# Light bulb lies



## Ray McCarthy (Dec 17, 2015)

I've said for YEARS that the claims of life and brightness of Halogen, CFL and LED are LIES.
Big brands 'cheating' consumers with false lightbulb efficiency claims

LED colour claims are lies too. Colour temperature is the apparent peak of the spectrum. Sunlight bluer than halogen, long life non-halogen tungsten are more orange. No matter WHAT colour LEDs claim, they are appalling and get worse with time, because they are a near mono-chromatic violet/blue with a yellow phosphor that wears out, so many coloured items show up as wrong colour and the hue is bluer with time. You need to know the Colour Rendition and Colour Temperature (Traditional Fluorescent tubes had both colour temperature figures and spectrum graphs to give idea of colour rendition). Good Colour rendition CFLs cost more and give less light as a more complex mix of phosphors is used. LEDs are too long a wavelength (Traditional Fluorescent and CFLs are native UVA and UVB so work better with phosphors) so can only use a single yellow phosphor. (yellow + blue looks white to us, but it's an illusion).
LEDs will suppress the hormone that helps you sleep as there is too much blue.
(Hence Tablets / Laptops worse at night than Incandescent /Halogen reflecting eInk)

Halogen has the best Colour Rendition / Spectrum.  

The Filament life is misleading on traditional Tungsten and Halogen Tungsten.

Quoted LED life is nonsense as the PSU electronics will fail and the yellow phosphor wears out.
CFL life is an AVERAGE, if left on. In reality it's much shorter for majority due electronics failure, increased electrode wear from on/off and phosphors fading.

Halogen, LED and CFL lamps quote comparable equivalent Watts of a traditional Tungsten, but it's a lie. LED are narrower angle and many colours appear darker. CFL lamps are dimmer with age and lower temperature. They also use dimmer long life traditional Tungsten for comparison.

ASA and ASAI refuse to take any notice.

In the West for the first time in a 100 years the light levels and quality is falling in homes.  Radio reception is destroyed by poorly made PSU of LED lamps and Electronic Ballast of CFLs.
Money savings are a lie if you have genuinely the same light level as more power is needed and the lamps need replaced more often than claimed.


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## J Riff (Dec 17, 2015)

_LEDs will suppress the hormone that helps you sleep as there is too much blue.
(Hence Tablets / Laptops worse at night than Incandescent /Halogen reflecting eInk)_

So, we shouldn't sit in the dark watching movies on the laptop every night?


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 17, 2015)

J Riff said:


> So, we shouldn't sit in the dark watching movies on the laptop every night?


Depends if you want to stay awake or sleep 

Actually while newer TVs and laptops have LED backlights (the cheap ones even start off with a purple hue), my two laptops and 40" Toshiba TV use CCFL tubes, a little like miniature Fluorescent tubes or CFLs but they last much longer (20 years is possible! Though they are bit more yellow and dimmer after 10 years). My netbook uses LED back lights.


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## Mad Alice (Dec 17, 2015)

Did you know that there is a sort of light allergy that affects some people when exposed to fluorescent lights?
They do not see the light as being light, it appears dim to them, and more over  being exposed to the flickering causes them headaches and nausea. It makes them seasick. But what I found interesting was that they don't perceive there to be enough illumination to read with.
Also it has been found that CFL bulbs emit UVC rays in amounts sufficient to create "snow blindness" upon prolonged exposure.
The seriousness of blue light exposure upon the systems of health compromised individuals cannot be overstated. There was a study showing that breast cancers increased in growth during times of blue light photoreception.

Blue light has a dark side - Harvard Health

The Effects of Fluorescent Light on the Ocular Health of Persons with Pre-Existing Eye Pathologies

Low Vision Resources Center  — Artificial Lighting and the Blue Light Hazard

4. Can fluorescent lamps worsen health conditions not related to the skin?

Moreover, the ingredients of manufacture for these lights are extremely toxic to children.
Upon breakage, this becomes a home area environmental hazard.  
Broken #CFL Bulb Syndrome: An Unnecessary Risk For American Households


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 17, 2015)

*CFLs are essentially identical to conventional fluorescent tube lights*. Just a different shape and electronic ballast built into the base instead of a straight tube and ballast in the fitting. A conventional fluorescent tube with passive magnetic ballast will use less energy than Electronic Ballast and no Radio Interference. The Electronic ballasts are unreliable but used to save space, weight and money.

The quality of the coating affects the amount of UVA, UVB and tiny amount of UVC.  Research into Melanoma from them started in 1970s. The flicker also is affected by the coating composition and by design of the Electronic Ballast. They can be perfectly safe. Of course some may be poor quality.

Modern coatings are not anything like as toxic as 50 years ago. There is only a small amount of mercury. You'd not want to eat a broken one, the sharp bits of glass are not great either.

LED lamps are not a better alternative because:

All need Electronic SMPSU: Radio Interference and short life
All lie about light output as it's very uneven and peaks at Yellow and Blue/Violet
Terrible Colour rendition. Only Neons and Sodium lamps are worse. It only appears white. Many coloured objects are wrong colour.

In reality equivalent brightness from a single lamp for working at stuff is impossible. The claimed brightness is a lie.
If you don't want CFLs/fluorescent tubes (identical), then use Halogen, not quite as blue as sunlight, but the healthiest and most natural artificial lamp.

Sun / Tanning salons/lamps ought to be banned except on prescription. They use fluorescent tubes with minimal filtering, age the skin and are a worse skin cancer / Melanoma risk than sunlight.


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## J Riff (Dec 17, 2015)

Okay, electronic ballast.. That's the little circuit board in the base of the bulb, correct? Capacitors, resistors, the usual stuff. Does the ballst affect the quality of the light? Or is that the unreliable part?
Halogen is best, but also most expensive?


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 17, 2015)

J Riff said:


> That's the little circuit board in the base of the bulb, correct? Capacitors, resistors, the usual stuff. Does the ballst affect the quality of the light? Or is that the unreliable part?


On CFLs it's an Electronic Ballast (essentially a special mode to start and then limits current). On LEDs it's a low DC voltage SMPSU. It's very unreliable, makes lot of radio interference (LW, MW, SW, not usually on VHF). The only aspect of light quality affected is the flicker. It costs MUCH more to have a big DC capacitor after input rectifier to reduce flicker. It's the capacitors that fail. Too small, too cheap, too much heat.

Halogens are currently over priced to buy (I suspect something illegal). They do cost more to run*, but not so much more as is claimed by CFL and LED sales pitch as they are even more dishonest about light output and compare their running cost to a long life non-halogen Tungsten bulb, which use most electricity for same light.

Regular traditional Tungsten bulbs ( a coiled coil of Tungsten wire) have mostly nitrogen near ordinary pressure (only plane filament style lamps have a vacuum, where the filament is like a hair of Tungsten) with some noble gases (Argon, maybe a little Krypton) to increase filament life. Halogen Tungsten lamps use higher pressure iodine/Bromine gas  to stop the filament  (a coiled coil of Tungsten wire) evaporating (it's more complicated actually) and thus can run hotter, making light less orange, more like sunlight. So they need quartz glass that can't be touched (grease from fingers on  cold bulb can cause it to fail). More daylight colour temperature Halogen are even more efficient, but shorter life.

[* Your tumble dryer if used is many many times worse than halogen lights, so is immersion, washing machine, dishwasher etc]


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 20, 2015)

Basic natural monochromatic coloured LEDs are good for Christmas tree lights. Though some have controllers that make so much interference that they interfere with WiFi as well as radio. Obviously the "CE" tests are not happening or flawed.


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