasteful of ink (at startup, it "purges" itself -- wasted ink!).

When I use it, the house is permeated with the smell of "burnt crayons" (if you think hard, I'm sure you can recall smelling burnt crayons as a kid -- it's a memorable scent!).

Other pieces of kit produce similarly noxious "burnt" odors (soldering iron, laminator, etc.).

One evening, I smelled a very noticeable "burnt" smell. I ran through my "scent memory" and none of *my* burnt offerings came to mind. Instead, it smelled like *wood* (too many campfires as a Boy Scout :> ).

"Gee, that's odd! I'm not *burning* anything! Did I leave something too close to the stovetop??"

Then, happened to glance out the back window to see the sky bright orange! A house ~200 ft behind us was completely engulfed in flame.

"Ooops!"

[Robert Green]

Ah yes. Easy-to-repair really counts for a lot these days.

Sounds nice. I am seriously thinking of doing something similar and replumbing the whole house with PEX. The cheap copper pipe that the prior owners used is now starting to show tiny pin-hole leaks.

Yep. Insanely low component count, too. I'll bet it pumped out a lot of RFI because there were no filters that I could see.

I wonder if the metal threads reported in the Sony battery fiasco only did their evil deeds when the batteries were charging? At least there haven't been any new smoke/fire reports of incidents on the new Boeing planes. Maybe the tecnology will eventually settle down.

"Battery schmutz" is also a term of art.

A similar thing happened to me one very dry Fourth of July. After setting off some fireworks we noticed that same orange glow. All the brush and leaves were on fire from the Roman candles. We were beating the ground with shovels like that Pearl Buck novel "The Good Earth" when they are fighting off the locust attacks.

Yes, very.

[Don Y]

Friends/neighbors/colleagues laugh and claim, "Now that you've put all that effort into making it easy to repair, it will NEVER BREAK!" They think this *humorous*. I, OTOH, think it a desirable asset!

"Great! If it never breaks, that's even better! If this sort of overkill would yield similar results for other things, I'd gladly adopt it EVERYWHERE!!"

Here, on a slab so no chance to change anything (at least, not for mortal wages!)

Anything that *I* plub always uses the heavier wall thickness pipe. But, I can't change the stuff already in the slab!

Yes. When designing consumer kit, every component you add is treated like unprotected sex with yet another partner: are you REALLY sure you want to do this?? :>

In *my* case, the consolation was that it wasn't *my* problem! So, not my responsibility to "address" :>

[Mike Duffy]

In fact, this brings up a few tangentially-related problems I had installing a motion-detection switch for lighting in my garden shed.

While I was in the store buying the switch, I noticed a 3-intensity (30/70/100 incandescent equivalent) "CREE" LED bulb which I could put into a compatible standing floor lamp, liberating a not-so-compact CFL that's about equivalent to a 150 W incandescent.

At the same time, I also bought a 5 W LED for the basement stairway (50 W incandescent equivalent) to replace the 2W one (~25 W equiv) that I had always found for years to be way too dim, but at the time of its purchase brighter LEDs were way too expensive.

So I put the 2W in the peak above the top shelf, because its only function is to light a few square feet of shelf which can only be seen by using the chair I keep in the shed for exactly that purpose. The huge CFL I put centrally, installed the switch, put the fuse back in the box, and went to the shed to check everything out.

At first glance, things looked okay. Full off turns off the lights. Full on turns on the light. Auto turns on the lights. So now I had to wait (perfectly still) to see if they would turn off.

After a few minutes, I was starting to feel a bit stupid. I should have read the instructions fully BEFORE. After a few more minutes, I did, and noticed that there was a wheel one can use to adjust the on-time from 15 sec to 15 min. But more importantly, I discover that the tiny green LED on the switch is not an auto-pilot ready light, but is supposedly a motion detector indicator. It had been on full whenever the switch was put to "auto". So I shielded it a bit to see it more clearly, and yes, it unlit after a few seconds of immobility. But then came back on steady when I unblocked it. Shortly, I realized that the huge CFL itself was constantly triggering the motion detector! So, I put it in the bulb box in the basement, and replaced the 75W (equiv) LED that I had removed at the start of my job. Problem (one) solved.

Problem two is that when the timeout had expired, and the lights are all supposed to turn off, the 75Weqv and 25Weqv LEDs both turned off as expected, but the 3 other LEDs (~40W equivalent) all on the same circuit (in parallel) stayed on. (Actually, I have a lot of high shelves in my garden shed.) They were not at full brightness, and were flickering in unison at ~10 Hz. On a lark, I unscrewed the 2W, and the flicker frequency changed to ~1 Hz. I realized that the problem was caused by a non-linear impedance in the load on the switch. After all, the circuit that performs the motion detection needs to put the electrons somewhere when it's finished with them. There is no white wire connection, so a certain amount of current needs to bleed through the load. It's not enough to light a filament lamp, but enough for a low power LED.

So I replaced the 2W LED with a low power (25W) incandescent bulb. Problem solved.

[Don Y]

One of the first products I designed was a remote display for a boat (LORAN-C TD display). As power is scarce on (small) boats, you don't want to be wasteful of it, needlessly. And, as you can't just "plug something in" a convenient "outlet", its even better if you can find a way of *supplying* the power to these sorts of things "automatically".

So, I chose LCD displays (segmented) as the electronics could all be CMOS and require very little power to operate. They are also very visible in direct sunlight (not true for other display technologies -- esp when power is a concern!).

This meant I could ship power down the same cable that was used to send the "data" to be displayed! Excellent!

When the first pre-production batch was built, everything worked fine. EXCEPT, I couldn't turn the display *off*! The power switch didn't work at all!

Long story short: the circuit drew so little power that the power available in the *data* wires was enough to run the device even if the "power" lines were cut (switched off).

Solution: leave the device ON all the time and just wire the "power" switch to BLANK the displays ("play dead").

[Robert Green]

I used to watch Storage Wars and I wondered how many times they've cut open lockers to find either dead people or meth labs.

[Robert Green]

Reminds me of the parody of LOTR by the Lampoon called "Bored of the Rings." They described a mythical ringed city with 9 huge concentric walls. The royalty lived in the centermost ring. Garbage was routinely tossed over the wall to the surrounding rings until it reached the outermost, poorest ring where the inhabitants ate whatever came over the wall. Same principle.

(-;

[Robert Green]

A lot of the King's ministers, his wifes, his mistresses and their friends and relatives all misplaced their heads involuntarily. IIRC, a few even got drawn and quartered although I think even the king could not visit that punishment on the nobility - only commoners. I do believe on rare occasions he did "denobilize" someone to visit some horrible punishment on them. A few even got hanged in chains and were then left to rot in place. That's got to smell something awful. Just like radios have magic smoke in them, humans have magic stink that escapes when they day (and for days afterward).

Do you think anyone named Cromwell has been elected to British office since then? I would imagine it would be like Atlanta where very few Shermans are to be found in the phonebook (or were, when I last looked 40 years ago).

[rbowman]

Olly is one of my all time favorites. You really have to piss people off to have them dig you up, give you a posthumous execution, and put your head on a pike.

Churchill wanted to name a battleship HMS Oliver Cromwell but the king wasn't enthusiastic. The Irish were testy enough without another appearance of Cromwell. He still makes the lists of popular historical figures though.