The blight of bright white LEDs

tealblue
2023-09-02T13:26:28Z

I feel like I'm the only one noticing this and it's driving me crazy. With everyone transitioning away from incandescent, it seems like anywhere you go now there are these blindingly bright and high color temperature LED lights. Of course, if LEDs are better and more energy efficient we should use them. But whenever I've tried buying LED bulbs, they've been consistently brighter and higher color temperature than the stated lumens and Kelvin. And a lot of times, it's just extremely difficult to find LED bulbs for certain shapes at a reasonable luminosity. Like our house uses a lot of BR30 bulbs that are supposed to be around ~400 lumens, but the lowest you can possibly find is 650.

I'm genuinely concerned what effect this is going to have on our shared spaces and even potentially our psychology/circadian rhythm. There's an especially egregious example on an important cultural street in the city, where there's this truly blinding light in a parking lot about a third the way from the edge to the center of the district that makes the entire immediate area extremely unpleasant to be in. Someone tell me I'm not crazy.

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