LED Bulbs--Opinions & Experience?

[beowulff]

@ZenBeam

Yeah, what is a good bulb to use outdoors, where temps can get to below zero? Do LED bulbs work then?

Perfectly.

[Mdcastle]

Yes- they’re even being used as street lights and traffic signals in cold weather climates. Incandescent bulbs don’t care about heat or cold, LED bulbs don’t care about cold and CFLs care about both.

[ZenBeam]

@Mdcastle

Yes- they’re even being used as street lights

:smack: Right outside my front door…

[Senegoid]

@Mdcastle

Yes- they’re even being used as street lights and traffic signals in cold weather climates. Incandescent bulbs don’t care about heat or cold, LED bulbs don’t care about cold and CFLs care about both.

An unanticipated problem that has turned up with that: Traffic control ligthts, with their tubular shades around them, fill up with ice and snow in cold climates, and the LED lights aren’t hot enough to melt that, whereas the older incandescent lights were.

Sample article (with pic): LED Traffic Lights Don’t Melt Snow. Dena Cassella, Digital Trends, December 17, 2009. (In the pic, you can just barely see which light is on. Note also the sign next to the lights, completely snowed over.)

Lede:

Cities around the country that have installed energy-efficient traffic lights are discovering a hazardous downside: The bulbs don’t burn hot enough to melt snow and can become crusted over in a storm — a problem blamed for dozens of accidents and at least one death.

[Antigen]

@Rhythmdvl

I wish burnt out CFLs had a Blue Screen of Dark. I swear some fixtures have gone through four or five of those things already. Our problem is that they’re lightbulbs. Even being *expensive *lightbulbs doesn’t make us pay all that much attention to them. When did we change that? A year ago? Shit, year and a half? Who the hell knows. And save the receipt? Yeah, well, maybe if we could manage to keep our accountant marginally happy with business expenses we’d have a shot at holding on to freakin’ lightbulb receipts.

Some of our fixtures seem to be killing CFLs quickly too. We’ve started writing the installation date on the new bulbs before putting them in, so we can judge whether it’s all in our heads or if there’s actually a problem. Of course, we started that almost a year ago and haven’t had one burn out since, so I have absolutely zero data so far.