If the bulb holder was designed for a halogen bulb, you might find that a LED will overheat in it (or rather its electronics in the base will). This is especially true of glass bulb holders in which the bulb points down. Even the fairly low amount of heat from a 5 or 6W LED bulb builds up around the base as it cannot escape. This is far less true of a golf ball than a G9, but can still be an issue.
There are some 800+ lumen dimmable BC Megaman bulbs here at the bottom of the page:
I spent ages (years) looking for BC dimmable, golf ball, LED bulbs equivalent to 40W. I only found them on Amazon recently.
I don’t hold out much hope for you finding higher than 40W equivalent.
I did see some mini larger bulbs - between normal size and golf ball but they weren’t dimmable an were too large for our fittings.
I had stocked up on ordinary 40W golf balls - we really like the lights and have them in two rooms. (6 in total). The plan was to keep them in use as long as possible. I have decades worth :-)
I haven't checked recently, but some of the bulbs used to have outputs stated in Chinese "fantasy" lumens.
Se my reply to the OP. Those bulbs are stated to be 810 lumens, from
9.5W. I have no reason to doubt that figure (as I would if it was from 5 or 6W), but the base of that bulb, if above the bulb without anywhere for the heat to vent, is going to get very hot after a while.
Only if their stated life turns out to be accurate!
The base of a normal halogen bulb, has no active circuitry in it.
Whereas LEDs have some electronics in the base.
A LED bulb can use a "capacitor dropper", for low power LEDs of say 2W or 3W input power.
Larger bulbs (the one over my head uses 17W input), they have a SMPS, and if the base of the bulb is a good size, that helps dissipate the heat from the SMPS.
The SMPS design in a bulb, is not "the best SMPS that money can buy". It is designed for cheapness.
Given those constraints, what kind of bulb can we build for you ? Tiny base ? Then it'll need regulated DC input. To make a really tiny SMPS and run off mains, the price would go up.
The whole bulb generally is in need of cooling, and placing enclosures around LED bulbs is bad for them. Even with silicon carbide substrates, enclosing a bulb can be too much for it. Whereas incandescent and halogen love the heat, and are made of ceramics and metals and other very-high-temp materials.
My 17W input bulb, it gets pretty hot. There's an electrolytic in the SMPS, with a limited lifespan at higher temperatures. So if you ask for really high golf ball output, there might be compromises on lifespan.
Is there just the one light then? If there are more and all are halogen, then it might be time to re socket the set and start with leds. I'm no fan of so called socket compatible low energy bulbs ever since a b/Q CFL got so hot in the base that the tube itself fell out as it unsoldered itself. Brian
Indeed. The PF of 0.5 or so represents the cheaper end of the LED bulb market. More expensive LEDs have a PF above 0.9 - typically 0.95. That
10W or so of wasted power has to go somewhere (as heat), so not only are you paying more for less light, but the stressed electronics means the bulbs won't last so long.
It may not present a purely resistive load to the mains, therefore RMS measurements and values may not be valid.
I've never seriously looked into it, but LED driver boards I've seen do not appear to be full mains 400V switchers, they have looked like capacitative voltage droppers feeding constant-current switchers driven by a voltage a little above the total LED requirement. If that is the case, the power factor could be well below unity. It also explains why the dimmable LEDs are more expensive, having to deal with a sliced-up and variable input voltage.
Good power factors, were back when engineers built LED lightbulbs.
Now that marketeers build light bulbs ("Philips" is not Philips), then 0.5 is the PF of choice.
You can check them on your Kill-O-Watt meter.
In an office building, you would not use homeowner light bulbs. But then you might be paying a lot more per luminaire.
And if you notice your new LED bulb only has a 1.5 year life, that's known as rent-seeking behavior. When a bulb life is unnecessarily short, you are renting bulbs, not buying to own.
Thanks for the link. At work we had an M(aximum) D(emand) limit of 500kVA; being an electronics factory meant that we had a lot of florries and not many motors - compessors of air and refrigerant being the most - so we used PV correction to get the MD closer to kW.
Some years ago there was a legal requirement for CFL of =>20W to have a PF of >0.9 (IIRC); I suppose that with LEDs being ~half the load that it isn't needed.
As an aside, some years ago there was an LED lamp in Ikea that warned about bein hot - it was Fhot! Ikea's LEDs are crap - at the time I was retrofitting the house with LEDs and, in most places, new luminaires and wouldn't use anything under 100 lu/W. Things haven't really improved since then.
Or add more lighting in it. LED tape can be useful there.
If you were determined to keep with golfballs, there are ways to up the output power either a bit by adding ventilation to the bulb or a lot by adding a tiny fan as well as venting the bulb.
I just received an assortment of flush circular LEDs from AliExpress, not connected any yet, I'm just interested to see how they compare with UK-sourced lights.
Here's an amusing (if slightly OT) factoid for you to consider:
It's rather apt that the Kill-O-Watt meter should be mentioned in a discussion about Power Factor. :) I have the UK version which is sold under the model number "2000MU-UK" (Maplin order code L61AQ) where the "Power Consumption" is quoted as 20 VA max versus the figure for the Kill- O-Watt meter which is quoted as 10W max.
Neither are correct since the reality is that since the UK model actually only consumes half a watt and the power supply is just a dropper capacitor, which is undoubtedly half the value of the capacitor dropper used in the Yank version, suggests the Yank rating is simply a typo or confusion between VA and watts (10W's worth of heat inside a Kill-O-Watt meter would produce magic smoke in a matter of just a minute or three!).
Since the current drawn from either mains voltage supply (120 or 240 volts) will be the same to power exactly the same electronics inside these meters, it seems obvious that the "10W" figure for the Kill-O-Watt version should be 10VA - the doubling up of VA for the UK model being simply the consequence of doubling the input voltage for virtually the same current with the dropper cap value scaled down to half that used in the Yank version to account for doubling up the 'volt drop' requirement on a 240v 50Hz mains supply versus that of a 120v 60Hz supply.
Have a read this and let us all weep over what might have been if the promise "That it takes about ten years development to go from the lab to a commercially available product"[1] had not proved oh so very false. :(
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[1] Slightly paraphrasing here because the original statement appears to have been redacted ?WTF!/
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