Eh, I’ve had lots of expensive LEDs fail in fairly short amounts of time. I have an LED nightlight that’s more than a decade old and has been on all that time, but these bulbs absolutely fail. And some brands fail more than others.
I gather the Dubai ones will reliably last a long time, but that’s not true of the ones sold in America.
And I’ve gotten incandescent bulbs that were burned out right from the package. So what?
Did those incandescents cost $20+ and come with a package that stated they would last for years?
Wait, what LED bulbs are you referring to that cost more than twenty dollars each?
Package of two, with an advertised life of 13 years.
I would return it if it the place where you bought it is near you or if it was ordered online.
Something to consider if the bulb is in a ceiling fixture that points the bulbs down like a ceiling fan. You will probably want the bulbs frosted. LED’s are highly directional and you may find them annoying if pointed at you. If the bulb is in a free standing floor lamp it may be better not to have them frosted so more light is reflected off the ceiling.
So no, they’re not $20 each; they’re half that.
You ask—with questionable sincerity—whether you need your physics 101¹ class to buy light bulbs.
You say that you bought Phillips bulbs, but they hummed, so you threw them away without trying to understand what was causing the humming. Get behind me, Satan?
You blithely dismiss the concept of CRI, even as you protest that you only care about brightness and color. This is in response to a poster who took pains to explain how CRI affects perceived color.
I’m starting to think that you don’t have an earnest question or even real curiosity, but rather just resent the existence of LED bulbs.
Is that fair? I’m asking sincerely.
¹ If you had—as you implied—actually taken a college-level physics class, you’d know that “Kelvins” sounds as silly as “Fahrenheits” does. Being charitable, maybe you took such a class but forgot that part. “Degrees Kelvin” is the term of art, for what it’s worth.
It’s not worth very much; I don’t care how you say it. A change of 1°K is the exact same increment as a change of 1°C, which is about 1.8°F.
No it’s not. "Degree’ is used with Celsius and Fahrenheit, not kelvin. Defined that way since 1967
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_(temperature)
I think he has both an earnest question and also a level of frustration with no longer understanding light bulbs.
And they have been oversold. I’ve had a huge number of LED bulbs fail. They really do cost more to purchase than bulbs used to. But they cost SO much less to operate that they are still a good deal, even if they often don’t last much longer than incandescents.
@Northern_Piper , look for CRI on the label. Unlike color (2700K, 5000K, etc.) or lumens (500, 1200,1800, etc) which are choices, CRI is a case where more is better. And an LED with a high CRI usually casts a pleasant light for my tastes. And if they don’t print the CRI, they don’t want to brag about it.
If you want a warm glow, like an old incandescent, you want the color to be 2700 or 3000. (Those are common colors. If you happened to see a bulb rated at 2850, I’m sure that would be fine, too.)
Lumens is an excellent description of the amount of light, and it lets you directly compare lights powered by different technologies. Back when we had incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes, we didn’t need that as much, but now we do. The rule of thumb is that an old 60 watt bulb cast about 800 lumens, and an old 100 watt bulb cast about 1600 lumens.
What else should he do? If the prior bulb doesn’t hum, and the new one does, the problem is likely the new bulb.
You are exactly right and I am exactly wrong. Mea culpa.
I apologize for my snark on that subject, and I stand corrected. Thank you.
I appreciate your points, Puzzlegal. And while I didn’t mean to imply that the first post itself was written in bad faith, I don’t see an earnest question at this point in the thread.
We’ve explained color temperature at length. The OP has rejected the entire concept of CRI because…reasons? Attempts to explain how to approximate the color temperature and emitted spectrum (“quality”) of incandescents are rejected with snarky non-sequiturs about how the OP still wants incandescent bulbs.
Along with several others, Gorsnak wrote a long, detailed and helpful response which the OP ignored except as a pretext to complain about the lighting decisions at their place of employment.
What question remains? I sincerely don’t see one.
Regarding what to do with buzzing bulbs, I admit I took the OP’s “Threw them out.” to be a pouty way of catastrophizing.
Frankly, I still do. Why not just return them to the store as defective like a normal human being? If that’s not appealing, one could chuck them in a drawer in case a bulb burns out someplace the buzzing doesn’t matter, like a storage room. The OP mentioned that happened just last week.
The OP seems to strongly dislike LED bulbs. That’s fine—everybody gets to like what they like.
But jeez—according to the OP, LEDs produce significantly worse light than fluorescents, they cause migraines, they die quickly—even faster if it’s cold—and they’re $20 each, at least until another poster gently points out how absurd that would be. Do LEDs also give puppies cancer?
Although I don’t see a question, it’s clear that the desired answer is “LEDs suck.” That’s a valid opinion, but it’s not a question. The only reason I commented was to ask if there was still a question.
But I did so in a way that was fairly cranky myself. If I could do it over, I’d phrase things differently and drop much of my snark—especially the plain-wrong bit about Kelvins. That was a doozy.
For most of my adult life, I’ve not had as much time as I wanted to do stuff. And I’ve usually had enough money. I would never make a special trip just to return a something as cheap as a light bulb. If i get a defective light bulb (and i have) i toss it and move on with my life.
I’m quite sensitive to light, and i hate fluorescents. Well, it turns out that good ones are okay, but bad ones give me headaches and most of them make everything look sick. So i was an enthusiastic early adopter of LEDs. I once paid $100 for a hundred watt equivalent bulb when those weren’t yet commercially available. It weighed more than a pound, and it failed in a couple of months. But i like to think i helped find the development of good LED bulbs.
When i redid a bathroom 6 years ago, i educated the electrician on lighting.
Anyway, I’ve had mixed experiences with LEDs. Some flicker, some die young, some have terrible CRI. But i really like them when they work. An added bonus is that you never burn yourself on them, and since most of them are plastic, you don’t need to worry about them breaking into deadly shards in the trash. Oh, and no toxic waste, either. I still take my fluorescenent bulbs to the dump as they die, to put in the “mercury” area. When an LED dies, i chuck it into my regular trash.
I think LED lifetime is very bimodal. I’ve had a few LED bulbs fail within a few weeks, but if they get past the infant mortality period, they last many years. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever had an LED fail unless it was within the first few weeks.
LEDs lights often have a desperate time with old dimmers. The LEDs themselves are DC and the electronics has to convert from AC and an make sense on a AC waveform that has been thoroughly distorted to reduce the power. The quality of the electronics to handle this varies greatly between different makes. Some dimmers require a minimum load to work and LED bulbs are often low power and below this minimum unless you have a fitting several bulbs in a group.
Only a few brands of LED bulb manage to get it right and perform as well as halogen bulbs and these tend to be more expensive.
Sometimes I think retrofitting LED bulbs into old fittings with an old dimmer is a fools errand. Better to get the Zigbee or some other wireless controlled LED bulbs and a similarly modern dimmer. They will probably last a lot longer because they have a stable power supply. I just need to wait until a suitably dinky looking LED bulb and dimmer combo emerges that matches the attractive appearance of the venerable halogen bulb and its fittings. We are not quite there yet.
Nothing matches the light quality of a good halogen bulb! But they are expensive to run, get hot enough to start fires, and cost as much upfront as an LED bulb. I’ve been replacing halogen fixtures with LEDs. I bought new dimmers that claim to work with LEDs, and while i get the occasional bulb that flickers or hums, it’s mostly been fine. Lots of cheap light, and almost no extra heat. I really notice the difference in the summer.
I don’t know about nothing: you have xenon arc lamps (watts to kilowatts!), supercontinuum laser optics, …
I like a simple gravity-driven fusion reactor in the 10 trillion terawatt range positioned about 1AU distant. Makes an absolutely superb light source, if a bit higher colour temperature than the OP prefers.
I’ve found it to be super difficult to get Alexa to control that particular unit though.
Wrong app. You need Apollo for that.