Light Bulb Ban Suspended For Another Year!

Being an estate sale maven I have found those contraband lightbulbs readily available for sale (for now).

LED lights are great!
But, if you don't have a way to reduce the voltage spikes that you get from the power company and those very brief brown outs, say goodbye to the life of those "great" LED lights.

On the back of my house, I have installed an entire house surge suppressor.
Why?
With all of the "electronic" items with their so-called computer chips in each and every household appliance and these LED lights,
an electrician friend recommended to me the entire house suppressor.
I was in luck for he also installed it for me as well. Of course, he also told me to tell people that I know how important it is to install surge suppressors onto electronic equipment these days with computer chips.

Also, another thing to know.
If you have the "old" dimmer switches that was ok with the old incandescent bulbs.
Well, those old switches really don't work with the LED lighting.
Sure, it seems like they dim like they are suppose too, but the old switch will burn out the LED bulb in no time as it is giving the LED lighting the wrong voltage.
You'll have to go to a hardware store and get the "New" dimmer switch for LED lighting!

Personally I don't like the new LED lights, I find that the light it emits is very tiring for the eyes and what's more when I film something and an LED light is present you can see a flashing coming from this light, not with a good old globe

And I just threw out a box of about 50 of these.....

I use these Led filament bulbs. Warm light like an incandescent bulb.

I still have large stockpile of incandescent bulbs. The one place I really still use them are in the dining room chandelier with candelabra base flame tip 60 watt clear bulbs. The LED versions of these have an enlarged base (for the driver circuitry) that raises the bulb up by about 1/4 inch and the yellow phosphor LED "filaments" are an eyesore when the light is turned off. So I made sure to hoard a 10+ year supply of those incandescent candelabra bulbs while I could. I suppose when I run out, if they haven't managed to decrease that bass size down to normal, I'll just have to replace the fixture. I see they have finally come out with LEDs with a white appearance when turned off rather than yellow. Hopefully that eventually becomes the norm.

I now have LED bulbs in many of the lamps and ceiling fixtures throughout the house, although they don't tend to last too much longer than incandescent bulbs in the totally enclosed ceiling fixtures as they run a bit hotter there. Most say "not suitable for use in totally enclosed fixtures" printed on them, and it takes a bit of shopping around for ones that are designed for use in such locations.

The worst failure mode of these LEDs is when they become a strobe light. My cousin has epilepsy and this has been a concern for her.

I too have found CFLs to last longer than LEDs, I still have a couple of those in use around here too.

Internal light element failures:

What I was referring to was having only one or two out of a set of 4 or 5 go bad. In the dining chandelier, I had a bulb go out over time every couple weeks. Then from 5 bulbs I was down to 4. I had already changed out the dimner for one LED compatible. These were bought on Amazon through one of their contractors. They were of the filaments similar to what Levent showed, but more in a teardrop shape for the exterior clear glass.

What would happen is that out of the 4 or 5 LED light bars inside of one bulb, one would go out or go completely overbright. Another 3 to 6 weeks, another, until I was down to one or two. I replaced the bad ones with ones roughly similar from Lowes, had one of those go out also.

Line voltage surges:

Electric line sub-surges? There will always be a certain amount of spike in shutting switchgear down. Even turning off your household light switches gives spikes from the arching of switch contacts. I gather that the design or materials of these were on the cheap. Brand name bulbs didn't have this experience until some I bought recently. Inferior semiconductor components?

No, there is more going on, a desire to make a quick buck I gather.

LED compatible switches:

Regarding LED compatible switches, I have a motion sensing switch as one of the switches to the door between garage and laundry room. I put one there to trigger the lights on when opening the door and room was dark enough, helped with both hands holding grocery bags, didn't have to switch the light to see in a dark room. If during the day with enough light through laundry room window, then light was not needed and it wouldn't come on unless I manually clicked it. Also when carrying a basketful of clothes to wash, it was nice to enter the room and have the laundry room light come on automatically. I had the duration set to 2.5 minutes which was sufficient, light automatically goes out after leaving 2.5 minutes later. This is the best use of an occupant motion sensor switch in a house.

Installed close to 20 years ago, says it would work with incandescent, fluorescent, and compact fluorescent. (Then, LEDs weren't common yet.) CPF's I had, it would strongly strobe quickly. In replacing the incandescents with LED's when I changed the wornout fixture, some would strobe brightly, others were OK. So, I put the ones that were OK. Several months have passed, it still works fine. These are GE looking similar to Levent's with dimming capability, but I am not using as dimming.

The motion sensing light apparently uses electronics that is incompatible with electronics on some CPF's and LED's. The switch is logically a one element FLIP-FLOP storage device. The slave 3-way switch at the other door, to turn light on manually, you flip the switch. to turn light off, you flip it on, then off (SET - RESET; it's a FLIP-FLOP.)

In the master bedroom, I have a single miniature base 60 Watt incandescent bulb fixture on my ceiling fan. It warns against putting any incandescent bulb greater than 60 Watts, because the lighting fixture bulb socket and wiring cannot handle the heat of higher Wattage bulbs. However, LED's consume less power. One manufacturer states his 100 Watt equivalent LED uses 13 Watts. That is a little less than 1/4th that of 60 Watts. I upgraded it to put out the light of 100 Watts. However today, there is a certain amount of "wokeness" in some bulb written instructions and on-line that tells you that you should only put say, a 60 Watt equivalent max LED bulb in a 60 Watt incandescent light socket. It warns against using higher Wattage LED bulbs. Fooey, a 100 Watt equivalent LED bulb rated at 13 Watts DOES NOT put out the heat of a 60 Watt incandescent bulb. More climate nonsense.)  

However, the touch sense dimmer switch I installed 23 years ago was incompatible with this LED bulb, strobing wildly and brightly, not a good thing. Not only unpleasant, but would destroy the bulb is short order. I replaced the switch with an LED compatible dimmer, now it works properly.

Power company line voltage stability:

The issues of power company voltage stability probably varies from location to location and company to company. I haven't had problems with Southwestern Public Service Company, bought out by Xcel Energy, except when we had a bad lightning strike. Other lightning strikes, we may have had an outage for a short time, but nothing more.

And no, I'm not going to invest in electric distribution panel spike protection, unless I live in an area where the electrical distribution is of poor quality. I've already got spike protection where it counts, on computers and computer devices, even one on the garage door opener.

LED lighting quality:

Regarding the unpleasantness of LED lighting, goes again back to the quality. The cheaper bulbs probably have minimal line filtration components and operate on 60 cycles (or 50 depending where you are at.) It was the strobing of fluorescent magnetic ballasts that was tiring to some, triggered epileptic fits in others. (Modern electronic ballasts switch the A.C. in thousands of cycles per second, not 50 or 60 CPS.) The noticeable constant 60 Hertz strobe flickering may be a symptom of poor design in some LED's.

One thing I did notice that the recent bulbs seem to be cooler in color (more of a bluish tint) than others, that's probably why some are noticing the less than pleasant bluish lighting. Several years ago, seems they were more truer to stated color temperature.

An interesting 17 minute video substantiating my point on short lived LED's.

At a recent estate sale: