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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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

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

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

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

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.

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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:

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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:

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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:

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"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:

Reply to
Robert Green

on'

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

bob_v

Reply to
Bob Villa

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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.

Reply to
Chuck

Cue Twilight Zone theme...

Reply to
salty

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

bob_v

Reply to
Josepi

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.

Reply to
Josepi

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

Reply to
Percival P. Cassidy

And you would benefit from less foul language.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

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.

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

With the energy required to manufacture LED bulbs. And the cost of the bulbs. I doubt there is any real savings. Either to your wallet, or to the planet, by converting to LED light indoors.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

The problem is the drugs they want you to take for these autoimmune diseases. My doctor gave me a bottle of pills and I looked them up on the internet. The list of things you can't do (go out in the sun, have a beer, eat fatty foods) sounded like my planner so I decided the arthritis wasn't really that bad. A little physical therapy got me going again

Reply to
gfretwell

He made his point quite well though.

Reply to
Josepi

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