Technology

Tell that to the bar I was at last night in Palermo. They had a string of festoon lights going down the laneway and every one of them was incandescent. I noticed the same in Taormina. In fact, Italy seems pretty far behind the rest of the EU when it comes to environmental concerns.....but that's for another thread.

I think the main issue with initial Led bulbs was their color was wrong. Incandescent bulbs emit light at 2700K, a nice warm white. Early LEDs emitted light at more like 5000K or there abouts, which is a really white light. Same with CFLs. Elderly people didn't like that at all. Honestly it wasn't just them, lots of people hated them for their too white of light.

Today you can get LEDs that are 2700K and/or are adjustable to what ever color you want.

Also it became a political issue as all things should be somehow

The most amazing thing to me - I’ve been using leds for 10+ years, and I think I’ve had to replace one or two of them. It is a wonder that prices can come down with demand dwindling so much.

If you still have a fridge or oven that takes incandescent bulbs, isn't it better to replace the bulb than the fridge? If the point is minimal environmental impact then I think that makes sense.

Some of these bulbs might be difficult to find in LED and there might be other considerations like shape, heat, dimmer compatibility, etc.. Replacing fixtures could represent a significant burden in these cases and thought there are many exceptions listed they likely represent a small percentage of overall usage.

This article is dogshit, and those are not the current exemptions. DOE revised the definition of a general service lamp on 2022 to include the majority of reflectors. The rest have miniscule sales and have technical limitations that make LED replacements difficult. It's not a lot of exemptions. When was the last time you bought a left hand thread or a colored incandescent lamp?

Is your point we should not be taking steps to decrease electricity usage because this step by itself doesn't fix the entire problem?

Left handed bulbs are definitely a thing. They're mostly used for two reasons:

1. You don't want people stealing your light bulbs. Instead of building a ton of secured housing for regular bulbs, you just buy ones people don't want to steal since their home appliances aren't threaded the same.
2. You need a very specific type of bulb, and don't want some idiot putting the wrong type in.

Can’t wait for this to be the hot button issue in certain presidential campaigns this cycle.

I had always used incandescent bulbs in practicals but now there are LED bulbs made specifically for film sets. Household LED bulbs are usually a mess on camera with ugly color spikes and/or flickering.

I've been lighting almost exclusively with LED these days aside from some HMI's, but even those are starting to get LED competition, at least for smaller ones.

Because they're driven entirely by emotion, not rationality. They were told to be angry about it, so they are. Plus, Biden or something.

I'm curious about what fixtures your led light bulbs were in.

Old incandescent lights worked great at high heat levels, so a typical boob light fixture that kept the heat in would be fine for an incandescent. Put an LED light in there, and it can still heat up beyond design capacity and might not get enough ventilation and age prematurely.

The only leds that failed for me were inside a fixture meant for incandescent lights. All our open bulbs or specially designed for led fixtures have been going strong for half a decade or more.

This hasn't been my experience at all, I replaced most of the bulbs in my house with LEDs a couple years ago and I don't think I've had to replace a single one since. When they were all incandescent, I was regularly replacing burned out bulbs. Check which brand you're buying, you're probably buying crap which is why you're getting crap. I've found Phillips bulbs work great and are long lasting, I have some that've been in a fixture for 5 years now with no issue

I don't know what kind of crap LED light bulbs you get in the US but here in Europe to to get a CE mark (required to be able to import them into the EU) a model has to have less than 5% failure rate within (if I remember it correctly) the first year, last 10,000h at least (and have been tested for it, which is quite funny because the test requires having the thing always on for months), turn on within a second, lose (due to burn-in) less than a few percent (forgot the number) brightness within the first 6 months and a bunch of other requirements including stuff like color fidelity.

About a decade ago I actually looked into starting a business importing those things from China and still tody have several samples from back then still working fine (and that's also why I know the CE mark requirements for LED light bulbs).

More in general I've been using LED lamps for even longer and even back in the day when they were more expensive those things paid for themselves in lower power costs, and often do so quite fast (a couple of months) when used to replace incandescents, plus the rate of failures is now pretty low.

(When I first replaced all my lightbulbs with LEDs, way back when they weren't even as efficient as now, the fall in the electricity bill was very noticeable)

Oh, and the price of those things at the factory has been less than $1 for ages, so stores trying to sell those for more than $2 have huge markups and you're better of avoiding those places and getting them from hardware stores and similar (or just buy online).