LED Bulbs

[Jrrarglblarg]

.sod your "freedom": it's just selfishness

only Ukians say crap like this. Sour grapes? Stockholm Syndrome? I don't get it.

 

[MikeG]

only Ukians say crap like this. Sour grapes? Stockholm Syndrome? I don't get it.

Only USAians use "freedom" as an excuse for not doing the right thing. Now, is that enough smearing on the grounds of country-of-residence? Could we instead talk about substance?

 

[BenBurch]

Yes, fair point, well made. However, it isn't quite as straight forward as that.

If you waste renewables, you make less of them available to those who don't have such access to renewables, and who are burning fossil fuels. That is most of the population of the developed world at the moment. Given that renewable sources of electricity are relatively scarce at the moment it strikes me as obvious that a country with plenty of spare capacity because of, say, lots of hydro-electric resources, has the chance to export that spare capacity to a neighbour, thus reducing the neighbour's reliance on fossil fuel. But only if they haven't squandered the resource by expanding demand to meet supply within their own borders.

Nonsense.

First, in order to buy wind power, I pay a premium price. This makes it attractive to supply more wind power, and indeed wind farms are springing up all over this region.

Second, nothing gets used up when you use wind power. There will be more wind blowing tomorrow no matter how much of it I use today. Ditto for the sun. Not true of hydro, however, as that is a finite and exhaustible resource.

 

[PossumPie]

Only USAians use "freedom" as an excuse for not doing the right thing. Now, is that enough smearing on the grounds of country-of-residence? Could we instead talk about substance?

Your previous posts about people choosing poor energy choices and this one about freedom are ridiculous. The bottom line is cost. The builder who built my home and I worked hard to come up with the most energy efficient house I could afford. Why would anyone want to waste money on energy each month? I resent being legislated into doing what YOU think is right. Hitler did this, I'm sure he believed he was correct, so did Stalin, et al. JUST because the politician of the week believes some policy or energy mandate looks good doesn't mean that I should be FORCED to adopt it. Show me it is effective and doesn't kill bats, birds, or do some other horrible side effect no one anticipated, and I'll gladly accept it. My country was built on Freedom. That means the ability to choose. Put a tax on inefficiency if you wish, but let me choose. The hypocrisy comes when I pay $20,000 for an "energy efficient " car with a bunch of environmental b.s. on it, and the dump truck next to me is belching out black smoke so thick I can't see. It is the pompous ass who sits in his inefficient apartment building that leaves all its lights on all night and complains about me in my energy efficient house. Al Gore the notorious politician who championed "Green" has a house that uses 7 times as much energy as mine. I hate hypocrisy. Make clean and green and energy efficiency attractive, and everyone will join. Mandate it and I'll go burn a few tires in my backyard.

 

[MikeG]

........<Rant snipped>.......

This is the sort of unthinking lunacy that we're up against. Some people have an overblown sense of their rights, and no sense whatsoever of any obligations, and the only way to move the world on from cave-man attitudes like that is to tell them they have to do things differently. There are minimum standards in all sorts of areas of life, and I can see no good reason at all why there shouldn't be minimum standards of energy efficiency for all new-build properties.

 

[MikeG]

Nonsense............ nothing gets used up when you use wind power. There will be more wind blowing tomorrow no matter how much of it I use today. Ditto for the sun. Not true of hydro, however, as that is a finite and exhaustible resource.

This paragraph suggest that you didn't read the post you are responding to. Have another look, perhaps, and see if you can see where you went wrong.

 

[Pulvinar]

Nonsense.

First, in order to buy wind power, I pay a premium price. This makes it attractive to supply more wind power, and indeed wind farms are springing up all over this region.

Second, nothing gets used up when you use wind power. There will be more wind blowing tomorrow no matter how much of it I use today. Ditto for the sun. Not true of hydro, however, as that is a finite and exhaustible resource.

Assuming you're being serious here… wind power is no more or less limited than hydro, as they both derive from solar energy. Wind is just currently much farther down on its "cost-effectiveness" curve.

If wind were truly inexhaustible you could put any number of turbines in the same exact location and they'd each return as much energy as the first, but you can't. That separate space each one occupies is what's being used up.
The more cost-effective spaces are being used up first, same as was done with hydro. Hydro also has many untapped sites left, but they aren't (yet) cost-effective.

 

[BenBurch]

Don't you understand even the basics of how it works? Hydro has a reservoir. And you can deplete it. Happens in Seattle every drought. And deficits carry over year-to-year.

Wind truly is inexhaustible. (At least while the sun lasts.) We tap the first hundred feet near the ground, but the atmosphere has more energy in it that it would be possible for humans to ever use.

 

[MikeG]

Don't you understand even the basics of how it works? Hydro has a reservoir. And you can deplete it. Happens in Seattle every drought. And deficits carry over year-to-year.

Wind truly is inexhaustible. (At least while the sun lasts.) We tap the first hundred feet near the ground, but the atmosphere has more energy in it that it would be possible for humans to ever use.

If you are addressing me (it is impossible to tell), then you have entirely missed the point. Let me see if I can make it simple.

The post of mine you are responding to was written in response to someone saying that energy conservation was less necessary in a region where all the electricity was generated using renewables. I said that was a fair point, but if that region neighboured somewhere which was still using fossil fuel (a circumstance which covers every country with a surfeit of renewables), then there was a choice between wasting the clean energy within their borders, or exporting it to their neighbour, and thus reducing their neighbour's consumption of fossil fuel.

If you don't understand that simple concept, or you have any comments on what I actually said (rather than what you think I am talking about), then please feel free to say. But continuing to bang on about something utterly removed from the conversation, as though you are somehow enlightening anyone on how wind generation works, isn't actually moving this thread forward.

 

[Pulvinar]

If you are addressing me (it is impossible to tell),

I believe it was meant for me.

Don't you understand even the basics of how it works? Hydro has a reservoir. And you can deplete it. Happens in Seattle every drought. And deficits carry over year-to-year.

Wind truly is inexhaustible. (At least while the sun lasts.) We tap the first hundred feet near the ground, but the atmosphere has more energy in it that it would be possible for humans to ever use.

I do understand, but I'm looking at the bigger picture: wind only *appears* inexhaustible because we've only begun to tap it. Hydro looked the same way once. Hydro is actually still far from being exhausted, it's just that the remaining sites aren't cost-effective to take advantage of, usually because they're too remote. Hydro *capacity* is ultimately limited, but reservoirs will always fill up again after droughts, so in that sense it's as inexhaustible as wind. When the Sun dies, they'll both end.

 

[Pulvinar]

dup.

 

[BenBurch]

I'm not interested in any semantic distinctions without differences here.

Back to the topic of LED lamps; We are seeing something else made possible by them now; Urban indoor hydroponic farms. These had been proposes and were for limited uses profitable using HPD lamps, but LED technology is revolutionizing this.

We are seeing this both in the commercial sector and in the illegal sector as both indoor lettuce and marijuana cultivation are being converted at a rapid pace. For the latter, the ability to have utility bills that set off no alarms with Law Enforcement, and growing areas that are not IR-shiny make LEDs the obvious choice.

 

[Delvo]

Very odd...

I just tried replacing some functional CFL bulbs with new CFL bulbs of the same size and wattage, for the difference in color temperature. It worked fine in all but one socket. That socket will not light up any of the new higher-color-temperature ones. If I put the old one back in, it still works. The new ones all work in other sockets. What's going on with that one socket?

In the "simple things first" department (and assuming that there is no dimmer or other electronics in the pertinent fixture), I'd look at the socket and see if the center post is squashed down or damaged. Sometimes the center point on a new bulb will be just a gnat's-eyebrow shorter, and not hit well.

That was it. The new bulb's metal tip is a fraction of a millimeter flatter. I screwed in an adapter I already had sitting around, the kind with a light bulb socket on the end and a couple of standard power plugs on the sides, and it works and lights up the new bulb.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I'm not interested in any semantic distinctions without differences here.

Back to the topic of LED lamps; We are seeing something else made possible by them now; Urban indoor hydroponic farms. These had been proposes and were for limited uses profitable using HPD lamps, but LED technology is revolutionizing this.

We are seeing this both in the commercial sector and in the illegal sector as both indoor lettuce and marijuana cultivation are being converted at a rapid pace. For the latter, the ability to have utility bills that set off no alarms with Law Enforcement, and growing areas that are not IR-shiny make LEDs the obvious choice.

I am considering using white (full spectrum) LEDs as "grow lights" for seed propagation next spring and googled the subject. There seems to be pretty major disagreement about whether the various red / blue LED combinations work well or indeed at all.
My thinking was really to use them as low power consumption heaters (and of course light sources) for a few seed trays contained in an insulated plastic tent lined with aluminium foil, which will itself be in an unheated, but weatherproof shed. Simply keeping the soil and seeds brightly lit and a few degrees above ambient seems worth a try. This could be done with low power tungsten of course, but trying maybe 2 x 3W LEDs seems like a pretty cheap experiment. (Around 1 Kilowatt hour / week by my reckoning).

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

I think you would still want some incandescent lites for heating the trays, even a small night-light or a string of quarter watt twinkie lights.

In colorado we get snow. Sometimes it blows in sideways and covers the traffic lights. With incandescent bulbs the red light at least would get warm enough to melt off the snow, but in a lot of towns they've been replaced with led units. They don't get hot enough and the snow stays clogged in the hood so you sometimes have to guess and hope what the lights are doing.

 

[Delvo]

Weird hood design; I've never understood why they extend it all the way around to where it's below the light in the first place. Its use is to put the light emitter in a shadow from the sun, and the sun is never below. That bottom section of the hood doesn't seem to accomplish anything but snow collection.

And something's wrong with infrastructure when it ends up sending enough energy to heat up a zillion separate little heat sources all over the place like that.

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

I suppose. My point was in response to soapy Sam, in reference to combining the efficiency of LED lights for low current grow lights with the heat created by low power tungstens that are terrible for starting seeds by themselves.

I've seen setups for starting seeds using cheap thrift store fish tank hoods with expensive fluorescent tube combined with twinkies wrapped around and between the seed trays to keep the roots warm, so if LED lights with decent plant spectrum are on the market I think they could be used in a combo system for best effect and efficiency of each type.

 

[Christian Klippel]

I was wondering if you could point to some sources for elaborating on the bolded above.

Sorry for the late reply, somehow i completely forgot about this thread.

I am mostly refering to LED strips and panels.

Some examples for strips (it's a German site, but should give you the idea):

Simple white casing

In aluminium profile

As flexible self-adhesive strip

Such strips can be used in many ways. You can also get aluminium profiles especially for LED usage, that can take up standard flexible strips. They are nice for more indirect lighting purposes: put them high up on the furniture, pointing to the ceiling or wall. But they can be used for more direct lighting as well, of course.

Then there are LED panels. Those are basically tiles with an aluminium frame, the whole thing usually about only 10-12mm thick.

Here are some sqaure panels on eBay in various sizes

And here are smaller ones in sqaure and round to install for example in dry-walls, ceilings etc.

Those panels are just the first results on eBay that i found. With a little searching you can get them cheaper as well. I use such panels above my workplace. Made a thin wooden frame, fixed to the ceiling in some distance using steel wire (Gripple).

Then there are floodlights, ridiculously cheap from China, like these here, 5 pcs. for about 29 Euros shipped. You can get them up to 100 watts. Of course, son't expect wonders from these cheapos. But they work sufficently well, i have a bunch of them in the "kitchen" here.

Don't be worried that for most strips and panels it says "not dimmable". This is not exactly true. Almost always they use an external power supply, while the LED's themselves are driven by a fixed voltage (for most strips and larger panels, they have current limiting resistors built in) or by constant-current supplies (often found with those smaller panels or floodlights). However, it's just a case of using a suitable power supply to get them dimmable, since, after all, it is just the supply that has to be dimmable.

A lot of creative stuff can be done with such strips and panels, since they are quite flat and thus require little space. Since they don't produce much, if any, heat either, they can be placed virtually everywhere. There is a difference between having a bunch of single bulbs in some fixture, or having literally a square meter or more of flat surface giving of the light, as can be done with such panels.

Greetings,

Chris

ETA: If you are up to it, you can assemble long strings made out of 3mm or 5mm diameter LED's and put that in the floor, for example between floor tiles or laminate. That can be used as some kind of "runway light", making a nice effect visually, plus, you can have the main lights all off and still see where you go. I have seen such strings ready-made in the past, but can't find them on a quick search.

 

[Christian Klippel]

Surely it is the electronics rather than the LEDs that are failing. I assume they are multi-LED bulbs, so if LEDs were failing a whole bulb would not fail at once. I suspect that in specifying lifetime they are only considering LED life and pairing that with cheap DC conversion that is not well tested.

Unfortunately, it is usually the exact opposite wrt. failure. Thing is, LED's need a constant current, not a constant voltage. Once you string up multilpe LED's, and then run the strings in parallel (a common topology in this case), if one LED in one string fails, the remaining strings get more current pumped into it, since the CC supply will keep delivering the same current. This leads to the LED die in the remaining LED's heating up and failing.

Conversely, if you have only a single string, a single LED failure will make the remaining LED's go out as well.

But yes, usually it is the cheap driver electronics that is the root cause for the problem. Especially in "regular" LED bulbs meant to replace incadescent lamps in common fixtures. The space in there is just too small to allow for good heat management, leading to early failure.

Greetings,

Chris