A couple of electricians came by to fix some intermittent fluorescent lights in the hangar. We chatted as they replaced the ballasts, the first service that these lights had had in roughly 40 years. “When LEDs came out, we thought that we were done,” one said. “But we’re busier than ever because the drivers fail after three years or the lights flicker or they aren’t compatible with dimmers.”
I had big hopes for LED bulbs in our house, but mostly it seems that I launched a Denial of Service attack on my own position. Feit bulbs from Costco flicker when connected to Feit dimmers from Costco. Lutron dimmers and Philips bulbs interact in unexpected ways. We couldn’t get a custom-designed LED fixture to work with any dimmer at all (it does work with an on/off switch though).
Should new houses be built with some kind of standard DC wiring for all of the lighting? And maybe a separate dimming signal? Monkeying with the AC waveform as a way to communicate “I want dim” doesn’t seem to work. Or can we keep the legacy ridiculously high voltage wiring and rely on WiFi bulbs, such as Philips Hue, that dim in response to digital packets received? Whatever we’re doing now seems like a disaster for everyone except electricians.
[Despite our failure to engineer working LED light bulbs, some American geniuses remain filled with confidence in the area of electrical innovation: “MIT Receives Millions to Build Fusion Power Plant Within 15 Years” (Gizmodo). They will just take the hottest thing in the universe and put it right next to the coldest thing in the universe and push the resulting commercial fusion reactor out the door. How hard can it be? Then they will, one hopes, turn their attention to flicker-free LED lighting.]
Had this same terrible experience with LEDs. I thought I was doing the right thing for the planet and my electric bill by getting rid of all my incandescent bulbs, but LEDs are a real PITA. Even when they say they work with dimmers, they often visibly flicker. And they fail, A LOT, despite their advertised long lifespan, and that kills any hope of them saving you money (because they’re also much more expensive). They also don’t fit inside some of the light fixtures in my house.
I’m sure the tech will continue to improve, but I regret switching as early as I did.
It seems there’s a market opportunity here for smugglers to import black-market lightbulbs from sane countries.
Well my experience with LEDs is just the opposite. They work great and are lot brighter for a lot less electricity. We bought 20 or so of the 60 watt led flood light replacement bulbs and put them in all over the house. Eight of these are hooked to a big dimmer switch in my family room. It works just fine and dims the bulbs from near off to full on with no flicker. The rest of the bulbs are all working fine all over the house. But we have not replaced every light bulb in the house with LEDs. We still have some squiggle screw ins bulbs and some old fashioned bulbs that have not burned out in low use locations. So those are not getting replaced yet.
Oh and we found a great side benefit of LED bulbs. We used to have bats constantly nesting inside and behind our outdoor can flood bulbs. Then the bats make a mess and destroy the socket and the bulb over time. Plus the lights near our hot tub were a constant worry with bats flying in and out when were were in the water. Since the LEDs put out little heat the outdoor bulbs are no longer attracting bats to nest behind them. So the LEDs are great improvement.
It should be possible to buy good incandescent bulbs for a long time. They’re sold as “heat lamps” for hatching chickens and such.
My experience with CFL bulbs is they’re a joke. They die faster than incandescents, obviating the point.
FWIW, I’ve been wondering the same thing for a while – at least for lighting, why not just install 12V DC in houses like they are doing in tiny houses and RVs these days? It would be a lot safer and a lot less cost. I had some exterior lighting that was going to cost $$$$ to make code compliant, so I just hooked it up to 12V DC and got a DC LED bulb, and all was good in the world, desired result is achieved and no inspections, code compliance, etc.
I’ve had basically zero problems with my LED bulbs (in europe), very satisfied so far. It’s been a few years by now and the only problem has been dropping a bulb on the floor so the glass covering shattered. The LEDs inside still worked. Haven’t tried my hand at dimmers though.
OK, there is one complaint: I’d like LEDs to be a bit stronger. More luminiscent. Far better than the terrible CFLs, but still some way to go last I looked.
The hue lights are expensive, there’s some slightly wonky behavior based around them getting switched off by the conventional switches, and there is an occasional glitch, but on the whole they’re awesome. Ran 3 rooms full for 2 years and didn’t lose any to attrition. (The hue bulbs with a hardware dimmer, even turned all the way on, were a problem, so some light switches needed to be replaced)
But wait, there’s more!
Light-Induced Retinal Damage Using Different Light Sources, Protocols and Rat Strains Reveals LED Phototoxicity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/27751961/
Parts of Boston had DC wiring as late as the 50s, or so I’ve read. DC is fine for lights but if you want to run a blender you either need to up the voltage (which is bad because DC freezes your muscles if you contact it) or run expensive heavy gauge wires to handle the 5x current you need to move 500W with safe 24VDC vs 120VAC. So realistically you’ll be running two power systems in a house which can’t be a win.
What’s the big appeal of dimmers?
The problem is there is no reliable source of information on these compatibility issues, or even more basic info like CRI. You should assume your dimmers will need to be replaced with LED-capable ones. By the time online reviews are available, the model has already been discontinued and the review no longer relevant.
As Mitch Berkson points out, it may be more sensible to pick lamps with the right wattage and eschew dimmers altogether.
Anyone who hasn’t reported problems with LEDs hasn’t really tried legacy dimmers with 12/24V LEDs. Compatibility is a pain. As Phil writes, it is dumb to modify the waveform to signal dimming (not to mention, those analog dimmers do not save any power at all, just convert to extra heat when less light is needed). The other main problem for people with 12/24V systems is that most transformers installed just before the LED age are of the electronic type and have a minimum power draw, which is normally above the needs of a few LED lights. I have a couple of lights in my kitchen exhaust hood, and when I tried to replace them with LEDs got the old problem of electronic transformer (only that it is inside the hood, and requires a painful disassembly to swap for an LED driver), so the current working solution is to have one LED, one halogen light.
For a new installation I went fully the DC way with LED power strips and 12V switches and dimmers. No flickering whatsoever, and smooth dimmers. The advantage of 12V DC is that you can use pulse width modulation dimmers, which really work by reducing the power draw (and consumption). The downsides of DC is that there are much fewer models/styles of dimmer switches, and with long cables the voltage drop can be significant. We solved this by going with a thicker wire gauge, but the distances were not that large to start with. For a whole house, this is impractical. Also tried to use a boost converter near the light to avoid the voltage drop, but this was not so reliable. Another downside is that if you have the switch + dimmer at 12V, you’ll need to feed it constantly (even when off), and this consumes about 1-2W idle power all the time. Until dimmer units are available that have an input of 120-230V and output of 12V with PWM, this will be something we have to live with.
For people with “normal” LED bulbs that work with 120-230V AC, LEDs will continue to work fine. The only downside is you’re buying a lot of electronics to convert and power a simple digital device that works at 12V.
I’ve found Cree soft white LEDs quite reliable. The 3-way are useful in lamps as well, and don’t have the problem of 1 of 2 filaments burning out.
Stay away from daylight, stay away from crappy brands.
I’ve haven’t liked the dimmable because they don’t go full dim reddish/orange like incandescents; instead they have a harsh pink light and only dim half way.
The flickering is a curiousity. I’ve had problems with flickering, but only when certain electronics are running on the same household circuit and interfering with the LED. Perhaps one or the other messes with the wave form???
The low voltage & high current is a real challenge for inexpensive components. Most production favors high voltage & low current. Chinese lower the cost by wiring them in series, with constant voltage regulators. They would last longer in parallel with constant current regulators.
Ridiculously high voltage wiring? I think we would be better to convert to 230/50 Hz, like the ROW, but that will never happen. A low voltage circuit with battery backup, solar collector/cell makes sense for lighting with LED, but the future will require more, not less high voltage options, namely car chargers that will allow more rapid charging of (hopefully) more efficiently recharged batteries.
Because of losses from long runs of low voltage wiring, it makes sense to keep 120V and do the power conversion at the fixture – the cost of individual converters is not much more than doing the conversion centrally. Changing to wifi switching/dimming makes sense because it add substantially to wiring costs to run power to a wall switch and THEN to the fixture vs just running right to the fixture and even more so if you want 3 way (or more) switching.
I’m also very happy with LED lighting here in Australia and of course we have 230v. Don’t use dimmers but have our lighting in banks and so just switch the area and the effect we require. No flickering and no failures.
Feit is a terrible brand. I’ve had so many failures from their CF bulbs, I don’t buy them anymore.
I have also found Cree bulbs, downlights and fluorescent tube replacement fixtures to be extremely reliable. Not just 3rd party bulbs with Cree LEDs inside but lighting directly from Cree. Top tip: buy the Cree lights with the 10 year warranty.
A certain type of incandescent bulb and fixture has an extremely useful side effect that LEDs will never be able to replace: gnat control. In my area we have a tiny flying insect small enough to make it through screen windows. I call these insects “gnats”, I don’t know what they really are. They are attracted to computer screens but squishing them means sometimes daily cleaning of computer monitors. However, they are also attracted to a certain type of incandescent ceiling light that is open above it for about three inches to the ceiling. Sixty watt incandescent bulbs are hot enough to kill the gnats and they fall on the fixture glass which can be cleaned every few months.