Anyone using LED home lighting replacement bulbs?

I've been using these for a couple of months now as I described in my earlier post. These look like the first serious LED bulbs for long life, whereas most earlier bulbs seemed to be good LED bait for the those who don't look behind the cover. My recommendation is to try one or two out in a very high use lamp or area where the strange design is not distracting (e.g. workshop light).

 

Not trying to bust any bubbles here but the LED technology is the same all over the world. Doesn't matter whose name is on it, they all come from the same source. I'm talking about the LED inside not the plastic housings. There are no "special" or "secret" LEDs being used in any LED bulb on the market. But if you like them, use them. fwiw.

 

It's complicated to design a good home LED bulb.

I've bought three or four kinds of LED Christmas lights. Some are junk, with a lot of the lights burning out or getting dim. Others are very reliable.

I've also used 200 lumen LED bike lights. These can get quite hot, some will even overheat if there's no airflow from a moving bike. They have an amazing amount of light from just one LED.

Screw-in LED lightbulbs would have similar problems, and require a good design and materials. LEDs tend to emit light in a beam, so the optics are important to get a light that isn't too directional. I haven't tried any yet, I'm waiting for some long-term reviews.

 

Holy cow! This post is so wrong I don't know where to start. First you have the LEDs themselves. There are several makers, each with many different shapes, sizes, architecture, and semiconductor materials. The technology is changing so fast that even the good makers like Cree produce better products continually. Their good chips from two years ago are pretty poor compared to what they have now. Plus you have to worry about counterfeit chips and binning.

Then you have the whole heat dissipation issue. You can spec a great LED die and have it work poorly due to poor thermal management. Do you use an integrated solution, or do you design your own cooling? Is it a replacement lamp or an integrated design? The questions go on and on.

If you make it through the first two hurdles you still have to worry about the power supply. You can just slap a resistor on the LED and call it good, but that makes for a pretty crappy design. Better driver designs call for current stabilization and integration with heat control. Voltage multiplication is common on some types of designs. So is pulse width modulation for dimming. Really good drivers will feature active control to better match the light output and color from each die. Better control makes for a better lamp, but it costs more. Lighting LEDs are part of a system. They aren't generic 60W Edison lamps.

LEDs all the same? Hardly.

Tom

 

This isn't what I've been told, but NDA prevents sharing of details.

 

You can say the same thing about the aluminum used in engine blocks....it's the same aluminum everywhere. The LED is just one component of a totally engineered product.


Good heat sinking is better than bad heat sinking, etc. etc. From the inside examinations of the entire bulb, the quality of engineering is significantly better than the others I've examined. However, it's going to take some run time to see if this successfully translates to extremely long life.

 

TOM QUOTE:
"You can just slap a resistor on the LED and call it good,
but that makes for a pretty crappy design"


Talk about wrong, Holly cats,
you obviously know very little about electronics. You "cannot" just slap a resistor
on an LED and light it with AC. LED's run on DC....You'll need a rectifier, resistor,
and a capacitor.

How many companies make high power LEDs: chips, stars?
I'm talking the LED, not the housing or power supply. I'll wait....
I never said "all" LEDs are bad. What I'm talking about here,
are the e27 120V LED bulbs: color, cost, lighting, power supply+quality.

I work with electronics for a living, and as I mentioned earlier,
there are a few "OK" LED bulbs out there but the color and cost don't cut it
with me. The rest are unreliable junk. Do you understand? As soon as
I'm able to post pictures on this forum I'll show the insides of a few different
style e27 LED bulbs. You can like it or hate it. Oh, and I don't drive a prius!
:cheer2:

 

Get a photobucket account and use its "IMG" tags after you upload images

 

Classic.

 

You obviously know very little about the long-time participants here. Stick around a while, and maybe you will learn something.

 

It's like listening to a Ron Paul speech.....
I dig your passion, but I'm trying to decypher where you're going with all of this.
Despite the fact that you're not a Prius driver, you'll fit right in in this forum! Keep posting, and I'll look forward to seeing the pictures.

Personally?
I'll let the pundrity do the stare and compare on home LED lighting, and keep burning CFLs untill the LED manufacturers recoup more of their "non-recurring engineering costs".
When their price point is attractive, and IF somebody makes one that will....say.....light up an area to my satisfaction, THEN I might consider picking up a few to try out.

Have fun!

 

Probably true. I only have a degree in electrical engineering and 33 years as a practicing engineer. I still have plenty to learn.

A quick search of the Digikey catalog lists 197,574 items matching LED. I suppose they are all the same. They probably list that one item in 197,574 places to make it easier to find.

Tom

 

Thank You, someone else who gets it!
I am not jumping into the LED pool yet.
They finally have bright, color correct, CFL's that work much better than they did 5 years ago!
Talk to me in 5 years, LED lighting will probably be..
A-Inexpensive,
B- Have the thermal problem solved,
C- Actually put out a usable number of Lumins, so much that dimming will be nice with mood settings. Thus having a great PWM system built into the LED or socket. Or, a Home Computer driven, whole home lighting system. All your future light switches will control, On/Off/Dim/Color through Cat-5. Bluetooth is too flakey, sometimes the best Data Path is Copper! Which transitions itself nicely into the last idea, which is...
D-COLOR no reason not to build a light that has color. If anyone has been to the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, the Lobby Bar area has hundreds of Cree 3 color LED's. Vary the PWM to each color, at some point you get white. They cycle through White to Red. to Green to Blue, and all the mixes in between!
That is the kind of LED light pkg that I would consider for my home. In 5 years it should be fairly inexpensive and leaps and bounds better than it is today.

 

From my web site:

"Originally we huddled in the dark.
Then we domesticated fire and used candles and oil lamps.
They were replaced by kerosene and gas lamps.
And Edison invented the incandescent bulb.

Now incandescent bulbs are being outlawed
to be replaced by Compact Florescent Lamps (CFL).
Soon CFLs will be outlawed due to the mercury in them
and they will be replaced by LED bulbs.
Then LEDs will be outlawed due to the arsenic in them
and we will be back to candles
Then candles and oil/kerosene/gas lamps will be outlawed due to carbon emissions.
and once again we will huddle in the dark."

JeffD

 

Remote Phosphors: Philips LED bulb, Tear-down Part II - PowerSource | Blog on EDN

if you like seeing the insides of the Phillips yellow LED bulb

 

It has been noticed that Robots tend to huddle together when placed in dark storage....
Asimov's "I Robot"

 

I have a 2 year-old house here in the UK, it is reasonably energy efficient, other than the kitchen, family bathroom and en-suite all have loads of GU10 halogen spot bulbs and fittings. These are all 50w a piece. For the kitchen alone, with 6 spots, this means 300W in a room where the lights are on a lot in winter.

Standard prices in hardware shops and supermarkets for Philips LED (4w) replacements were about 10 GBP each (around $15 USD). So that was out of the question. Looking on eBay I found some cheap no-name 4w LEDs for 2 GBP each from Hong Kong. They were described as 'warm' in colour, and in terms of light output equated to around a 35-40W halogen. I was sceptical, but went for it.

They are great - not quite a powerful as the Halogens, but the light quality is very good and if anything they are warmer in quality than the Halogens. You can't argue with 24W versus 300W...

 

I'm missing something. Why was this out of the question?

I started buying some CFLs back in the 20th Century even when they cost $18 and electricity cost less than half what it does now, because their life cycle cost was already favorable. A good LED lamp saves even more energy and lasts even longer than does a CFL.

 

You have to remember I'm an instictively cheap person. Spending 60 GBP on light bulbs went against the grain.

 

I got the lights and they are dim as hell. They're dimmer than the TV. It's only about as bright as 1 candle. The only thing it's good for is changing colors. It's not even close to the advertised 50w equivalent.
I have switched back to the Ikea CFL bulbs I bought in 2004.