I'm curious: Do people have good solutions for replacing now-deprecated incandescent bulbs for indoor lighting?
Even when I get an LED lamp with a warmer color temperature, it just doesn't look anything like an old-school light bulb. (I think it's because LED lamps are so much less full spectrum, no matter their frequency.) And I miss the older experience of lighting quite a bit - it just made a house seem like a warmer place.
Sometimes I set up rooms to be lit by only candlelight, which is beautiful, but very dim and obviously very impractical.
Anyone here have solutions for warmer lighting in a post-tungsten-filament world?
Just shop around for better LED lights. There's a lot of variation out there.
The problem is that the spectrum, which impacts "how other things look to your eyes," can be a wide range of things, ranging from "quite decent" to "a hot, peaky mess." They look the same in terms of how your eyes perceive the bulb, but other things will look very different. If you've ever had a pure RGB LED, and wondered why things look "wrong" when it's set to white, that's the problem - it's three very peaky emissions, and while it looks white, everything else looks wrong in it.
CRI measures this, and as soon as you get the RGB emitters online, the multi-color bulb CRIs tend to head downhill in a hurry.
You can see spectrometer graphs from a Philips bulb I reviewed here: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/11/philips-smart-wifi-bulbs/ - it's a good bit better than some of the other bulbs, but it's still easy to get it off the white emitter and into the peaky RGB emitters.
But yes, anything under than will still look "blueish" if it reflects the right tones of blue, or "brownish" if it only reflects the wrong ones. It's just much better than almost every other LED.
Thanks for this comment, I guess I gotta do some research on this now.
Thermal should be obvious. The components in the bulb's internal power supply can only withstand so much heat.
Interference is harder to track down. Old dimmers designed for incandescent bulbs will destroy LEDs very quickly. Since the problem seems so endemic, I suspect you have a more serious issue with your electrical service. Your AC voltage may be too high or low, or there's some equipment nearby or in your house that's putting a bunch of noise into the AC lines. Likely causes are old, improperly filtered inductive loads. That'd be anything with a big motor in it: washer, dryer, fridge, HVAC, pumps and fans. If you have any old dimmers anywhere in your house, remove them. You can also call your electric utility to see if they can send someone to check it out. They're usually pretty serious about interference like this because it can spread.
If the LEDs have a switching power supply, they should survive basically any high-frequency noise, and any overvoltage that is small enough to pass unnoticed. Leaving only small average voltages to deal with (like from dimmers). Those should be detectable with a multimeter.
Most modern fixtures are recessed, and the bulbs are "upside down" - so the heat builds up in the base of them, where the power electronics are, and simply fries them. There's a typical, handwaving, "For each 10C above design temperature, the lifetime halves" curve you can apply, and those power electronics are running way above design temperature in "almost all modern uses." So they die quickly.
An enclosed rated bulb is worth trying, if you can find one that does what you want. But good luck. They're cheap consumer devices at this point, built to a price point.
LEDs (or actually their power electronics) can't stand nearly the same temperatures that incandescent lights can, so they get cooked. You'll notice brownish stuff coming out of the base when it happens.
My fixture was a series of thick, donut-shaped aluminium rings connected via spacers forming a sphere around the bulb approximately the size of a melon. Three such spheres in total.
The damn thing destroyed two whole sets of lights before I:
-Disassembled one of the fixtures so that only the top is left, exposing the ceramic base.
-Replaced the other two with "efficient mood lighting" 2W 2700K bulbs - those with a transparent head mimicking a glass bulb.
It's not particularly beautiful, but hadn't had any problems since.
I went around the house counting bulbs, found that I had something like 26 incandescent 60 W or 40 W bulbs, and bought enough Walmart bulbs to replace them, plus another dozen to have spares. Since then all my non-smart bulbs other than the small incandescents in some appliances, two incandescents used as heaters in my well shed, and two that are in places I don't go (attic and crawlspace) have been those Great Value bulbs.
I've only had one fail in the 6.5 years since then. That was one in the garage that I dropped onto the concrete floor when screwing it in. They are plastic, not glass, so it didn't shatter like a glass bulb would, but it did not work afterwards.
I gave it to someone at work who was interested in taking it apart to see what broke. If I recall correctly there is an inductor on the PCB is just attached by some thing wire leads and one of those leads broke.
They're usually not as bright as other bulbs, which isn't suitable for all applications [although desirable in others].
So glad we’ve “saved” so much electricity.
And this is not only (cheap) home stuff, you can see this effect walking around in parks or streets, where a lamp is $100..
i have 7-8 long-fluorescent-substitues doing this at home, replaced capacitors in 2 of them, then replaced whole power supplies in 2 others.. then replaced the rest with whole new lamps as the price vs hassle/time-waste did not make sense..
Edit: but as sibling in thread says, if it soo repeatable, something is wrong in your electricity network at home. There is some source of disturbance, maybe even at neighbours. Long ago one bad laptop switching power supply was making an LCD display go crazy 4 rooms away.
Since you've tried numerous brands, that implies to me (and my tiny sample size) that the problem for you is not the bulb quality, FWIW.
Look for high-CRI leds with a colour temperature around 4000K . The 5/6k are quite glaring and cold, the 3k emulate the dingy yellows of low/medium-wattage incandescent.
Except for the bathroom and storage room, all lights in the flat are “smart”.
If you are willing to spend more money (from my experience the cost is about double of what you would pay for narrow spectrum LEDs), there are good options available for warm, high CRI lighting.
To give you an example of lights that I recently installed and am quite happy with: https://www.solidapollo.com/Candlelight-Warm-White-ULTRA-Hig...
Nothing beats the warm soothing glow of those things. I use long-life low-watt appliance tungstens in all my lamps, and I will never part with them. The light is superior to that emitted from LEDs, and the appliance bulbs are actually cheaper and more reliable than LEDs, believe it or not. With tungstens, I sleep better, my house is cozier, and I save some money.
LED bulbs are a meme.
https://www.omled.com/product-page/omled-one-s5l
They're eye-wateringly expensive and not particularly bright, but the spectrum is reportedly much friendlier than LEDs and they're currently making their way to the automotive world, so prices might decrease over time.
A more realistic proposition might be red phosphorus LEDs:
https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-technolo...
The key thing is that CRI doesn't tell the whole story about a light's spectrum, as it's an average of 15 test colours and R9 - red - often scores very low, producing a visibly worse image despite high CRI.
Look for lights that advertise high R9.
I run them at between 25-50% brightness most of the time.
[1] https://www.leds.shop/products/conextbar-power-supply-module...
[2] https://www.leds.shop/products/meanwell-lph-18-24w-power-sup...