On 2/4/2015 7:43 PM, Jacob Ritorto wrote: I wondered who still used carbon filament bulbs. Ben.

On 02/04/2015 09:18 PM, ben wrote: Well, Ferrowatt still makes the antique carbon filament lamps: http://www.ferrowatt.com/light-bulbsLight And you can still get them from Rejuvination Lighting: http://www.rejuvenation.com/catalog/categories/lighting/bulbs/reproduction-… Personally, I worry a bit about LED lamps supplanting the incandescents. In my home, I have several custom fixtures that rely on the look of the clear bulbs. An LED lamp, not even a fake filament one, isn't going to look right. I've gone shopping for fixtures and am disgusted with the "made in China" looks of some. --Chuck

On 2/5/2015 12:46 AM, William Donzelli wrote: What do you mean by, "without guilt" ? How can "burners" be used without this guilt? Thank you- -John

Me too - though for a different reason: a (tungsten) incandescent bulb is an extremely useful thing when working on small appliances. Hook it up in series with the mains and shorts in the appliance (a) don't do any damage and (b) are obvious when the bulb goes full brightness. (Of course, the bulb has to be sized appropriately for the appliance's normal draw; a 50W bulb will false-positive when testing an iron. :-) And then there are people who use them as heating elements in (eg) wood-drying kilns. And I'm sure there are plenty of other applications I haven't heard/thought of. Perhaps fortunately, it appears that here, at least, incandescents aren't completely banned, just vanilla 100W ones. (I am, though, somewhat worried about this being the camel's nose.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 02/05/2015 01:05 PM, John Kaur wrote: You take standard 5mm LEDs, cut one lead real short and solder a 1/4W or 1/10W resistor to that lead. If your console has sockets for the lamps, this combo can be plugged into the socket after the leads are trimmed to the right length. if no sockets, then they can be soldered into the PC board. The resistor value needs to be figured out by trial and error, due to the variations in LED efficiency. if the console has heep-alive resistors that keep the filaments slightly warm, these will need to be removed, as they will keep the LEDs partly lit. Jon

I think CFLs are kind of terrible. http://www.richsoil.com/CFL-fluorescent-light-bulbs.jsp On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 11:10 AM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 03:26:14PM -0500, Jacob Ritorto wrote: I certainly won't miss CFLs, but that site is also veering on the conspiracy nut rant complete with cherry-picked facts to support it. The basic problem is that cheap-arse CFLs are over-marketed junk that make false claims as to the quantity and quality of light output, and an incandescent really is better than these on pretty much everything except power consumption. AFAICS, most mass-market CFLs fall into this category. There are however some nice outliers such as the ~2000lm 6500K bulb I found at an electrical wholesalers. Turn that bad boy on and you can almost hear the spiders frying from all the light pouring into the corners of the room. LED lighting is actually delivering what the CFLs falsely claimed, provided one doesn't need more than about 400lm per bulb due to heat issues. For the customary single bulb per room in typical UK lighting, it means we're stuck with CFLs until the technology improves or one replaces the light fitting with one that takes multiple bulbs. We'll probably see a whole load of crappy LED bulbs when that finally becomes mainstream though.

On 2/6/2015 2:30 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: So, why do you think that happened with the LEDs, Chuck? - J.

----- Original Message ----- I have replaced every bulb in my apartment with the CREE LEDs from Home Depot. I like them much better than my older Incandescent lights and my older CFLs. I used to get CFLs from Panasonic, because the cheaper ones were terrible. I very happy with my LEDs.

On Fri, Feb 06, 2015 at 07:05:10AM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote: [...] I'm going to retract this paragraph as I happened to be in Ryness earlier, and got to check out the 2015 range which included 1600lm LED bulbs at a not completely outrageous price. Sadly, the only high-power ones they stock have a colour temperature of 2700K, aka "is this thing on?" for those of us who are severely red-green colourblind, and I got grunted at in the usual London Customer Service style when I asked if they had any in 6500K and was informed I would have to buy a CFL. Anyway, given that 1600lm LED bulbs exist, and 6500K LED bulbs exist, one that does both must surely exist. Now if only I could figure out where to buy a few...

On 02/05/2015 01:14 PM, Tothwolf wrote: A quick tour of my local big-box store shows that halogen versions of these standard incandescents are available. So a 72W halogen = 100W standard; 43W halogen = 60W standard, etc. There are LOTS of them left in stock; I can go to any big-box store and buy them. The odd thing is that the more energy-efficient T8 lamps are more expensive than the remaining T12s. Converting from T12 to T8 is mostly a matter of changing out the ballast--which you may want to do anyway, as the old iron ballasts weren't terribly efficient and did have a tendency to develop an annoying hum. --Chuck

On 02/05/2015 02:03 PM, Tothwolf wrote: Well, I first converted all of mine to T8 using surplus GE industrial ballasts from the 90s. So far, so good--no failures in over a decade.. A peek inside shows them to be pretty well constructed. On the other hand, I picked up a lot of "SASI" brand ones about 5 years later and they've pretty much all failed. The most common cause seems to be the failure of an 0.5 ohm 5W power resistor, which I assume is used for current-sensing. I will give the T8 lamps this--they use less power and last longer than the T12s. About the only reason that I've had to change them is when the light output has fallen off noticeably. But then, you'd replace an LED fixture for the same reason--assuming that it lasted that long. It seems that in this case, you get what you pay for. --Chuck

On 02/05/2015 03:14 PM, Tothwolf wrote: I have VERY few incandescents here. I have started converting our kitchen (where the lights are on a LOT of the day) to LED. I couldn't find anything I liked (some LED fixtures are actually on recall as a fire hazard) so I built my own. I made a 10 LED fixture with Cree 1W LEDs first for our pantry/laundry room, which had the worst lighting in the house. (A recessed fixture too cramped to fit a CFL, and made so it lit a spot on the floor and not the room.) I built my own constant current source for it, and it was a huge success. So, then I built two retrofits for dual 48" fluorescent tubes. These have a string of 20 1 W Cree LEDs and a commercial LED lighting power supply. The old magnetic ballast drew 103 W, the new LED system shows 21 W, and the lights actually appear brighter than the fluorescents. I was worried that the color temperature would be horrible, the LEDs look real blue if you look at them, but with the fixture, diffuser and the whole room, they look perfectly normal. (Warning, if you look right AT the LEDs, you will only be seeing spots for a couple minutes, they are blindingly bright.) Jon

On 02/06/2015 10:15 AM, js at cimmeri.com wrote: OK, here's a bad picture of my first retrofit, 10 Cree 1W lamps and a home-made power supply. The fluorescent tube retrofits are made on strips of 2" wide PC board material. I have some left over from an old project, so cut it into 2" strips 22" long. I cut little grooves in the copper to make 11 2 x 2" squares, and check with a meter that they are isolated. I then solder 10 Cree XPEBWT-01-0000-00CC2 LEDs across the grooves. Then, I solder a pair of these strips in series to make a 20 LED string. I need to make a picture of this next time I'm in there, or make another unit (which is on the to-do list). I use an LED Supply LED25W-72-C0350 power supply from Digi-Key to power it. These units have been running in a flush drop-ceiling fixture for almost a year now, and are still doing very well. The 10-LED job has been running almost 2 years, now. These things are NOT cheap, but I'm expecting to get better life than most of the commercial units, which I think have crummy thermal design. I think they work out well. Jon

On Fri, 6 Feb 2015, Chuck Guzis wrote: What do all-y'all think of the Feit LED 4' shop light? ("3700 lumen 38W 4100K") Costco sells them for $40, and sometimes further discount. "But, if I was sold out of them, then I'd only charge $30"

On 02/06/2015 10:04 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote: I'll add a bit that the drop-in T12/T8-style replacement tubes don't seem to make a lot of sense in most cases. A traditional fluorescent lamps emission pattern is pretty much omnidirectional, radially, at least. So the typical 2-tube fluorescent fixture is painted white inside to reflect the light emitted from the side obscured by the fixture. An LED is by nature highly directional, so it would seem to be a waste of energy and money to use a 23W LED replacement tube priced at several times the cost of a 32W T8 tube. I purchased a box (30) of Philips 32W T8 lamps for less than $50 from my local Lowe's. Given that we have some of the lowest electricity costs in the nation here in the Pacific Northwest, it didn't make sense to upgrade the fixtures to LED. I'm probably not going to live long enough to recoup the investment from energy savings. The ROI just isn't there for me. Not that I don't believe in conserving when practical. I spent more on a super-insulated water heater because I know that the big gray thing consumes a sizable portion of my electrical budget. On the other hand, I use an inductive cooktop in the kitchen, not because it saves energy, but that it's so much nicer to cook with than the traditional electric resistive version. Finally, I turn my computer gear off with a switch on a power strip because it's safer from a fire perspective to do so, not because I want to save on "zombie power". --Chuck

On 02/06/2015 01:48 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: I note that Walmart and other big-box stores are selling the Lights of America version as well (~~$38). But you're not behaving sensibly if you buy that brand, based on my own experience. Well, there are ceiling cans and ceiling cans. The type that I have carry an IC rating (insulation contact), which, in my case means that they're under more than a foot of blown-in fiberglass insulation. Incandescents don't care about heat, but I suspect that LEDs do. --Chuck

On Fri, 6 Feb 2015, Jon Elson wrote: These are single-ended-power type retrofit tubes, so a rapid start ballast really shouldn't harm them (the two pins on one end are not connected to the circuit). The older double-ended-power type retrofit tubes are the ones to be afraid of...they are a shock hazard (well documented) if both ends of the tube aren't fully seated. The double-ended-power types are also now banned in many countries. Are you sure those tubes on Amazon require the ballast to be removed? Many of these retrofit tubes do not, although some require the starter circuit to be bypassed. [In the US, with 4ft T12 and T8 fixtures, the starter circuit is built into the ballast, but that convention isn't universal, and in many countries fluorescent fixtures use a separate starter module in a socket.]

On 02/06/2015 07:20 PM, Tothwolf wrote: A lot of T8 solid-state ballasts don't use the heater at all--they tie the two pins on each end together. --Chuck

On 02/06/2015 11:35 AM, Jon Elson wrote: Oops, sorry, here's the link : http://pico-systems.com/images/LEDlight3.JPG Jon