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BothsidesistFraud

LED lighting sucks (self.opinionhavers)

submitted 2 days ago by BothsidesistFraud to c/opinionhavers

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I'm appalled by the state of LED lighting.

I would rather change every incandescent in the house for the next 20 years, than figure out all this.

I have an attuned sense for good lighting. I just do. So if I want good LED lighting, that doesn't look flat or cheap, I have to figure out the Color Rendering Index. That's a single number which tells you how good the LED is at showing true color, except, it's a scalar value that describes a 2D vector of possibilities (magnitude x spectrum). So not all CRIs that have the same value are the same quality.

You mean I have to figure out which LED bulb is gonna make red look red?

This is all setting aside color temperature, which at least is pretty straightforward. I've been a 2700K man since day one.

But there's the dimmer situation which is the complete wild west. Not all bulbs work with all dimmers, not all dimmers do a good job for all bulbs, and if you choose wrong you'll either get a dimmer that doesn't dim all the way, or you'll get flickers or random cutouts (think 6 recessed lights of which 2 cut out early as you dim).

Companies publish spreadsheets to tell you which bulbs dim with their dimmers and how well. SPREADSHEETS

And, seemingly, the only dimmer switches that function well are cheap plastic shit. There are no good dimmers that also look or feel high quality.

Line all this up against Prior Era where I would go to Home Depot, pick out any fucking random bulb I wanted, and it would look great, work great, and dim great.

Someone please tell me that the end-to-end carbon cost of making LED bulbs vastly outweighs the energy savings so I can be even more validly self-righteous?

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[–] rowinxavier 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Sorry, but no, the carbon cost of making led bulbs seem to be about double that of incandescent bulbs.

Source

When you take into account usage it gets much better for LEDs.

This site says that a 60W bulb will produce 152.42kg of CO2 over the course of a year if on for 8 hours a day using coal, while the LED bulb will produce 22.23kg. So unless it takes more than 130kg of CO2 more to produce an LED bulbs it is not worth it over a year, and likely much less than that.

That said, the LED filament bulbs are fairly good, and honestly any of the phosphor with UV LED setups will do a fairly good job now. I would recommend looking at Home Assistant to control everything and getting controllers for that. The options for switches, dimmers, dials, heck even big double knife switches (the big wall mounted ones you pull down in a mad science lab), are all well supported and you can bring switches you like over if you care to tinker a little. You can completely rewrite the dimming options to make more steps, differing colour balances for different times of day, and use a combination of lights to reach the CRI you are looking for.

[–] BothsidesistFraud 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info on CO2.

Nerding out on my lights is absolutely the reverse of what I'm going for. I have great distaste for adding complexity to simple things. That said if you know of smart dimmers that look and feel high quality, please post a manufacturer or link because I'm unavoidably in this world so I may as well do it right. I've looked into Lutron and they feel like cheap plastic junk IMO.

[–] rowinxavier 2 points 2 days ago

To be honest, I have the inverse preferences, I will work with something janky if I get to mess around inside it, so my recommendations are a bad fit. That said, mixing lights may be a good option, as well as using light strips or EL wire, basically a bunch of LEDs in a plastic sort of wire. They can have a range of different profiles along the strip, so you could have every second LED drop the blue or green a bit to pull the balance towards red, or have a tiny bit of added red alongside the white phosphors. Good luck!