LEDs

BatteryOaksBilly

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Our electrician Just left 15 minutes ago. I replaced 16 8 foot fluorescent lights with 16 8 foot LEDs. I also added 4 4 foot LEDs directly over my bench. While I was hoping for brighter what I got was BRIGHTER!!!! I mainly change to get rid of the heat from the HO fluorescents. Amazing difference!

@Geezer ….we can find somma that stuff we lost now!!!!!!
 
I did the same in my little 'shop', made a huge difference. Also, won't mess with electronics - powder scale, etc. - as much.
 
I replaced the 10 4' double tube fluoresence lights in my shop and like you Billy I was exspecting an improvement but WOW! I could probably have gotten by with 8, maybe less. And I have a 14' ceiling. Most of the time I only turn on one half.
 
I worked for Sylvania the first ten years of my adult life. What a lot of people don’t realize is a fluorescent’s light output diminishes to about 50% of new once they start reaching the end of their life, so most installations that aren’t routinely relamped every few years will get pretty dim. That doesn’t make a case for keeping them versus LEDs, but it’s part of the reason you’ll see such a dramatic difference when changing out to an all new lighting system.
 
We moved into a new house 10 months ago and about 1/2 of the Satco LED bulbs have burned out, many of them early on. I replaced with some GE hoping they were better, but they started crapping out. I need to find a better brand, if there is one.
 
We moved into a new house 10 months ago and about 1/2 of the Satco LED bulbs have burned out, many of them early on. I replaced with some GE hoping they were better, but they started crapping out. I need to find a better brand, if there is one.
I thought this technology was supposed to last something like 10 years before needing replacement
 
I thought this technology was supposed to last something like 10 years before needing replacement


That’s what they say, but I’ve never had any of the new fangled bulbs live up to the promises of long life. At our last place, we had very dirty electricity and went through bulbs like candy. CFLs lasted a little longer than incandescents. LEDs lasted a bit longer than CFLs, but that house ate them all.

Anywho, the life spans they give must be based on laboratory conditions.
 
That’s what they say, but I’ve never had any of the new fangled bulbs live up to the promises of long life. At our last place, we had very dirty electricity and went through bulbs like candy. CFLs lasted a little longer than incandescents. LEDs lasted a bit longer than CFLs, but that house ate them all.

Anywho, the life spans they give must be based on laboratory conditions.
When I left Sylvania 30 years ago I was involved in their industrial/commercial side of the business so if we had issues with early failures or less than optimal operation with any kind of lights it could be a big maintenance headache for the customer causing a lot of expense. Voltage was always one of the issues, and rarely did any commercial or industrial site have exactly the voltage that the lights were rated for. Low voltage impeded proper starting and operation of fluorescents, but made incandescents last forever, while higher voltage caused early failures in incandescents that increased at an exponential rate if the voltage was say 130 instead of 120.

It was always a crap shoot as to what the voltage might be no matter how large the building or manufacturing site.

I was gone a long time before LED’s came on the scene so I know nothing about the impact of voltage variations to their lifespan but I imagine it can’t be good.
 
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Do the LED tubes need a different ballast? Or is it a direct replacement versus fluorescent tubes? My reloading room could use some brightening
 
The place I work in is probably 80,000 sq feet. The facilities guys came through about a year ago and replaced all the florescent tubes with LED (AND occupancy sensors).

Within about 6 months the new tubes were failing at a significant rate. Now I call the facilities folks about every month to replace tubes in my lab space. I'm not sure whether it's the toggling on and off that wears 'em out (LED's shouldn't care, as long as the PS is well designed) but they are extremely unreliable.

I bet we didn't buy cheap either.
 
So they just pop right in or does something need to be done to the fluorescent fixtures to make them compatible
What has stopped me is that the ballasts need replacing. Last I checked, compatible ballasts were pretty dear.
 
Depends. Electrically, there's no need for a "ballast" in a LED. If they're "dimmable" they probably have a pulse width modulator to pull that off.

A quick look at amazon shows some that are compatible with ballasted fixtures and others are no ballast compatible. I'm guessing this has more to do with the ease of the retrofit process than the need for any legacy ballast in an LED fixture.

LED's that require an external "ballast" or "driver" have no internal power supply, to change the 120VAC to the DC required for an LED. I wouldn't think there's too many of those still around as nobody would buy them as they'd require some work to rewire the fixtures.
 
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Lasts 50,000 hours! it says on the box.
Guys...when was the last time you saw anything made, especially in the US, that lasts 50,000 hours?
The light emitting diode..yeah, it will last 50,000 hours. There's really no extra manufacturing to make them do that it's just what they are.

But there's no way in hell the manufacturer is gonna make the driver (power converter for the bulb) last that long. Like everything, it's manufactured to fail at a certain point. I'm gonna sell you a light bulb that lasts the rest of your life? Quick way to go out of business. Oh no sir, you're gonna come back and buy some more. :cool:

You wanna make bulbs last?
Dimmer switches.

When you turn on a light, or anything electrical, there's an inrush of current that far exceeds what the product is rated for. It only lasts for a brief moment, so quick that most electrical meters won't even register that.
But it happens.
For easy math, lets say you have a bulb rated at 120 watts. That's 1 amp of power. When you flip the switch, that bulb is gonna see 10,12,15 amps of inrush current for just a brief millisecond or two. Compare it to starting your car every morning and it redlines for a second before it comes back to idle.

You ever notice that the bulb always fails when you turn the light on? POP...and shes done. That was the time it got tired of dealing with the inrush current and it finally let go.
A dimmer switch, when used to gently turn on a light from dim to bright, prevents that large shock of inrush current. I have regular old-timey incandescent bulbs going on 15 years in my house.
I have dimmer switches on every fixed light in the house.

If you wanna go with some dimmer switches, the bulb and switch have to be compatible to work with each other. You just can't slap any ol' dimmer switch in there or use any bulb with it, especially with newer cfl's and led's. So read the box and be sure the product will do what you want it to do.
And if you wanna dim a bunch of lights with one switch, the switch has to be rated to carry the total ampacity of all the lights.

So there ya go. Now get back to work you homo's. :p
 
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Our electrician Just left 15 minutes ago. I replaced 16 8 foot fluorescent lights with 16 8 foot LEDs. I also added 4 4 foot LEDs directly over my bench. While I was hoping for brighter what I got was BRIGHTER!!!! I mainly change to get rid of the heat from the HO fluorescents. Amazing difference! @Geezer ….we can find somma that stuff we lost now!!!!!!

Going to need this.
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I worked for Sylvania the first ten years of my adult life. What a lot of people don’t realize is a fluorescent’s light output diminishes to about 50% of new once they start reaching the end of their life, so most installations that aren’t routinely relamped every few years will get pretty dim. That doesn’t make a case for keeping them versus LEDs, but it’s part of the reason you’ll see such a dramatic difference when changing out to an all new lighting system.
Yes, the bulb stays level and decreases starting at two years depending on how long you burn them.
The new LED replacements have a bit lower lumen output vs traditional fluorescent lamps that are omnidirectional,
the LED is directional downwards so less lumens needed.
You can get direct replacement or bypass, where the ballast is taken out of circuit and the lamps run on 120VAC.
 
We moved into a new house 10 months ago and about 1/2 of the Satco LED bulbs have burned out, many of them early on. I replaced with some GE hoping they were better, but they started crapping out. I need to find a better brand, if there is one.
Cree, Philips and Ecosmart at Home Depot. (shameless plug I work there).
Agree dimmers are the best way to extend bulb life, most of them can handle old school, CFL and LED bulbs.
Lutron dimmers have an adjustment so you get full dim range.
 
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BP makes some good points.
The cfl's and led's won't dim with a dimmer switch like incandescent bulbs. Incandescent bulbs...you can dim them down to look like a candle for when you & the wife put on some Barry White albums.
Cfl's and leds...if you can get them to dim down to 10% of their full power that's pretty good. Any lower than that and they just shut off.
Like BP mentioned, led's are highly directional with their lumens. It's hard to get led's to 'flood' even with refractor lenses designed to do that. The higher up you can mount an led bulb the better they will look. Get them close to your work surface and you will see your hand casting shadows underneath them.
My favorite application for led bulbs is for outdoor use. They're phenomenal in those applications, and it doesn't matter how cold it is, they fire right up.
 
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Theres a very lengthy thread on LED Retrofit bulbs over at garage journal, along with links to programs to help determine the best fixture layout/quantity to achieve the proper luman at work height.

I made the switch a few years ago, while I really NEED 3x the amount of bulbs that I currently have in my shop, it did drastically improve light output from the old t8's that were there.

The bulbs I picked up had clear lenses which I do not care for. The light gets refracted through the lens and you wind up with off color stripes from the bulbs. This is only evident while looking at a white surface or a white vehicle, its enough to make me want to revamp the whole setup. I've been told the frosted lenses do not have this problem.
 
I recently converted all of my shop lights to LED. I chose to delete the ballast and re-wire for direct line voltage due to the cost of replacement ballast. I have 7, 8', dual bulb, single pin fixtures so it wasn't cheap or easy but after the first shipment (EVERY bulb was broken) things went well. I did the re-wire myself and the new LED's are MUCH, MUCH brighter.
I ordered mine with the glass tube to prevent the eventual sagging and yellowing associated with plastic tubes. Before the conversion they were pulling 34 amps on a 40 amp breaker and afterwards they pull 11 amps on the same 40 amp breaker so the cost to operate should be substantially lower.
 
Had a weird experience with a led bulb that Duke Energy brought by (box full of them for calling/emailing them). It had been in our basement for about a year, and one day I walk down, flip the switch, and.....lights came on (two bulbs in fixture). About 7-10 seconds later, one of them exploded, yes, exploded. Glass and little parts of the inside pieces went everywhere, including all over me. Other bulb is still in there as we speak. I just put another in there, and bam, light.

I have also recently changed all the lights in our cars to led, including a plug and play in my old F-150, and man, that made a difference.
 
The power supply in those things run hot (they're switchers) and there's some capacitors in there that get hot , especially if the bulb base is above the bulb itself. Capacitors (especially electrolytics) sure aren't gonna last 50K hrs.


Every time you reduce the temperature of an electronic "thing" 10 deg C, you double its life.
 
The LEDs in my kitchen went out last week. One was completely out...the other was dim...never seen that from led but whatever.
Went to HD and got a pack of 2 4 foot leds Philips brand for $17.xx.

While I was out shopping with the Mrs. at Costco, we found the 2 pk 4ft Feit brand that we had in there. $9.99 for the pack. Needless to say the ones from HD went back.
Love me some Costco!

DS
 
When I left Sylvania 30 years ago I was involved in their industrial/commercial side of the business so if we had issues with early failures or less than optimal operation with any kind of lights it could be a big maintenance headache for the customer causing a lot of expense. Voltage was always one of the issues, and rarely did any commercial or industrial site have exactly the voltage that the lights were rated for. Low voltage impeded proper starting and operation of fluorescents, but made incandescents last forever, while higher voltage caused early failures in incandescents that increased at an exponential rate if the voltage was say 130 instead of 120.

It was always a crap shoot as to what the voltage might be no matter how large the building or manufacturing site.

I was gone a long time before LED’s came on the scene so I know nothing about the impact of voltage variations to their lifespan but I imagine it can’t be good.

Isn't there a World Record Incandescent Bulb still burning from like Edison's days at a Fire House somewhere? I think because of the low voltage and the way it was mfg'd, they said it would still light for quite a while.
 
A word of caution with putting LED's into your garage door opener. Some can created radio interference with the receiver which will diminish the range of your remote control. If you change the bulbs and suddenly realize you have to get much closer or the door or may not even activate when the lights are on, then you need to find another bulb. Sometimes it's only when the bulb is lit. Or can be all the time. Depends on what kind of interference the bulb creates. There are LED bulbs that are certified not to emit radio interference. So there's my PSA.
 
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We moved into a new house 10 months ago and about 1/2 of the Satco LED bulbs have burned out, many of them early on. I replaced with some GE hoping they were better, but they started crapping out. I need to find a better brand, if there is one.

Same experience, tryed a few different brand LEDs and they all flicker and crap out after 6 months. So back to the good ol edison bulbs for me.
 
Same experience, tryed a few different brand LEDs and they all flicker and crap out after 6 months. So back to the good ol edison bulbs for me.
Electricity bills are usually one of my smallest, so while century old technology might not be “optimal”, it works pretty darn well, and I’m pretty sure the failure rate of these LEDs, and their upfront costs negates any actual dollar savings.
 
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