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Ask HN: What do you use to replace incandescent lights?

by decasia on 11/17/23, 11:52 AM with 85 comments

• by mcv on 11/17/23, 12:11 PM

  LED lights can look like anything. My son has LED lights in his room that can flash in all the colours of the rainbow. We have a couple of LED bulbs that do a very good approximation of those dim incandescent bulbs were you can clearly see the filaments.

  Just shop around for better LED lights. There's a lot of variation out there.

• by EvanAnderson on 11/17/23, 2:36 PM

  Thread hijack: Is there a simple cause for the terrible longevity I'm getting with LED bulbs in my house? Regardless of the bulb brand, regardless of the fixture type, regardless of bulb orientation, seemingly regardless of the amount of use my LED bulbs start flickering and periodically turning off after the bulbs are 1-2 years old. It's maddening. I've tried expensive name brand bulbs (Phillips being the most recent one that comes to mind) and less well-regarded bulbs (Feit Electric, Sylvania, IKEA) and my experiences haven't varied. I love the quality of the light and the instant full brightness. I hate that I'm always replacing a bulb somewhere.

• by jacknews on 11/17/23, 2:21 PM

  I always found regular incandescents slightly dingy, halogen bulbs have a much richer light.

  Look for high-CRI leds with a colour temperature around 4000K . The 5/6k are quite glaring and cold, the 3k emulate the dingy yellows of low/medium-wattage incandescent.

• by slau on 11/17/23, 2:17 PM

  I mostly use Trådfri IKEA bulbs. In rooms where a lot of light is required, the white-with-adjustable temperature bulbs are good. Anywhere else, the multi-colour ones.

  Except for the bathroom and storage room, all lights in the flat are “smart”.

• by jupp0r on 11/17/23, 2:59 PM

  I'm a very color rendering index sensitive person. As it seems to be the case with you, I cannot stand narrow spectrum lights in my home, especially in areas where food is prepared or consumed. I also can't stand light with high color temperatures (ie blueish lights), unless it's in a working area like a garage workshop or gym.

  If you are willing to spend more money (from my experience the cost is about double of what you would pay for narrow spectrum LEDs), there are good options available for warm, high CRI lighting.

  To give you an example of lights that I recently installed and am quite happy with: https://www.solidapollo.com/Candlelight-Warm-White-ULTRA-Hig...

• by VoodooJuJu on 11/17/23, 2:55 PM

  Unfortunately, there is no replacement for tungsten filament bulbs.

  Nothing beats the warm soothing glow of those things. I use long-life low-watt appliance tungstens in all my lamps, and I will never part with them. The light is superior to that emitted from LEDs, and the appliance bulbs are actually cheaper and more reliable than LEDs, believe it or not. With tungstens, I sleep better, my house is cozier, and I save some money.

  LED bulbs are a meme.

• by Tade0 on 11/17/23, 3:12 PM

  I'm in the market for some lighting now and my dream is to have OLED lights:

  https://www.omled.com/product-page/omled-one-s5l

  They're eye-wateringly expensive and not particularly bright, but the spectrum is reportedly much friendlier than LEDs and they're currently making their way to the automotive world, so prices might decrease over time.

  A more realistic proposition might be red phosphorus LEDs:

  https://store.yujiintl.com/collections/high-cri-led-technolo...

  The key thing is that CRI doesn't tell the whole story about a light's spectrum, as it's an average of 15 test colours and R9 - red - often scores very low, producing a visibly worse image despite high CRI.

  Look for lights that advertise high R9.

• by akaij on 11/17/23, 6:13 PM

  I have a 20/strip Nichia 757 2700K LEDs with CRI 90+ [1] taped on the back of each monitor, cost me around €25 with the appropriate power supply [2]. I control them with a Shelly RGBW2, which I bought for an additional €20.

  I run them at between 25-50% brightness most of the time.

  [1] https://www.leds.shop/products/conextbar-power-supply-module...

  [2] https://www.leds.shop/products/meanwell-lph-18-24w-power-sup...

• by notjtrig on 11/17/23, 12:30 PM

  I have something like this it’s very nice at the warmest setting but only equal to maybe 25w incandescent. https://www.amazon.com/ONLSITY-Pendant-Lights-Outdoor-Contro... I think the defused cover on these lights make them exceptional source of light.

  For regular bulbs I use Energetic Edison style bulb https://www.amazon.com/Equivalent-Filament-Daylight-Non-Dimm...

• by stetrain on 11/17/23, 2:20 PM

  Philips Hue lights (RGB or just color temp) where appropriate. Philips 'Ultra Definition' bulbs or GE Relax HD LED bulbs where dumb bulbs are appropriate.

  Paying a few dollars more for the broad-spectrum LED bulbs really does make a difference in light quality.

• by mickelsen on 11/19/23, 12:16 AM

  Interesting previous discussion that touches upon LED and light quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35371750

• by scrapheap on 11/17/23, 1:14 PM

  I've grown accustomed to compact fluorescent bulbs these days - mainly to having been given a lot of them for free about 10 years ago. I suspect that I shall be using them for a while yet as my stock pile of them is still filling a shelf in one of my cupboards :)

  Strangely the thing that I really noticed when we stopped using incandescent bulbs was that it felt a lot colder during winter nights, as the majority of the energy the old bulbs drew was converted to heat rather than light.

• by eljimmy on 11/17/23, 2:16 PM

  I've got the color/RGB Philips Hue bulbs indoors and I find you can change them to a nice warm yellow color which is nice but they also can be changed to act like a candle.

  These are Christmas light specific - but Tru-Tone makes LED bulbs that look like filament bulbs: https://www.tru-tone.com/. I've just ordered some so I'll update this comment once I've had a look.

• by h2odragon on 11/17/23, 12:25 PM

  Phosphor leds are a little better. the "warm filament" style and the white leds that get used for projectors and grow lights are both a little better than single frequency LED lights.

  Multi element LED banks are good if distant and diffused; but direct lighting from multiple points like that produces fun multiple colored shadows and that is exhausting for close eyeball work, I find. Not good for photography either.

  prohibiting incandescent bulbs made less sense than prohibiting alcohol

• by svilen_dobrev on 11/17/23, 3:29 PM

  post-tungsten.. not yet: stock halogen/sodium sticks/bulbs while still possible

  or i you must:

  - search for LEDs with CRI>90, beeter >=95. beware, it is NOT easy.

  Very hard to find recently. Strips, panels, bulbs.. anything. No idea why but (at least in East Europe) these were more available 2 years ago than now.

  Don't use one huge single source, have instead many smaller, "constellation" like (It's the resulting Lux'es-at-surface that matter not source Lumens). Mix and match (more of) 3000k + (less of) 4000k, avoid 6000k. e.g. 6x3W 3000K CRI90 + 4x3W 4000K CRI90 in a criss-cross "grating". Or have them on/off in variable ratios and few switches. Dimmable? up to you.

  i have at home several such "chandeliers" made out of whatever-materials-were-around.. work perfectly :)

  (quickly hacked page :) https://svilendobrev.com/napravisam/lampa/

  have fun

• by 50 on 11/17/23, 3:13 PM

  For as long as I may remember, I've had the same problem. I detest artificial light and I'm a sucker for the twilit, moonlit, and candlelit. Seems like modernization means having every single dark corner illuminated.

  Aren't there types of candles that are long-lasting and which don't give off the seemingly bad chemicals I tend to hear about?

• by mikewarot on 11/18/23, 5:09 AM

  You could get 2-40 watt "appliance bulbs" meant for use in ovens, etc... and use a RAID-1 adapter* to fit them into a single socket... that'll get you 80 watts of pure incandescent joy.

  If you were a tetrachromat, you'd be particularly sensitive to color gamut.

  * - AKA "Y" adapter

• by Kirby64 on 11/18/23, 4:01 AM

  Philips Ultra Definition line is quite good. Around $2-5 a bulb, come in a variety of wattages and styles, and they make a 2700k bulb that dims to 2000-2200k as it dims which mimics the incandescent dimming behavior. They’re also all 95CRI with decent R9 for the price.

• by thiht on 11/18/23, 1:33 PM

  Are incandescent bulbs still a thing in the US? In France they got banned like 10 years ago and it’s not a problem for anyone anymore…

  Honestly, you’re just being dramatic over nothing. Just buy warm LED bulbs and favor accent lamps instead of the big light.

• by billyt555 on 11/17/23, 2:27 PM

  I use the 40 watt “appliance bulb” incandescents that you can still get when feasible - like in my small office. But they only work for certain situations- hard to fully light a room on 40 watt bulbs, but for accent lighting they are great.

• by firebot on 11/17/23, 2:27 PM

  LEDs can satisfy the color temperature of incandescents. They're actually fuller spectrum. They are designed for such. You can purchase a wide range of them. They're also extremely more efficient.

• by jollyllama on 11/17/23, 3:11 PM

  Decorative Edison incandescents. They're exempt. I like dim lights anyway. Just watch out for LED ones that they're trying to pass off as incandescent.

• by francisofascii on 11/17/23, 2:40 PM

  2200K LED bulbs. For example, GE's vintage style. Still not as good as an incandescent. Finding a really good, dimmable, warm, LED bulb is still elusive.

• by fasteddie31003 on 11/17/23, 2:39 PM

  I’m wondering what to do when my incandescent light bulbs in my sauna go out. I’m pretty sure leds won’t work well in a 200F+ environment.

• by LargoLasskhyfv on 11/17/23, 3:40 PM

  LED-Filament. Non-smart. Very warm-white, meaning below 3000k as 'base-lighting'. For color-stuff there is other stuff.

• by davidmurdoch on 11/17/23, 2:40 PM

  I splurged on bulbs from Waveform Lightning for my office and bedroom. The have 95 CRI flicker free bulbs.

• by cube2222 on 11/17/23, 2:27 PM

  Philips Hue RGB lights. I couldn’t find non-rgb lights that would go to such levels of warmth.

• by kanbara on 11/17/23, 2:08 PM

  get better led bulbs.

  i honestly dont understand how people become so fixated on minutæ. my led bulbs look great, and i’ve never thought “wow i really miss inefficient, energy-wasting, hot, single-colour bulbs from 30 years ago”

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• by tomxor on 11/17/23, 3:10 PM

  To all of those arguing spectral distribution doesn't matter:

  Consider Spectral Reflectance.

  We use only three wavelengths for LED displays that manage to show us millions of colours, HumOns are trichromats right? So the thinking goes - we should also be able to use narrow band light sources to illuminate our physical environment with the same results. But this is just not how illumination works in the physical world.

  The difference with displays, is that we are looking directly at the light source, the light source is the image; with lamps, we are looking indirectly at reflections from our physical environment, and physical surfaces reflect different wavelengths with different intensities, i.e they have a spectral reflectance curve (and these can be pretty crazy, not simple smooth curves). The other key detail is that our eyes are not narrow band, they merely quantise broad spectrum into three colours. So just because some surface might reflect brightly at 480nm but not 420nm (humans peak sensitivity), doesn't mean we don't see it, it still looks blue, just less so. The issue is that most standard LED lighting spectral output (phosphors and all) might focus on 420nm so that it looks white, but might have a dip at around 480nm so that reflections on that particular surface appear less blue than they should.

  This is the issue people are experiencing when some things look too dark or too grey, surfaces have complex reflectance curves, most cheap LED lights have extremely poor spectral distribution and they can basically miss those surfaces. The more spikey and narrow band a surface's reflectance curve the more likely a narrow band light source is going to miss the reflection wavelengths and do a poor job of illuminating it.

  [edit]

  To be more fair to LED lighting, the comparison I made above is not entirely fair. Unlike a monitor's output LED lighting actually attempts to get broader spectrum output by adding phosphor layers to convert wavelengths of the LED, it's just that most ordinary price household LED lamps are still very poor in their distribution. It's not impossible to generate a better spectral distribution with LED sources, it's just expensive, and requires more than one LED source wavelength+phosphor combination. The other issue with cheap LEDs you might notice is that the phosphor layers tend to degrade, changing the colour temperature over time, and the inverters commonly break before the filament resulting in a very short and flickery lifetime.

  I haven't used these, but this thread instigated a search, seems like there are broad spectrum LED manufacturers like this one [0]. Their target customer makes sense... Some art will undoubtedly look weird in narrow band light.

  [0] https://www.savemoneycutcarbon.com/category/soraa-lighting-r...

• by Syonyk on 11/17/23, 2:55 PM

  I stocked up on incandescent bulbs last year, and run most of mine on dimmers anymore, because that radically helps longevity. My overhead bulbs in the living room (BR30 form factor) are a good bit over a year old, but they're almost always dimmed down, if not deeply, then "a notch or two below full bright," and that increases their lifespan massively.

  I went down a massive rabbit hole last year based on someone's throwaway comment about LEDs and blue, and ended up with my own spectrometer, and quite a few words written on light bulbs, blue light, etc: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/spectrometer/ It includes a lot of spectrums of LEDs vs incandescent, and explains more about the blue spike in all our modern white LEDs (because that's the way that particular bulb type works - a blue emitter with phosphor coatings around it). Unfortunately, incandescents are harder to find these days (stock up on eBay, but buy a few before you bulk - the new "standard bulb" incandescents from a lot of places sing loudly on a dimmer, and are annoyingly audible).

  As for candles, skip those and go straight to kerosene lanterns. I've also gone down that rabbit hole: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/kerosene/ My advice is to get a few of the large cold blast style lanterns (the Dietz Blizzard is easily my favorite - it's a good looking lantern, and it puts out a good amount of light, while not being purely massive like the Jupiter I have), and then get some of the low sulfur kerosene substitutes (Klean Heat is one brand, Pure Heat is another, go raid your local tractor supply/farm store sort of place, though Home Depot and Lowes also carry them in my area). These are "no sulfur" fuels compared to the "low sulfur 1K kerosene," and have less of a room note when running. You basically shouldn't smell the lantern except on startup and shutdown if everything is correct, and if you put a particulate meter in the room, it should be far lower than with the candles (especially if you have any airflow at all - candles soot easily, lanterns far less so until it gets really windy).

  If you look at the papers that talk about indoor kerosene particulate pollution, you'll find that the high readings come from "bare wick burners" - not a well designed cold blast lantern, which are down at the bottom of the readings, if at all.

  Sorry, it's about a year late to be doing this. The new old stock bulbs I really like are no longer floating around eBay, and it's harder to find the older stock stuff anywhere. I just have what should be a lifetime supply of incandescents socked away for the rooms I use in the evenings.

• by Syonyk on 11/17/23, 3:14 PM

  Heh. Well this thread got disappeared in a hurry.

• by bloopernova on 11/17/23, 2:15 PM

  We use Hue bulbs. They're much more expensive, but we can tune their colours to pretty much exactly what we want.

• by harrid on 11/17/23, 3:26 PM

  All light other than incandescent is awful in my opinion. I'm still almost 100% on them