The blight of bright white LEDs
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.
You're not crazy! My neighborhood recently replaced all of their streetlights with new LED ones. The new posts have very little shielding to prevent light pollution. The lights are practically white and actually blinding at night. Annoyingly, they also put up a new one in direct view of my bedroom window, so even with my blinds closed I get a bunch of light flooding in.
Where I live you just contact the council and they put up a shield on the light. I miss the orange lights very much but light into bedroom should be an easy fix.
Frankly, I think that streetlights should all be shutoff at 10 PM at the latest and turned on at 5 AM at the earliest. Even the best techniques to mitigate pollution still mess with noctournal life something awful.
Humans are actually pretty good at seeing in the dark when not travelling > 10 mph
Respectfully, no. Some of us work nights and need to be out and about at night. When I worked in LA I would have been completely shafted if the streetlights turned off at 10pm.
I work night shift too, and I feel like a happy medium would be pushing it back to 1 AM, and only shutting off half of the lights, or using significantly less powerful lights. On this street near me there's a stretch of road where about every other light pole is out and even with no houses there (which often have lights of their own) you can very comfortably see the whole way.
I love the night and darkness and it's annoying how well lit everything is. I could walk from my work to my house (2 miles) in the middle of the night and read a book perfectly fine the whole way there, which is totally unnecessary.
That's a good point. Our artificial outdoor lighting should be the bare minimum to cover for when the moon and stars aren't providing sufficient light to see at all. This could be done with a fraction of what we use now.
Perhaps have half (or quarter or...)the bank of LEDs on separate circuits?
Would make good "redundancy" if needed
You would do what I did in rural PA: Carry your own light and wear reflective clothing.
Yeah, that's a great idea, its like a beacon saying "please jump me" haha
I think this depends on the neighborhoud, I'd guess some women appreciate the street lights. But most of the time I'll agree with you, I hate having bright lights shine through my windows when I wanna sleep. I think they should all be dimmed after 10 pm.
I used to live in a village that had no public lighting (by choice, apparently it allowed the residents to gaze at an unperturbed, starry night sky, which it did), and I very much enjoyed it, despite the occasional pub goer that would fall into a stream. In fact, we don't need to go as far as shutting all lights off, reducing the amount of lighting would greatly improve things, in my opinion (and experience, given I moved to a slightly bigger town with spaced out street lights).
Leicestershire in the UK has been doing that for well over a decade. The amount of uproar that people made when it happened was hilarious.
"PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GET RAPED AND ATTACKED AND IT'LL BE ON THE COUNCILS HANDS!"
No rises in any crimes due to street lights being off
IIRC there have been studies done that streetlights have little to no impact on actual crime. Most variations can be explained by other factors.
Add a few 'emergency beacons,' that can dial 911 and signal police with a pushbutton, and we'll have 10x safer streets.
Yeah, believe me there's a lot of people who would prefer dangerous anecdotes rather than science over street lighting.
There's such utter-nonsense that goes on emotively with things like this.
There was that one study that found turning off street lights halved car thefts.
Turns out it's more difficult to break into a car if you can't see what you're doing
There's middleground options like motion detection light boosting for streetlights
I have to disagree that street lights should be shut off at any time other than day. I mean that could cause a whole host of problems that not everyone will forsee. People can use blackout curtains for their bedrooms if the light is a problem.
And what does noctournal wildlife do? Some nice nighttime blinders?
Mayne we can come up with better solutions to being afraid of the dark.
Like what?
I wish stuff like this was taken into account in such a transition. Cause you know that's a missed opportunity that won't happen again soon.
You’re definitely not crazy. I’ve had to replace almost all our bulbs with Hue bulbs because it’s nigh on impossible to find regular LED bulbs that are less than 3000K. Under my roof thou shall go no higher than 2700K!
As a tangent, I'm incredibly frustrated with Hue right now. I feel like there's an incredible potential just being squandered with the Hue app essentially being abandoned. The current functionality in no way seems to justify the cost difference between Hue lights and your run-of-the-mill Bluetooth color-changing lights which are a fraction of the cost. Hue lights are useless without the bridge, but non-Hue Bluetooth lights can't be added to the bridge, so Hue remains it's own closed ecosystem. I started slowly buying Hue lights before cheaper Bluetooth lights became widely available and now I just feel trapped in this overpriced system. I don't want to buy any more Hue lights due to price, but I don't want to just toss out the hundreds of dollars I've already got either. Very "first world problem", I know. /rant
If it makes you feel any better, I started off buying cheap Chinese LEDs off Amazon and almost none of them still worked after a year. I had to replace all my main lights and generated a bunch of e-waste in the process. The only ones that still survive were bathroom lights that have far less usage, but I’m expecting those to go at some point as well. Now I’m in the Hue ecosystem because I needed something with better longevity.
The other thing you’re saving yourself from was that the cheap LEDs connected through WiFi, which sounds great since you don’t need a Hue Bridge, right? It means you’re stuck with unnecessary telemetry to a Chinese server (why do they need to know my daily habits and routines?). Also, you can’t even control them locally using a voice assistant like Alexa, as the software wasn’t supported. I eventually tried setting up my own Home Assistant server and controlling them that way (I wanted to lower the temperature with the sunset to benefit my circadian rhythm). Turns out the documentation for low level changes was so poor I could only get them to turn on/off, leaving color and temperature too difficult to manage. Diving deeper into the rabbit hole, I could have potentially flashed the firmware to take complete control using open source code. Turns out the always-connected bulbs also update to newer OS versions preventing you from flashing their memory, while providing back no additional functionality.
It appears the grass is always greener.
on a side note, have you tried NFC tags for triggering routines? I got these ones from aliexpress, and they're great. I'm only doing simple things like changing scenes, toggling fans, etc -- but it works well.
they're so cheap. Its also handy if you have people wanting to use your wifi. You can write the key and ssid to the NFC -- then they only have to tap to join.
FYI you can connect hue bulbs to a different Zigbee hub than a Hue bridge. I use Home Assistant to tie all of our lights and other devices together into a single interface. I like our Hue bulbs because they're rock solid and perform well. Haven't touched the Hue app in about a year.
I’m the exact same way. I just moved into a new rental last month, and the place was full of 5000K lightbulbs. I don’t understand how the past tenants lived!! I just spent the day replacing them with 2700K bulbs, because otherwise I felt nauseous.
Even with the new bulbs, I hardly ever keep overhead lighting on? To me, it always casts such hard, unflattering shadows. I always try to aim for lots of lamps with diffusing shades. I also just installed a cheap $30 2700k dimmable under-cabinet strip lighting kit in our kitchen, and gosh, it’s a world of difference. I’m never turning on the overhead lighting again.
Totally agree about overhead lighting vs lamps! I go for a “pools of light” aesthetic.
I’m loving this whole thread. My kind of people!
I'm also a lamp lover! I don't have the reasoning/verbiage to explain why I dislike overhead lighting but I have always favored indirect lamp light over turning on a room's main overhead light. For me, overhead light is kind of depressing. Idk why. I also am bothered by the harshness of LED bulbs so I use lampshades to temper them. Even a "soft" white 2700K bulb is still harsh for me. I've added additional lining to lampshades to get a softer light effect. I wonder if it's just personal preference or if there's any science to explain why light affects some people in this way.
I haven't had much issue finding them on Amazon. We bought our house in 2019 and as the bulbs have died, I've gone around replacing them all with LED ones. No more bulb issues now, and all our living spaces have a nice 2700k. I prefer closer to daylight (5000k) for the kitchen and utility room, though.
I don't use Hue but do use the Philips Ultra Definition. No smart control in the bulb (I have installed smart switches where relevant), but good color temp, CRI, and flicker free. Wife has photo sensitive migraines and these have helped her.
I haven't noticed bulbs being too bright or brighter than spec. But I do notice them being poorly used in both public and private spaces. I've certainly experienced staying at a friend's house with a quasar of a street light beaming straight into the guest bedroom.
A brain dump of things I've learned and thought on this topic:
As you noted, LEDs typically have a whiter/bluer temperature. This is fine for kitchens, workspaces, or generally during the day. But most LEDs tend to have a very poor Color Rendering Index. Particularly with red tones (and yes, you can still have a warm colored bulb with poor reds). This is used by manufactures for a bit of misleading marketing where even products marked as "high CRI" will either leave red out of their analysis, or average across the spectrum (so many colors reproduce > 90%, but red is very low producing an average of 80%). As a result, spaces with LED bulbs can feel gross or cold.
Related to brightness, LEDs also tend to have issues with dimming. Even bulbs marked as dimmable will put out less light by flickering at a slower and slower speed. This is unpleasant in a way that most people couldn't point out if you asked them "what's wrong with this room". But for some people it's actively nauseating. If you want to see this in action, wave your hand in front of your face and see if your fingers move in a constant blur, or if they have a sort of stop-motion movement to them. You can also look at running water and see that it looks strange like a high shutter speed photo of water where the motion is stopped, but continuous.
So ultimately we want bright cool light during the day, but dim warm light in the afternoon evening. Sometimes this is simply a poor design, like bright cool street lights when they should be warmer and dimmer. High end living spaces have (long before LEDs) used different lighting in different rooms/areas with dimmer warmer lighting in bedrooms an living rooms, with cool bright lighting in kitchens.
How do LEDs compare to other lighting technologies?
Obviously classic incandescent bulbs are the the main reference point. These have a perfect CRI and are usually on the warmer side. They were more forgiving since the warmer light made them more acceptable in the evening in living spaces, and the CRI made it ok to use them in kitchens or task areas.
Fluorescent lights can have a high CRI, but usually don't. They miss out in colors other than red and (in my experience) make spaces look green and gross. If you picture an office cubicle farm hellscape, you're probably also picturing lighting created by bad florescents.
Finally, the holy grail (in my opinion) of lighting is halogen. Halogen is technically incandescent, but uses less power and has some fun qualities. Since it's incandescent, the CRI is a perfect 100. They typically have a cool temperature and are commonly used in jewelry cases to make gems sparkle. Like incandescent, they can be dimmed without flickering. But the really neat thing is that as you dim them the color temperature warms up. Often in museums you'd see large halogen lights with low power going through them to create warm, high CRI light for the installations. This dimming/temperature change combo is perfect for human life. Street lamps: want to have a street festival? turn them all the way up. Normal street lighting at night? dim it down and have a warm glow. Small living spaces with kitchens adjacent to the dining table? bright cool light for food preparation, turn it down for more intimate lighting while eating. Unfortunately they use about 4x the power of LEDs and humans are going to go extinct because we can't stop pumping coal into the atmosphere to create power. So that's a bummer.
Some people use color-changing smart lights to get a cooler light in the day and a warmer light at night. Unfortunately these tend to have an abysmal CRI (please let me know if you're aware of one that doesn't) and I personally prefer to have different lights that I turn on at different times of day.
The flickering is due to pulse width modulation. We "pulse" power to the light on and off and the "width" of each pulse determines how long it's on. It doesn't actually dim the lights at all, it just shuts them off for x% of the time (called the duty cycle) and your brain averages that out and assumes it's darker. Afaik this cycle is usually in reference to your country's mains frequency.
But brightness is also proportional to the voltage supplied, so it would definitely be possible to control brightness with a step down transformer as well, that's just more expensive. Especially if you want granular control.
I've also tried higher CRI warm LED bulbs and been unimpressed. I remember looking into halogen, but they seem very hard to come by.
Are those higher CRI with a > 90 R9 & R13 rating? I've seen a lot of marketing that will call 80 "high CRI", or will advertise > 90 but the R9 and R13 are abysmal. What left you unimpressed?
Halogen is illegal in a bunch of states now, so it is indeed hard to come by.
I remember it still feeling a bit off, but I remember it looking better when it was in a covered ceiling light than an exposed lamp.
Hmm, interesting. Usually painted walls or fixtures create issues rather than solving them (with color; of course they help diffusion). Because paint can only reflect and fixtures can only pass through colors that were in the light source already. So light bouncing off of paint will make the room more paint-colored, and light going through a fixture will make the room more fixture-colored.
Sorry I don't have much for you aside from the idea that you could get a well-regarded bulb and try it side-by-side with bulbs you've tried before. If you can tell the difference then great, if not then idk.
Maybe you have very good eyes. Most people notice a difference if it's pointed out to them, some notice on their own, few can distinguish between incandescent/sun light and a quality LED bulb. You could certainly be one of the few though.
The biggest downside for me with halogen, related to the power usage, is how much heat they put out compared to traditional incandescent, let alone LED
They should emit less heat than traditional incandescent. Because they are more power efficient, they output less heat and more light for the same input power.
Halogen Lamp (Wikipedia)
The Halogen cycle section talks about required operating temperatures. The Safety section says:
Seems my power usage connection was off, but the heat issue still stands.
yes and no... :)
Wikipedia is a good read as always. I think they tended to sell brighter halogen bulbs compared to incandescent. So yes, as a consumer one would probably buy bulbs that put out more heat than traditional incandescents.
But a "60W equivalent" halogen bulb is going to be putting out less heat than a 60W traditional incandescent bulb. Yes it will be hotter in terms of temperature, but that doesn't mean it actually puts out more heat.
I don't know enough to say why this is. If I had to guess it's because the halogen bulb is quite small so it takes less energy to bring that small amount of gas to the necessary temperature.
I’m certainly no expert, so I’m probably wrong. All I can say is anecdotally, halogen desk lamps and ceiling lighting putting out unremarkable brightness levels have felt noticeably hotter to sit near. Noticeable as in the times I’ve felt the heat around one without knowing and later checked, it was always a halogen bulb (where most lights were incandescent). Maybe I’ve been unlucky with bulb or fixture design, or maybe I’m much more sensitive to heat differences than brightness.
Me neither, so I'm open to being wrong too. But I did pick up some basics from a previous job.
Very possible, feel like I often hear random places that folks have bad fixtures or fixtures designed for one type of light source that are now misbehaving with another.
That's actually probably true! How bright things look is tricky. Other ambient lighting is a big factor, but also we don't perceive brightness linearly relative to the increase in actual brightness. For example in a relatively well lit office building (like I'm in right now) you can look out the window on a sunny day and outside looks brighter than the inside, but not significantly. But in fact it is WAY brighter outside than inside. This is also why when you take a photo indoors (exposed for the indoor scene), exterior windows are usually blown out (unless you're using a smartphone or other camera doing HDR or something), even though the window doesn't look bright to your eyes.
The lumens isn't the problem, it's the color of the lighting. As others have stated (maybe indirectly), the hue of the actual light plays a huge factor. You can get "daylight", "soft", "cool", "warm"... the makeup of the actual colors that best mimic the sunlight usually do the best for "light" in general.
There are studies that show a steak looks better in sunlight[-mimicked lighting] than in most options.
There is a light pollution tradeoff, but I prefer LED lights outdoors as much as I prefer them in my home. The inability to see stars (and oh man, there is that) is a small price, IMO, for the tradeoff of the depression I didn't realize I had felt under sodium light orange until they installed LEDs on our block. Additional, perhaps the LED bulbs Philadelphia is using aren't as bright as your city's, but I find them easy to look at. Again, I miss a starry sky, but I live in a city, the stars I could see were the ones that could compete with the light to begin with.
Around the corner, half the lights need replacing, and I can tell you that darkness isn't all it's cracked up to be either. There's always a compromise, and I hope they experiment until they find the one that works for the most people (I'd say for everyone, but just writing this out proves that can't happen.)
Oh, one more note: All my life I had horrible insomnia, but that cleared up around the same time they did away with sodium lights. There's almost certainly no correlation, and the plural of anecdote is not data, but it's proof no solution helps everybody.
There's definitely variation in what people want, but I would say that decisions should be guided by what's generally healthy for people. Ex. we shouldn't be using 5000K or higher lights at night because they disrupt our circadian rhythm, use bulbs that don't flicker, etc.
Well, like I said the LED bulbs restored my Circadian rhythm, so they still have work to do.
Look at color changing LED light bulbs. You can tilt them towards warmer colors and even dim them without needing a dimmer switch. There are smart bulbs that connect to app and dumb ones that connect to a traditional remote. The remote ones are nice because they cost less and are ideal for anything connected to a switch.
I generally o to use smart bulbs for lights that are always powered on or hard to reach.
This doesn’t fix your neighbors flooding your bedroom. That you have to talk to them or install blackout curtains.
Headlights in cars are awful these days as well.
Something about the light from LEDs though has always felt a bit clinical to me, even with warmer temperatures.
What you might be seeing is the CRI (color rendering index) of LEDs, which is often much lower than on florescent and incandescent bulbs, especially for commonly available/cheaper bulbs.
I have a few warm high CRI LED bulbs in places where I spend the most time in my house and it makes a big difference. They’re more expensive and still not quite as good as incandescent but given the wild difference in power consumption I can deal with that.
Sometimes they tend to flicker to a somewhat noticeable amount. I feel like this can sometimes be seen from the corners of my eyes or in shadows and reflections.
Another trick is to drape a sheer cloth over the lampshade. Anything that will help scatter and dampen the light.
There’s also vintage bulbs that have a very warm tone.
I have a few lights that have stash behind and under things. Under beds and behind TVs are my favorite.
There's a few points in my opinion that are contributing to this. First of all, in Europe we have this thing called UGR rating which is basically a standard for how strong perceived the glare of a luminaire is: the higher the number the higher the glare. Now while the way it is defined is kind of a matter of debate, the fact is that in the US, this is just not a thing. In Europe, no matter the application, street lighting, architectural, industrial, office lighting, there's hardly a sector where this isn't mandated and where it isn't also strongly enforced. So from a regulatory point of view, the US is the wild west in terms of glare control meaning manufacturers are actually quite free to blast as much light out of a narrow opening under viewing critical angles as they want. Not ideal.
Second is of course the thing with color temperature. A lot of people would die for the idea that in order to properly illuminate something, you absolutely have to have cold white light. Now while it is true that warmer color temperatures need more lumens to reach an equally strong perceived illumination than cold white light, it is just that, a matter of how many lumens you have per illumination task, not what color temperature.
The thing that most people are struggling with these days is the abuse of their circadian rhythm. In the industry, its quite a big topic (at least in Europe) - search for human centric lighting - because science backs this quite strongly that it really matters which color temperature you are exposed to at which time of the day. The reference here being the behaviour of the sun again of course, color temperature in nature shifts during the day from warm to cold to warm again. Exposing yourself to cold white light at night time for example basically messes up your circadian rhythm, telling your body to keep you awake when all other cues are pointing towards bedtime. Some are more sensitive to this than others but it is a big thing.
There is a point to be made for the warmth and gentle glow of a light bulb but with energy efficiencies being an order of magnitude and more better for LEDs, there's just no going back anymore. Lighting needs are a serious contributor in the overall energy bill of the planet and savings there have a huge impact. Interesting fact here: It's mostly the use phase of a luminaire that matters for energy. This means if your luminaire is running for a lifetime of let's say 30 years, single digits in the efficiency percentage have very large impacts in terms of equivalent CO2 emissions. BUT: It really matters where the energy comes from that you are using to feed your luminaire. If you are in Poland and most of your energy comes from burning coal, the use phase is the most important thing to focus on. It doesn't matter how poisonous the extraction of the LED rare earth metals was for the environment. If on the other hand, your energy is mostly from renewables, such as Sweden for example, then it really matters what the raw material foot print is as during the use phase the CO2 impact is more or less irrelevant. The Fagerhult group, being one of the largest manufacturers in Europe, have great info material about this and great products to accompany their findings such as this one: https://www.fagerhult.com/Products/kvisten/
I do agree with the sentiment that some people here have mentioned that for the layperson, choosing the right kind of light has become infinitely harder. The most obvious choice for the consumer seems to be harsh chemical white light in amounts that exceed the need for most tasks with horrendous flicker. Picking up a light bulb in contrast to that is a child's game. Good thing we still have candles :) Of course not for general illumination but if you are still craving that gentle natural light at times, those are my preferred option.
I have this complaint about harsh lighting in general, not just LED. It really affects my mood! I would address it with lighting fixture design and placement. Soften the harshness of the light by always diffusing it with a lampshade and/or (if it's a spotlight) pointing it towards the wall to create indirect lighting. Positioning lighting at around eye level or slightly lower (by having wall/table lamps, instead of just ceiling lights) also makes lighting seem softer and cozier as it creates softer shadows. Shadows look harsh when all the lighting comes from directly above.
i personally like the moderately bright street lights but i’ve also never lived next to one, so that might change my view if it kept me up at night.
i was traveling once, i don’t quite remember where—either denver or philly (usa)— and there were a couple of blue (almost purple, like those color changing LED that are everywhere) street lights and i thought that was super interesting. it lit the area quite well but didn’t seem to bleed out in the same way as “white” light. i’m fairly certain that it was a failing LED bulb though and not purposeful. separately, i have seen very neon yellow LED lights and those seem decent too. unsure if those are on purpose or another defect.
Fortunately the lights around here and in my home all seem to have the appropriate 2700K. I find the LED headlights in certain cars extremely blinding though. And some manufacturers seem to be adding these extremely, unreasonably bright blue LEDs as indicators to all kinds of electronic equipment. I had a gadget I'd duct taped over the indicator and the light was so strong it still shone through.
Shouldn't be too difficult to find 2700K bulbs online. As for lumens have you considered adding dimmers?
Weird, I've never seen BR30 light bulbs that are that dim before. Those ones are usually meant to be fairly bright, so it's not surprising to me that you're only seeing them as low as 650lm. I tried searching the internet for an incandescent lightbulb like that and didn't really find one; the closest one I could find was a 485lm rated 65w version, which is terrible efficiency even for incandescent. The lumen scale is logarythmic, so the difference between 485 and 650 is not as dramatic of a difference as it sounds - though I would assume you've tried it already and know it's too much for you.
Like every time someone talks about being unhappy with LED lights, I'm going to suggest changing your fixtures. They likely aren't designed to be used with LEDs to begin with and therefore any bulb you put into it has a greater chance of failing prematurely. The best options are the ones that have the LEDs built into them, as they are generally designed in ways that make them last longer.
There are well designed light fixtures, and there are badly designed light fixtures. And between all of those there are also variances in the quality of materials and craftsmanship. The people in charge of installing those street lights should have made a better decision. So no, you're not crazy, but it's important to realize the problem isn't with the LEDs, it's with the implementation.
GE's warm temperature ones seem decent. They're distinctly orangey, and still available in different brightnesses. I can't remember which line they're a part of (Refreh/Reveal/Rewhatever).
There have been more than few articles discussing the problems that LED lighting creates, particularly in art museums. Restaurants are also going to be plagued by the same problems. Explaining all the nuances and the whys/wherefores takes some work, so here’s one such recent article discussing the issues and difficulties that LED lighting creates.