I would argue LED lighting does increase the demand for all sorts of lights rather a lot. It is due to increased efficiency, but that is not directly what creates the demand. The increased efficiency means light bulbs are no longer a fire hazard, allowing lights to be strewn just about anywhere and left on indefinitely.
Just because it’s LED doesn’t mean it doesn’t use any power at all, so it’s still a waste of energy.
Every light in our house is LED and I still teach my kids about not wasting energy and turning things off when not in use.
Maybe it’s because I grew up with incandescent bulbs, but I can’t stand the thought of random lights being left on for no good reason, even if it costs 40 cents a year to keep lit.
EDIT- ADDITIONAL THOUGHT
I was going to add that it’s not like I went around my house adding lights that didn’t exist, but as I think about it... The house I grew up in was built in the early 70’s and every room had a single ceiling light that had two bulbs in it. The hallways had 1 or two ceiling lights.
My current house, built two years ago has 8 can lights in the living room, 6 cans in the kitchen and 3 pendants over the island, 8 in the dining room, etc... So maybe you’re on to something with the thought of putting in a lot more lights than we used to.
> Maybe it’s because I grew up with incandescent bulbs
It is soooo that. When I bought my house 8 years ago I immediately had to replace some incandescent bulbs that shared a circuit with the microwave because the power consumption was tripping the breaker. And then I had to do the math to figure out when it was cost-effective to replace everything with LEDs. So I've become extremely cognizant of what things consume, and exactly what that costs...
Now I've got everything automated with LEDs and presence detection and schedules to turn things off when people aren't around or shouldn't be awake. Yet, lights needlessly being left on still bothers me.
There were less lights in poor homes. The more affluent homes had suspended lights with multiple bulbs. (I am not sure how it is called in English). I recall that a lot of homes got more light bulbs and ornaments through the century, as they become more affordable and more hype.
The increase in count came with a decrease in power. The typical 100-150W bulb got replaced by multiple 30-50W bulbs, they do not consume significantly more in aggregate.
> Every light in our house is LED and I still teach my kids about not wasting energy and turning things off when not in use.
Are you certain that it's wasting energy, though? You have to account for the time spent actually turning the light off, as well as for the psychic cost of having to think about whether to turn it off or on.
I'm reminded of one of my old offices, where some office busybody turned off the lights in the bathroom. They were fluorescent and took awhile to brighten up, so of course this meant that one would enter a darkened room, turn them on, and then slowly get some light. Was it a huge deal? No. Did it make our lives worse than just leaving the lights on? Yes.
> Maybe it’s because I grew up with incandescent bulbs, but I can’t stand the thought of random lights being left on for no good reason, even if it costs 40 cents a year to keep lit.
At 40¢/year, leaving it lit costs .11¢/day, or .0046¢/hour. At any reasonable rate for your time & mental energy, it makes sense to just leave it lit.
> They were fluorescent and took awhile to brighten up, so of course this meant that one would enter a darkened room, turn them on, and then slowly get some light. Was it a huge deal? No. Did it make our lives worse than just leaving the lights on? Yes.
LEDs don't do this. At absolute worst, you'll have a fraction of a second before they light up at all, but once they light up, they light up immediately.
That's true to an extent, but if you had 16000 lumens previously, using about 1000W, you probably don't _want_ ~100,000 lumens now, just because it uses the same amount of power. That's far too much light.
Perception of brightness is not linear. The human eye response is not linear. So x10 the luminous flux (power output) will be perceived as brighter but far from x10.
not in their home, but I can see many more historical and institutionnal buildings being illuminated, commercial use also. It may still not amount to 10x though.
Do you mean fluorescent bulbs? They do not use neon, but rather use mercury vapor. The UV light from the mercury excites a fluorescent layer on the inside of the tube, causing broadband emission of visible light.
In support of your argument, just about every damn device these days is covered in LEDs that run 24/7. Look around your house at night. Microwave, electric kettle, stove, phone chargers, smoke detectors, routers, modems, electric toothbrushes, and that's just what I remember off the top of my head.
Yes, not exactly the same as LED light bulbs, but illustrates the point. LED's are cheap and the power is a rounding error, so they go in everywhere.
(This is infuriating to me because I would like my house to be dark at night)
I'm gonna have to call you on that one. Even high-end brand LED bulbs are so much more cost efficient than incandescent bulbs, it's the rational act to immediately replace nearly every single incandescent.
Whether you're interested in saving energy or saving money, you should remove and smash your incandescents.
A bit less than two decades ago, when I was still living with other (post-graduate) students we got a flyer which announced a low price for Compact Fluorescent Lighting compatible with our rented house. We went into the living room where there was a whiteboard, and worked out the TCO of these more efficient lamps over their lifetime compared to just the ongoing cost of our incandescents (since we had these already we didn't need a total cost).
We then immediately set out to purchase an entire house full of CFLs. They were still going years later when we split up and each took our share, I still have one somewhere, maybe in my living room.
Personally, the reason I don't run out and replace all my existing incandescents is because I don't want to waste perfectly good bulbs; I would rather for them to reach EOL and then replace. The energy used to create a good is usually significantly more than the energy the good itself uses. I'm OK paying a little more for the energy used by the incandescents when it's overall less wasteful.
More than 99% of the total lifecycle energy of a incandescent is in its use.
Let's just repeat that.
More than 99 percent of the total lifecycle energy of a typical incandescent bulb is in its use. That includes raw materials, manufacturing, and transport.
> The energy used to create a good is usually significantly more than the energy the good itself uses.
Not when you're talking about a cheap consumable product which mostly converts power into heat. A 75W bulb is about $2.50/yr worth of energy consumption per hour of daily use at $0.09/kWh. An LED equivalent is +/- $0.35/yr at a cost of $3-$6.
Maybe 5%-10% of my home's bulbs weren't worth replacing out of cycle, but LEDs are so cheap and the overall savings so high that it's not even worth thinking about.
But I'm not concerned about the money, I'm concerned about the wastefulness. The existing bulbs are completely functional until they reach EOL, at which point they will be discarded into landfill. The less frequently things are replaced, the less waste ends up in landfill (and is consumed in initial production).
We can readily quantify how 'perfectly good' incandescent bulbs are no longer perfectly good in terms of energy consumption costs, to which you might also factor the environmental and health impacts of consuming more energy than you could be.
But quantifying the wastefulness of prematurely sending them to the landfill is much more difficult. We can suggest that LEDs longer expected lifetime is another benefit to the environment but that is equally challenging to quantify for the premature replacement scenario.
I think the grandparent is saying there's a limit to the number of additional efficient light fixtures one would add with promise of low runtime costs because of higher initial fixture, bulb, and dimmer costs for LED.
I haven't found an LED yet that works in my dimmable ceiling fixture, where I can dim it to the lowest possible level and get a pleasing light. The incandescent gives a very dim, warm orange glow which is great for movie watching or other mood-setting purposes. The LED still emits a rather harsh and not-as-dim light even if it's rated in the warm spectrum. Have you seen a solution for that?
For our hallway, rather than buying an LED lamp that's compatible with a dimmer, we bought one with built-in dimming. You flip the wall switch twice and it goes into a dim warm orange "nightlight" mode. Flip it twice again and it goes into full brightness daytime mode.
LEDs are terrible with dimmers. They flicker, and they have bad response curves to the dim-level. Yes, there exist properly dimmable LEDs, but buying 5 different bulbs to find one that works negates the savings.
This isn't the LED's fault. It's the fault of the fact that dimmers are awful designs. They feed a nasty chopped-up waveform to the fixture that has RMS voltage proportional to the desired power output. Aside from the fact that it has a bad power factor, it's more or less okay for plain old line voltage incandescent lights. For LEDs, several things go wrong. First, LEDs want DC or high frequency PWM. The driver is given a nasty waveform at 60 Hz. So the driver needs to rectify that waveform to DC, filter it, and then decode the waveform to dim the LED as the user requested. This is a big hack and doesn't work all that well. Second, modern power supplies aren't resistors. Supplying them with input power with rapid voltage swings is not so great. Third, the dimmers themselves are usually wired in series with the bulb without access to a neutral wire, and incandescent dimmers expect to draw their own power using current through the bulb. Given that LED drivers are highly nonlinear, this makes it very awkward for the dimmer to power itself. "Dimmable" LEDs will intentionally leak some current to power their dimmers. High-end dimmers in newer homes will have a neutral connection.
If you can find a "ELV" or "reverse phase" dimmer and you have the wiring for it, you can at least avoid the inrush current problem.
An anecdote: I have a fancy computer power supply that buzzes rather loudly when the lights are on. This is presumably because the lights are drawing a big inrush current spike 120 times per seconds due to dimming.
To top it off, LEDs have much higher frequency response than incandescent bulbs. This means that, unless you drive them with clean DC or with a very high-frequency PWM input, they'll flicker. (Not the kind of flicker you're talking about -- the kind you're seeing is the system malfunctioning. I'm talking about the kind where it flickers as designed and someone waved their fingers and decided it was hard to notice.) There's a new standard called IEEE 1789 that describes what levels of flicker are likely to be harmful (causing low productivity, headaches, general crappy feelings, etc.) and what levels are very likely to be safe. Very few LED drivers meet this standard so far. At least California has imposed a less stringent but still helpful for Title 24 compliance [1] for the last couple of years.
(This is extra nasty given that incandescent bulbs don't actually produce light proportional to the power with which they're driven.)
Ok, but the dimmers worked fine with the incandescents. Your post gives a lot of reasons why the high-efficiency of LEDs comes at a cost of lower flexibility to adapt to important use cases.
I just saw some 2700K bulbs in Poundland (£1~=$1.38), at a selection of power levels. Not sure what the brightest was, might have been 60W equivalent?
I deliberately got a dimmer model because I wanted something to encourage my mum to sleep more; due to Alzheimer’s she has no idea what the time of day is any more, and has developed a fear of the dark and only sleeps with the light on.
You don't, not yet anyways. But if that 100w bulb is on 3-hours per day and you want a 1-year ROI, your replacement budget is probably in the $8-12 range.
They certainly _were_ expensive, but these days reasonable quality LEDs seem to be a similar price to reasonable quality incandescents. You can still get very cheap incandescents for less than any LED, but you probably don't want them; they won't last.
My local utility has an online store for customers with amazing deals on LED lightbulbs (not as cheap as normal bulbs, but not as high as you see at a Home Depot). I've replaced every bulb in my house.
Prices are plummeting though. I can get a software-dimmable app-controlled LED (Philips Hue) bulb for cheaper ($10) than the serial-replacement incandescents it replaces. It's to the point that I'm bummed I can't find any more standard-size bulbs to replace, and they're not making candelabra etc type Hue bulbs yet.
Hue and IKEA have E12s. The Hue E12s are available as white or color, but they're terribly expensive and never seem to go on sale. The IKEA E12 is only $7, dimmable but not color temp, and will pair directly to a Hue hub.
