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Mostly using CCFLs and have a few multi-bulb installations(which rarely get used) which still have some old incadescent bulbs in them(!).
Want to replace a number of them with LEDs,but I am a bit wary of getting cheaper brands in case they break quicker especially as they are still about £2~£3 a pop,and also whether they will take longer to warm up. So what are some good and reliable brands of bulbs?
Thinking Phillips,Osram and Sylvania?
I switched out all my CCFL bulbs and incandescent spots for LEDs not that long ago. Philips, Osram and GE are pretty solid (at least, will usually give you a replacement no questions asked), but to be honest I mostly went with Wilko and Wickes own brands and haven't had a problem. Warm up is much quicker than CCFL.
Some of the installations don't get use that much - I wonder if it would be better to get some of the more expensive ones for the frequently used installations,and the rest an have cheapo ones?Quote:
Originally Posted by kalniel
Just beware if you are using Dimmers. Even dimmer compatible LED's on an LED compatible dimmer don't necessarily work without annoying flickering. There are load ratings to consider as well.
Could do, but then you've got to weigh up if cheapo ones would suffer from not being used in terms of corrosion etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
We're well protected with consumer rights, so I'd just go cheap and keep your receipt.
TBF I always went with decentish brands of CCFLs,etc but shopping for LED bulbs around its only a £1 or a £1.50 difference anyway!Quote:
Originally Posted by kalniel
I tend to just get the supermarket ones. I've tried all sorts of brands, and not found expensive ones any better. For the kitchen, the cheap Tesco 12V spots work fine whereas everyone else's needs special transformers that would be horribly expensive to replace, so cheap Tesco ones it is.
I think both Tesco and Sainsburys have a choice now of warm or cold colour temperatures btw, but you have to dig around the shelves if you don't want the standard yellowish light ones.
CCFL bulbs you needed to buy good ones, else they take minutes to start up and the light quality is horrible. LEDs all seem to just work instantly,
I've got cheap screwfix ones I picked up 4 for £5 about 6 years ago still going strong. The only LEDs I've had pack up are little ones on our 3 light levels bedside lamp (You have to turn it on by touch - it then gets brighter for every touch then turns off on 4th touch - The lights just buzz and flicker on settings 1 to 2, work fine on setting 3 but always fail after about 2 years - The way they chop the mains seems to kill the capacitors used to regulate the voltage in the bulbs. I'd replace the lamp but its a wedding present - £2 a bulb that does ~2 years is no big issue!).
Personally I really like the IKEA bulbs - cheapish but decent quality although you do need the bayonet to ES adaptors though.
I got a load from Screwfix, some were dimmable and they worked on the dimmer without flickering. The only place I have ever had problems with is The Range, 3 out of 4 LED bulbs went within 6 months
Wish we could get these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4&
Seems the ones we get here actually use less LED filaments than what is ideal,so they need to run at the edge of the effiency range which gets them hot. So the backend electronics will fail especially if you go too high in wattage. But the "Dubai" lamps quadrupling the filaments,so they last longer,run cooler and are more efficient.
If they are all going to be like that,maybe going OTT on expensive ones is probably not worth it then!
I replaced all mine at the last place I lived at. I went with a mixture of Ikea & Homebases TCP
Ikea have a really good range and you can see the exact type of light in terms of brightness and colour that you will get if you go into store. Which I found invaluable, preferring a softer light to harsh whiter lights.
Another reason for Ikea was they had some 0.9w bulbs, my housemate worked night shifts and with the huge gap at the bottom of my bedroom door the hallway light used to shine in and wake me up. Once I got these bulbs it was perfect. We could also leave them on without feeling guilty, being 3 lights was still less than 3W.
I was about to recommend Clas Ohlson as well, but looks like they went bust at some point, they had a brilliant light display like Ikea, think I got a couple from there once.
The way I see LED is, they are a bit more expensive, but they do last a hell of a lot longer. They have the potential of a better second hand value as well, so if you want to try alternate bulbs in the future you would still get some money back. I've yet to have an LED bulb go on me.
I've yet to see any difference between cheap & premium brands and would recommend going on the type of brightness and colour you want vs what brand it is.
I DON'T recommend these bulbs as they didn't seem to last.
I'd definitely recommend avoiding the Energizer ones you can buy in supermarkets (2-packs if I recall correctly) too, they didn't last long for me either.
I believe I had the same problem with a supermarket-branded set of bulbs before that too.
I haven't had my current set of bulbs for a full year yet, but so far they seem to be going strong and I'm optimistic they'll last due to being Philips ones.
I don't use any type of dimming though, so I can't comment on that if it's part of your use case.
Only the first one I mentioned was a multi-bulb installation though, so the rest may not be useful information for your particular case.
I have switched almost all incandescents and Cfl for LED. The exceptions are the rarely used bulbs like cupboard under stairs and boiler room, which get about an hour a month, if that.
Initially I had cheap bulbs from Screwfix. Yet to have one fail. Lounge lights went to wifi-controlled dimmable about 10 years ago. Mostly still work, though one or two I suspect have individual blown LEDs as they aren't as bright as they were. But those, while pretty good, are hard or mpossible to get now (cheap versions might be available but those were about £20/bulb, but saved buying a new expensive dimmer switch).
The latest 8 or 10 have been Phillips Hue 'smart' bulbs. Opinion? Good but pricey. But I wanted voice control in certain areas. About 2 years in, no issues and no failures.
Oh, one of those £20 wifi (with a little remote, not 'smart) was DOA so if you buy pricey bulbs .... check 'em all on arrival. Guess who didn't? :( Grrr.
I\'ve got a couple of rooms with dimmers in, I\'ve found that all LED bulbs sold as dimmable work But you have to invest in a decent brand "trailing edge" dimmer switch.
Varilights V-Pro programmable ones are about £16 each from screwfix but do the job very well. Cheaper ones flickered too much or didn\'t work at all.
I'm sure the Reading branch was still open last time I passed it. Either that or it's longer ago than I thought walking down Broad Street!Quote:
Originally Posted by AGTDenton
You have to have a general understanding of how LED's work, compared to incadescent / halogen. LED bulbs have a "trip" voltage, whereby they don't turn on until a specific voltage value, after which they're very voltage sensitive - so a stable voltage is essential to the lifespan of the bulb. Dimmable LED are just strobing (turning on/off at high frequency), due to the properties I outlined above - they cannot be "turned down" in a linear fashion like traditional incandescent / halogen bulbs.
LED are also very temperature sensitvie, so you'll see bigger bulbs with metal heatsinks on the back to dissipate the heat. Running hotter than recommended temperatures actually reduces the resistence in the circuit and makes the LED brighter at a given voltage - but this is due to the higher current running through the diode and will reduce the lifespan of the bulb. Ergo - the inbuilt power circuitary needs to keep the voltage steady, and the temperatures in check.
Long periods without both of these will lead to premature failure or colour degradation.
LED are also instant on, and have a larger CRI value than CCFL (high CRI value - full colour range across then entire visible range of the electro-magnetic spectrum, ergo, closer to natural daylight effect and more pleasing to be in). You know when you go into a room with CCFL bulbs, and it's bright, but somehow not pleasant - that's a low CRI value.
As a general rule I tend to buy Philips bulbs, they have a good build quality, and it's something you tend to buy once and don't need to replace for years - my main lights in various rooms in the house are 20W Philips LED - equivalent to 120W incandescent if I remember correctly - the colour is pleasing, bright, and it's still working exactly as it was at the point of install 6 years ago.
I find the 6W bright enough. I must have horrendous eyesQuote:
Originally Posted by cptwhite_uk
I set myself a target of no more than 6
There was an incandescent 120W bulb when I moved into my previous place, was as strong as looking at the sun.
I shouldperhaps have clarified. The "expensive dimmer" wa an old (c.1988) dual-gang dimmer for incandescents. But it was working rather weirdly. As I dimmed, ower usage dropped (as expected) up to a point but then went up. Worse though, if I clicked it to turn it the lights (two 60w incandescents per gang) it somwhow drew more power turned off than on, but low. So, it was drawing about 10w per bulb, 24/7 even while lights were "off". Something was well screwed in there. A replacement switch was about £50 in those days, so I replaced the dimmer with simle dual-gang on/off, and put in wifi bulbs with a remote each for me and wife. When they finally pack up, I guess smart bulbs will go in, instead, not least 'cos they seem to have killed off the market for the other type utterly.Quote:
Originally Posted by spacein_vader
@cpt_white .... What my appear to be doing, logically if not physically, is that there seem to be 10 'dim' levels. It seems like there are 10 banks of LEDs, and if you dim by one level, one bank switches off.
I'm no LED expert, but I've never seen an LED that could 'dim' so sure, I guess it either has to be a rapidly switching on-off and the timing of the off bit lengthens as you dim, but I'd have thought that was likely to result in flicker. Or, it's using that "10 banks" principle, nd dimming just turns more banks off, but the ones that are on are on all the time.
Turning LED bulbs off seems to result in a tiny level of continuous power draw. I assume something has to be monitoring a wifi circuit for the 'on' signal, but it's nowhere near the rather substantial draw that antique '80s dimmer used when it should have been using 0.0W. Turning my smart LEDs off at the wall switch (as opposed to via wifi) and they do consume zero power, as I would expect.
But that tiny power draw, 24/7 if wifi is enabled, is one reason (the other being standard LEDs are far cheaper than smart ones) that I have way more non-smart than smart. Also, of course, unlike smart bulbs, nobody can data track when bulbs are on or off if they are dumb bulbs with a physical switch.
The data aspect of smart bulbs does concern me a bit (it being a personal hobby horse) but, it's one of those areas where privacy comes second (for me) to functionality. In many ways, I'd still rather have the little remotes than use a smartphone/Alexa for lighting but, I just can't get the goods ones (and haven't been able to for several years now).
Oh dimming can be done, but it involves some pretty nasty analogue current control which would be tricky to implement and would generate heat which is the enemy in things like LED bulbs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen999
Instant on really is instant with LEDs, down in the microsecond region easily. So if you want to dim an LED you just PWM drive it, usually at about 1KHz so way above the 60Hz that people can see as a flicker. So 10% brightness will have the LED on for 0.1ms and off for 0,9ms. You can do that easily with a microcontroller (cheap) and power switching FET (cheap), which usually have a hardware timer circuit where even a cheap 8 bit timer can do 256 level PWM. Those 256 levels will be far from linear to the eye, so there might well be a 10 entry table to map perceived brightness to PWM values.
It seems odd that digital electronics has got to the point where the cheapest and best way to drive an LED is to give it more computing power by far than the first desktop computer I had (a TRS-80 clone with 1.79MHz Z80) but that is where we have been for many years now.
The WiFi LED bulbs, they will contain an ESP32 chip to monitor the WiFi or Bluetooth. Those have to be always running, and are a 32 bit dual core 160MHz or faster 32 bit controller. I used to play Quake on something slower than that, but complete with the radio circuitry they are about a quid.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32826540261.html
I'm guessing the stepping in brightness Saracen appears to perceive, is more likely due to stepping of the digital signal for the time on/off cycles, which is being interpreted as a single LED cell switching off as you adjust the dimmer. That would probably make sense.
Interesting, DwU. Very. That all makes sense. I guess I'd never really given it much thought especially into the relationship between how fast we can get the electronics to drive LED switching, compared to our eye (or brain) to perceive it. But ultimately it's the same trick as everything from a pack of cartoon 'cards' to running still video framestoo fast for us to detect it, leaving the mental impression of motion when there isn't really.
As for "dimming", it seems the issue is one of definition.
Are those individual LEDs 'dimming' in the snse that lower power into an incandscent dims? As I understand it, no. They're either on or off. owt in-between.
But .... if you look at that LED 'bulb' (which really isn't a good description of it) as a system, then the output of that system as a whole, rather than individual LEDs, then that light output cold 'dim'.
An analogy might be my lounge. Two ceiling light fittings, each with two 'bulbs', and a few wall lights. With incandescent bulbs, I used go vary the light output of a single bulb's filament by varying the dimmer. The light in the system, i.e. the lounge, went up and down. I could somewhat do the same thing with incandesants without a dimmer by switching individual filaments on and off, varying the light level in the lounge as a whole.
And if I could have switched those incandesnts on and off fast enough I could have varied the overall effect much like an LED bulb does. In theory. In practice, of course, it's a total non-starter not only 'cos no way could I switch them all anywhere near fast enough, but the sheer physics of heating and cooling the filaments couldn't be done that fast. Or anything near.
TRS-80? That takes me back. I never owned one but I used one (well, two, IIRC) at work a fair bit. Genuine Tandy ones not clones, and again IIRC, a Mk.3 then a Mk.4. Other than a TI 'programmable' calculator (which was pretty damn sophiticated for the early '70's) my first actual computer was an Apple II (Europlus), which was a 6502. But .... I had an optional plug-in board with a Z80 chip on it, because I wanted to run CP/M for a project.
When I think of how sophisticated that as for those days (late 70's, early 80's) .... most people could probably barely spell 'computer' never mind have one at home) andd you then compare to the power of modern computers .... I mean, it's mind-boggling how much we could do even then, then you scale up to modern graphics, even 'just' for games, voice recognitionneeding just a phone or smart speaker, end to end encryption, medical advances, materials technology .... and so on. I mean, here's me thinking about a £400 3D printer (Prusa Mini Plus) and what it can do, and it's FAR from the cheapest 3D printer out there and I'm years late to that party, yet it's capability could have been sheer sci-fi back in the '70s.
All in barely 50 years.
What will the world look like in another 50? Or 500? If we haven't blown ourselves to kingdom come in the meantime.
I remember, a few years ago now, visiting Thomas Edison's home in Key West, and seeing what (according to claims) were some of his original hand-made incandescent bulbs still working (never switched off or on apparently, and running pretty low power). Before that, no electrical lighting. And now compare that to the nature of the LED 'bulbs' we are talking about here.
We live in interesting (and fast-moving) times.
A conventional dimmer should switch on both halves of a mains cycle, so 100 times per second for us. That gets smoothed out by the thermal inertia of the strip of tungsten in a filament bulb, but will still be a rapidly changing light level so also partly by our eyes (specially if it is a halogen bulb).Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen999
But essentially, yes I would say the LED is dimmed. The number of photons hitting your eye in a given millisecond will be the same whether you are looking at a slightly colder than expected strip of tungsten or a pulse width modulated LED. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
Got a pair of these for a 4 spot Chandelier unit to replace 4 old candle incadescents:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08K3BLL5Y/
Very bright!
I'm trying to do the same at home here, as bulbs go I'm looking to replace them with LED bulbs. The annoying this is that the previous owner of our house had fitted halogens in the majority of the rooms. Thus far I've found the LED bulbs we want to use aren't happy with the supplied and fitted transformer for the halogens. Our electrician can't find all the transformers either as they have been stuff in the ceiling in such a way we will have to make large holes.
We're using 6 watt ones I think and they are nice and bright. Looking forward to getting rid of my florescent strip lights I've got here in the garage not only do they give me a head ache I don't think they are very cheap to run.
I have replaced all my bulbs with LED equivalents from Screwfix, inside and outside. Most have lasted 3 plus years and very happy with them. Clas Olsen still open in Reading last Thursday.
I'm a bit late to the thread but in case it's still useful, I find the Diall branded ones from B&Q decent, I generally get the 10.5W ones. I've tried a few brands (including some big names) and am yet to find anything consistently better overall. YMMV, naturally.
I'm very sensitive to the stroboscopic effect you get from cheap bulbs but have never detected it with this brand. Colour temperature/CRI are also decent enough from the ones I've used.
The output angle, while I forget the exact number, seems decent too - many brands seem to be limited to about 180 degrees which leaves a dark patch above them on the ceiling which makes the whole room look gloomy.
I also got a multipack of 11W Philips ones from Amazon which are generally fine, but a few out of the pack have a noticeable buzz/hum, some worse than others. I didn't notice beforehand but a few reviews on Amazon mention it too, so it's not just me. Not really an issue for use in e.g. the bathroom, but can be annoying in quiet rooms.
I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but electric lighting existed long before Edison commercialised a product, largely building on Joseph Swan's design. Humphrey Davey's arc lamps existed from the early 1800's, and the fluorescent lamps from the mid 1800's.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saracen999
The incandescent lamp most of us know was a very different design again, a tungsten filament design by Just and Hanaman, produced by Tungsram (later Osram).
And many other types and iterations of lighting in between and since, with credit due to a lot of people, including the Nobel-prize winning invention of the blue LED (allowing the production of white LEDs) by Isamu Akasaki. It's an area where the perception of the history is quite far removed from the actual history, and one name in particular seems to get a lot more credit than his fair share.