When moving from CFLs to LED bulbs...

[Jeff7]

Interestingly, I was a job once, and the project manager wanted a couple wire flags to use as diving rods to find electric. I was laughing at him, but gave him the wire flags. I was walking with him as he walked over the lines, and the wires crossed. He gave them to me, and I got the same result. It's something I've been meaning to try replicating, but never really got to it.

Even if it works, it's just an interesting novelty. To cover your ass, you need a service to come and locate them. You then have someone to point to when you hit a utility.

If anyone can prove that divining rods work, there's $1M waiting for you. The prize has been waiting for 50 years.

 

[BoomerD]

I can't PROVE that they work...bit I've seen it with my own eyes. When I worked for the electric/irrigation utility, there were a couple of guys who could find buried pipelines and electrical cables with "bent wires."

 

[SparkyJJO]

LED bulbs can be hit or miss. I bought a 2-pack from Home Depot for $5...they bulbs take several minutes to "warm up" to full brightness...however, I got some Phillips "Slim-Style" bulbs for $1.97 (after instant utility rebate) that work great.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Philips-...ED-Light-Bulb-E-452978/204730356?N=5yc1vZbm79
(your price may be considerably higher than what it shows me.)

LEDs don't have any noticeable "warm up" time. Of the three types of bulbs (incandescent, CFL, and LED), LED is the fastest and appears almost instant. Incandescent takes a second to reach brightness, and CFL has a noticeably long warm-up time to reach full brightness.

Car tail lights are a perfect example of incandescent vs LED - the LED 3rd brake light that many cars use is on (and off) slightly before the regular bulb brake lights turn on and off.

BTW, CFL is almost totally useless for outdoor lights in the winter. They don't like the cold and can take a few minutes to get any real light out of... and by then the light is back off.

 

[who?]

LEDs will light up in the cold but they don't produce any heat so they don't melt the snow off of the traffic signals.

 

[Jeff7]

I can't PROVE that they work...bit I've seen it with my own eyes. When I worked for the electric/irrigation utility, there were a couple of guys who could find buried pipelines and electrical cables with "bent wires."

Except that they can also allegedly find buried treasure, bodies, empty graves, ancient walls, large stones, buried buildings, and water. Basically "whatever you're looking for" is what they are claimed to find. But none of these expert dowsers seem to want a million dollars.

LEDs will light up in the cold but they don't produce any heat so they don't melt the snow off of the traffic signals.

They do indeed produce heat. Just not very much of it.
Relative to the amount of energy pushed into the devices:
- Incandescent lights are electric heaters that happen to throw out a tiny bit of light. It's about as efficient a solution as warming up your car so you can cook bacon on the engine block. Lightbulbs just happen to be a lot cheaper and easier to make.
- LEDs are semiconductors that also produce a lot of heat and throw out more light per watt.

A lightbulb runs normally with the filament at a few thousand degrees.
But an LED emitter doesn't like getting too much hotter than boiling; if it stays hot like that for too long, its useful life will diminish. Since you can push a lot of watts through a tiny area of emitter die, proper internal heatsinking is important, and that's one place where some manufacturers will skimp.



Sorry, I just try to dispel the myth that "LEDs don't produce heat." Trust me, they get hot. I have some 37W emitter arrays in my livingroom. That's 37W of power consumption, not 37W incandescent-equivalent output.
Those things would quickly cook themselves to death without adequate heatsinking.

 

[lxskllr]

Except that they can also allegedly find buried treasure, bodies, empty graves, ancient walls, large stones, buried buildings, and water. Basically "whatever you're looking for" is what they are claimed to find. But none of these expert dowsers seem to want a million dollars.

A guy I work with's father dowsed for water. The guy in question isn't the most reliable source, but he said his father never hit a bad hole. The father was contacted once by someone that wanted him to find missing people, but it didn't work out.

I mention this cause I can think of a couple ways dowsing for water or underground electric could be plausible. Finding 'stuff' not so much. I can't think of any way that doesn't involve magic.

 

[Imp]

LEDs will light up in the cold but they don't produce any heat so they don't melt the snow off of the traffic signals.

They do... just not as much. I've lightly burned my hands on LED bulbs that were barely on for half an hour before.

 

[Linux23]

I just bought a few bulbs at home depot yesterday for like $5 a piece. I hope that these bulbs last longer than CFL.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

A guy I work with's father dowsed for water. The guy in question isn't the most reliable source, but he said his father never hit a bad hole. The father was contacted once by someone that wanted him to find missing people, but it didn't work out.

I mention this cause I can think of a couple ways dowsing for water or underground electric could be plausible. Finding 'stuff' not so much. I can't think of any way that doesn't involve magic.

Confirmation bias is a powerful force

 

[IronWing]

I bought two different styles of LED bulbs to try out in the kitchen track lighting. The spot/flood shape looks pretty good. My wife hates the CFLs in there now as they stick out beyond the fixture so there is a lot of glare.

 

[edro]

Incandescent for life! (or until the government takes them away)

 

[DrPizza]

A guy I work with's father dowsed for water. The guy in question isn't the most reliable source, but he said his father never hit a bad hole. The father was contacted once by someone that wanted him to find missing people, but it didn't work out.

I mention this cause I can think of a couple ways dowsing for water or underground electric could be plausible. Finding 'stuff' not so much. I can't think of any way that doesn't involve magic.

If he's good at finding water... have him find where there ISN'T water. There's a reason it's called the water table, not water stalagmites or something - the stuff is spread out for miles underground.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, if his talent is real, there's a $1 million prize waiting for him.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Lumens if you are concerned with light output, watts if you care about power.

Also, remember there are more cost savings than just what the bulb uses, there is also the reduced heat output which has to be compensated by your cooling units

 

[NikolaeVarius]

If he's good at finding water... have him find where there ISN'T water. There's a reason it's called the water table, not water stalagmites or something - the stuff is spread out for miles underground.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, if his talent is real, there's a $1 million prize waiting for him.

It works to a very specific depth, corresponding to just above the water table.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

If anyone can prove that divining rods work, there's $1M waiting for you. The prize has been waiting for 50 years.

I had a very vivid and somewhat strange dream years ago about a place that was impossible for me to know about in any detail. I told my to be wife about it the day before I met her parents. I told her what I saw- a great blue heron in a pond with a frog playing the "red river valley" on a harmonica.

Well that was utterly bizarre so I forgot about it until I got to her parents. I looked out the kitchen window and no, there was no frog, but there was the exact same pond with a Great Blue in it. The song? Her father was watching a western at that moment and someone was playing that on a harmonica at the same time. I called her over and she just about freaked.

There is no way that could be recreated in a lab.

 

[Jeff7]

I had a very vivid and somewhat strange dream years ago about a place that was impossible for me to know about in any detail. I told my to be wife about it the day before I met her parents. I told her what I saw- a great blue heron in a pond with a frog playing the "red river valley" on a harmonica.

Well that was utterly bizarre so I forgot about it until I got to her parents. I looked out the kitchen window and no, there was no frog, but there was the exact same pond with a Great Blue in it. The song? Her father was watching a western at that moment and someone was playing that on a harmonica at the same time. I called her over and she just about freaked.

There is no way that could be recreated in a lab.

Human memory is also pretty lousy. It's surprisingly easy to get people to remember things that they never experienced, and to get key details wrong. Our memory is like a psychotic JPEG compressor, where the quality slider is tied to a random number generator.

I don't trust much of anything that comes from dreams. It's a nightly hallucination that comes about when random memories are accessed as your brain does its sleep thing. The snippets of your brain that are partially "there" then try to make sense of the barrage of nonsensical information that they're being fed.
Assemble 500 bytes of ASCII data from random sections of your hard drive and put them together in a text file. It probably won't make much sense, but I'm sure it'd be possible to find some kind of pattern somewhere.

You're also good at looking at patterns, and applying meaning to them. Ever seen shapes in clouds?


And remember all the dreams you had which didn't have any real-world relevance? Or how about the numerous dreams you've had which didn't get committed to memory?


I've had a dream a few times now that involves a white cabinet which conjures up a black panther every time it's opened. The panther then leaps out a nearby window, which is invariably open.
That has never happened to me, though the cabinet does indeed exist at my grandmother's house, and there is a window next to it.

I've also had dreams where I open a window, or tear off a piece of paper towel, which are indeed things I do. I didn't assign them much significance though.


House by a lake: Not too terribly unusual. Check.
Lake with a blue heron: Herons like lakes. Check.
Harmonica music on the radio or TV: Less probable, but certainly possible. "Piano Man," anyone? Check.
No frog playing the harmonica: A significant
discrepancy that was discarded.
Brain: Flexible and good at making false matches of memories, even vivid ones.

If he's good at finding water... have him find where there ISN'T water. There's a reason it's called the water table, not water stalagmites or something - the stuff is spread out for miles underground.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, if his talent is real, there's a $1 million prize waiting for him.

I bet I could even dowse around and find a silicon-based rock!

 

[rh71]

It's still not cost effective to switch to LEDs unless you get a major rebate. Those bulbs just cost too much compared to CFLs.

True but the way the CFLs take a while to get to full intensity is pretty annoying. We have dimmable CFLs in my office and non-dimmable in the living room and they're all like that. I just put in LEDs for a bathroom and wow it's like instant showroom quality.

 

[JimKiler]

I love the Philips LED bulbs and their 100watt equivalent that is 1600 lumens is as bright as some cheap 2100 lumens CFL i got at home depot even after warm up time. I like that with LED i do not have to second guess what equivalent wattage to get, 60 watt equivalent is good but if it is CFL i need to get a higher wattage to keep the same brightness as incandescent.

 

[Linux23]

can you use one of these things in the bathroom with the fan that draws stale air outside?

 

[gbeirn]

can you use one of these things in the bathroom with the fan that draws stale air outside?

I have one in mine. About a year now, no issues.

 

[Blanky]

I've installed 50-60 bulbs from several different vendors between my house and my parents. I have multiple makes and models ranging from cheap ikea par for rarely used locations to $30 apiece globes and high output medium base. My parents have nothing but Cree 60w soft white in their house.

I haven't had a single failure to date, even relatively high output bulbs in enclosed fixtures. I'm approaching two years on my house and one year on my parents. The parents were skeptical when I put the Cree bulbs in as they have had terrible luck with incandescent failures - some fixtures were killing bulbs every few weeks. Zero failures on the Cree is a huge improvement.

We will see of course on the long term reliability but with prices dropping like they have been warranty claims likely won't make sense. I spent $800 doing my house, my parents a year later was $150. There's just no reason to get incandescent or cfl at this point unless you are doing some highly color critical task where the relatively low cri of cheap LEDs won't work for you.

Viper GTS

I like this.

I am done buying cfl, they were a stopgap tech at best.

Led are slightly more efficient than cfl, are instant on, seem to support dimming better, have a longer lifespan, less toxins involved, and are smaller. Small "candle-like" dimmable cfl for a candelabra never did exist, but now they are accessible in led. The link above from the guy all butthurt over led makes arguments applicable to cfl as well.

Best deal in these now are at lowes. 60 and 40w equivalent utilitech for $7 and $5 respectively (earlier this week were a dollar less than that), though not dimmable. I am about to drop $20 on a par38 led bulb as a swap for a halogen flood light. Those halogens sucks crap tons of power but also have a lifespan of only 2-3k hours and they remain very expensive as well, so led makes sense there as well if I get one with a 1300+ lumen output.

 

[TheSlamma]

I like this.

I am done buying cfl, they were a stopgap tech at best.

Led are slightly more efficient than cfl, are instant on, seem to support dimming better, have a longer lifespan, less toxins involved, and are smaller. Small "candle-like" dimmable cfl for a candelabra never did exist, but now they are accessible in led. The link above from the guy all butthurt over led makes arguments applicable to cfl as well.

Best deal in these now are at lowes. 60 and 40w equivalent utilitech for $7 and $5 respectively (earlier this week were a dollar less than that), though not dimmable. I am about to drop $20 on a par38 led bulb as a swap for a halogen flood light. Those halogens sucks crap tons of power but also have a lifespan of only 2-3k hours and they remain very expensive as well, so led makes sense there as well if I get one with a 1300+ lumen output.

Like Vipers parents we did the Cree, the 2700K accuracy is right on unlike CFL's and those new Edison rags they are replacing incandescents with, they are instant on and bright, no warmup like cheap CFL's and they can be on for hours and are still cool to the touch. I have yet to have one burn out or have a defect, plus the 10 year warranty.

My last house we did CFL's and I had about 3 or 4 of them burn out from defect, but the rest all went the whole 11 years I lived there, but the color was off on them and differed so much between them even though they were all supposed to be soft white (minus the laundry room 4000K) but the cheaper brand ones always had to warm up and in the winter it could take up to a minute or so.

 

[Blanky]

My last house we did CFL's and I had about 3 or 4 of them burn out from defect, but the rest all went the whole 11 years I lived there, but the color was off on them and differed so much between them even though they were all supposed to be soft white (minus the laundry room 4000K) but the cheaper brand ones always had to warm up and in the winter it could take up to a minute or so.

I never wrote the dates on the bulbs (I do now), but I felt like the early CFLs had a very high failure rate. They last a long time now, but yeah depending on brand some take forever to warm up and it's quite annoying at times. One other pro of LED vs cfl they don't look as goofy (Philips slimstyle notwithstanding--a bulb I do otherwise like and have a few of them).

It's amazing to me that in a fairly short time we've gone from ubiquitous incandescent bulbs to bulbs that take about 1/6th as much power for the same light and last 10X as long. That's truly a revolutionary technology. For better or worse I think little of leaving lights on now. Those 6.5W 40W equivalents take a full six days to hit a kWh, which means the average American can leave one on for a full month and it costs about $.60. It's less irresponsible than ever to run decorative lighting on all the time. I never turn my garage lights off now

I use incandescent now in some night lights (although nightlight led are damn cheap) and two dimmable chandeliers, but I'm hoping the spare bulbs will last until the LED on these are nice and cheap. Will not be buying anymore CFL unless I find them on clearance or something. I already have so many it will be years before I've fully moved to LED.