How much are you overpaying for the LED scam?

[Zephod]

100 LEDs - all white. $2. Two batteries.

Ages ago I soldered 100 white LEDs to a PCB and powered up with 3V from a pair of C cells. There was sufficient light to illuminate a very large room. I still have that circuit somewhere.

I did that for $2 and a lot of hand soldering. It was far brighter a couple of years ago than anything else on the market then or since.

I'm joe ordinary and I can do that. Question is... why are manufactures scamming us with incremental rollouts of such lousy luminescence? With a 500 lumen lantern you really can't tell the difference between a turd and a mars bar!

In today's blog entry I reviewed LED lanterns. The conclusion I have come to is they're just a scam. Mine has 35C of LEDs in it plus a bit of pressed plastic that cost next to nothing. Yet my lanterns cost $30 for my alleged brightest and $10 for the dazzling but not very bright Chinese junk.

Give me half a kilogram of tritium in a jar!


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[neoneddy]

Time is certainly worth something.   The LEDs in most bulbs are no surface mount.

I will say I feel bamboozled by some led ceiling lights I purchased from Amazon. Seller has gone AWOL and they all over heat and melt. I took.one apart, it's just a little bit of the LED strip you can buy for $15 a roll of 16 feet inside.

I paid about $4 each for the assemblies, not bad if they worked longer than a week without melting.


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[J_E]

Russian Components, American Components, All made in Taiwan!

Slightly curious how you found yourself in a situation where you only had a dim flashlight to try and distinguish between a terd and a Mars bar.  

For me, traditional LEDs have always been like baby spot lights that you can't actually focus.  Since, they don't emit light like conventional bulb, it's also difficult to diffuse the light in a way to make them good for lighting a room.  It seems like most LED applications, especially budget applications, are still simply trying to replace a conventional bulb with an LED, slapping an LED label on it and selling it as-is.  Higher end products have gotten better, and some of that is trickling down.

I have some of the Phillips LED bulbs in my florescent overhead light in my kitchen.  I bought them when Home Depot was selling them for $10 each.  I have 2 bulbs and they are brighter with better color then any of the florescent options that I tried.  Of course, the ended up costing me more than $10 each because I had to replace the ballast to one that was compatible with the bulbs.  So far though, that is the only LED bulb that was promptly changed back to a conventional or CFL bulb.

I don't remember where I saw it, but someone made a light using a 12" line of the wide angle LEDs all in a row.  Then they took a 1/2" aluminum tube, polished the outside and attached it to the side of the row of LEDs.  The result got pretty good diffusion and was reasonably bright.

[bevans6]

I'm slowly replacing all the bulbs in my house with LED's, and they are high quality, throw a lot of light at 1/10th the power.  My provincial government has a program where they replaced every incandescent bulb with LED's, and that was the start.  Now, when the mini-flourescents fail I put LED bulbs in.  Zero failure rate so far.  I put LED brake lights on the bus five years ago, they are still bright and perfect.  No bad cells.  I'm a big believer in LED's.

[Zephod]

I'm slowly replacing all the bulbs in my house with LED's, and they are high quality, throw a lot of light at 1/10th the power.  My provincial government has a program where they replaced every incandescent bulb with LED's, and that was the start.  Now, when the mini-flourescents fail I put LED bulbs in.  Zero failure rate so far.  I put LED brake lights on the bus five years ago, they are still bright and perfect.  No bad cells.  I'm a big believer in LED's.

Omg. My work bus is 4 years old. Over the last year it's had bad LED clusters. Currently the tail lights are only partly lit. Half those LEDs are dead. I've had the same with both reversing lights and both brake lights. Not so far with the schoolbus flashers though. I would never willingly put LEDs in the place of tried, trusted and true incandescent bulbs.

Household LEDs - I put an $8 LED over the stairwell and it blew in 3 months. I put 4 LED bulbs over the washbasins. One blew the next week. Two more turned into disco strobes after a couple of months. One is still going. The others long since replaced by incandescent.

In terms of household energy saving, these LED and CFL contrivances are a false economy. At most, a light is on for 8 hours a day in the winter. The rest of the day, you're at work or asleep so probably not even 8 hours. Weekends would probably average it out to 8 hours. So say 6 hours a day all year round.

6x365x100 -assuming a 100W bulb and we are talking 190kwh per year. That's at 9c per kWh which is what I last paid, around $19 a year. Seriously guys, mess tyan $20 a year!

Where I live, there are 10 light fixtures. Most are on only briefly. Even assuming $100 a year in lighting, that's not going to break the bank.

Going straight to LEDs which probably consume 5W then we are talking $20 a year in electricity for lighting a whole house.

What everybody in the USA is doing is getting their panties in a wad over trivia. The biggest household energy burners are cooking, air conditioning, water heating, heating and entertainment (TVs use a ton of juice). Lighting barely even registers!

Going back to my $24 electric bill of which less than $10 was actual electricity used, lighting consisted of no lights left on. I used a 17w cfl most of the time when I was in the house. The rest of the time, it was other lights on briefly.

In summer I used no AC. I just removed excess clothing. In winter I put a fan heater in the smallest room. Done!


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[Iceni John]

I wouldn't say that LEDs are a scam.   They are merely a different source of light, and the buyer needs to make the right choice about what will work best in each application.   Each has its benefits and shortcomings  -  I use incandescent, fluorescent, LED and HID for different purposes, and they each do a good job in their own application but would be useless otherwise.   For diffuse lighting LEDs are good, but I agree that they usually cannot be focused well enough for use in a spotlight or vehicle headlight.   As Daniel Stern has explained, merely replacing an incan lamp with a HID or LED will always result in spill and glare, especially if in a reflector light instead of a projector light.   Interestingly I have an adjustable-focus Duracell 1300 flashlight at home that uses a single square LED emitter behind a rudimentary projector lens, and its light output is always a square shape regardless whether it's on tight-beam or wide-beam focus!   I replaced my bus's gauge cluster warning lights' incan bulbs with LEDs, and even with wide-pattern LEDs (I think they have a 135-degree output) they send out only a small circle of light onto the writing instead of the incan bulbs' wide wash of light  -  my blue Retarder light now just says Tard!   I think I'll change back to incan bulbs for all those lights.

What some people don't realize is that LEDs produce heat, just like any semiconductor, so they should always have heatsinks to dissipate their heat.   The high-wattage emitters like the Cree 3W and 5W can get surprisingly hot.   If not, they'll burn out just like any overheated diode or transistor.   I plan on using some LED rope lights to throw a wash of light against the bus's ceiling for ambient lighting, but I'll put them inside some aluminum channel to conduct away some of their heat.

John   

[belfert]

I make decent money so I'm not going to skimp on using electricity when it makes sense to use it.  I'm still using about 1/3 of the electricity that an average household uses.  LED backlit TVs use very little power.  I got my parents an LED backlit 47" TV in 2014 and it uses $8 in electricity a year based on four hours viewing daily.

I installed all LED bulbs in my house in late 2014.  Not a single failure yet.  I bought quality Cree, Philips, and GE bulbs.  The Cree were at least assembled in the USA.  I also paid attention and got the right bulbs that work in enclosed fixtures.  I have had one of the Bargman brake/tail lights on my bus quit, but it was the circuitry, not the LEDs.  The tail light function worked, but not the brake light.  I have had a car with LED tail lights since 2012 and no failures.  I can count on one hand how many cars I have seen with bad LEDs in tail lights.  Auto makers probably buy a little better LEDs as they have to warranty them for at least 36,000 miles.

My plasma TV is like a small heater.  I didn't realize until just this past week how hot it gets and I have had it since 2010.

[Oonrahnjay]

     Gary Throneberry ("Garhawk" on here) showed me the LEDs in his bus.  His bus has a very warm golden wood/honey brown upholstery and carpet/naugahyde color scheme and he has the "warm yellow" LEDs - they look great but my bus is all blue and bluish grey/silver and so I ordered a set of 27 bulbs from RVLeds.com (I think) with a bright blue color.  The halogens would kick up my watt usage almost 200 watts but the LEDs don't register on the meter at all (it's not a very precise meter at those low power draws so I'm not putting a lot on it but the low power usage is obvious).  I love them - I have "middle aged eyes" -- that's my story and I'm sticking to it -- and I need lots of light and those LEDs blast it out. 
      If somebody snuck onto my bus and stole all 27 of them, I'd gladly replace them for twice what the first set cost me.  Gladly.

[eagle19952]

I ahve had very good luck price success durability and warranty replacement of ONE bulb from this outfit. i have bought mostly 110v.
and they don't take a long time to get.
warm white dimmable etc.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/sanny-technology/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=

[windtrader]

Switching to LED lighting is on the high on the discretionary bus projects list. Since boondocking is the main mode for us, optimizing energy use helps a lot. Currently sizing solar panels to cover daytime and evening use without having to use the genset for charging the batteries on typically sunny days. Expect to need to gen on cloudy and raining days.

BTW - LED Tv use very little energy. Just put in a 32" Samsung LED and it draws 14 watts.