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Fluorescent Phaseout

Fluorescent was already pretty bad for getting colors beyond one or two of the common types. You could get tubes in yellow or red or pink or really any color of the rainbow but they were always special order and extremely expensive.
LED replacements now come in whatever color the factory wished to load the Pick and Place machine with.
 
I like to use the "vintage look" LED bulbs outside. They have a gold tint to the glass, and the color temperature is rated 2200K IIRC. I like the orange light outside better than blueish since it doesn't seem to take your eyes out of night vision mode as much.
Something like this:
www.usa.lighting.philips.com

3.3A15/VIN/820/E26/CL/GL/DIM 4/1FB T20 | null

Modern technology meets iconic design. Get the look and feel of vintage incandescent bulbs with extra warm light and energy saving LED technology.
www.usa.lighting.philips.com www.usa.lighting.philips.com

When I was still living with my parents, some different colored CFLs showed up one day, and one of them was hot pink. It put out the most terrible pink/red light you could imagine. I used to put it in different fixtures around the house and wait for someone to scream in agony as they walked into the room and turned the light on. One day it mysteriously "disappeared".
You can do some fun stuff with phosphors I guess. Technically we should be able to do most of this same stuff with LEDs.
 
Okay, I have 4 dual tube florescent lamps in my garage overhead. What is the consensus on replacing them. They've been there since 1989. Some work and some don't.
 
Thanks everyone! I was considering replacing the flourescents with LED's if the bugs didn't like the light, but it appears I'll wait until the bulbs die out. I was hoping it had something to do with frequency or something not visible in the human vision wavelength.
 
Moondog said:
Thanks everyone! I was considering replacing the flourescents with LED's if the bugs didn't like the light, but it appears I'll wait until the bulbs die out. I was hoping it had something to do with frequency or something not visible in the human vision wavelength.
Click to expand...

All light attracts bugs to some extent,
Ye Olde bug lights are the least attractive but heat and any light will still bring in bugs

Oddly low pressure sodium draw the least of any non-coated bulb

outdoorspaceaccents.com

Patio Lights That DON’T Attract Bugs, Which Colors Are Best? | Outdoor Space Accents

Those balmy summer evenings on the patio would be a little slice of heaven, but for one thing – bugs! Your lights attract them, so…
outdoorspaceaccents.com outdoorspaceaccents.com


Anything with UV (fluorescent, high intensity outdoor LEDs and other oddities like neon attract the most)

So led bulbs that look like Edison bulbs have little heat and minimal UV adjacent light so should work ok.

Pure bug yellow is best but not sure how much better it works or how easy it is to find
 
Finally had a chance to look at one of my 4' t8-size borked LED tubes. I discovered a fatal flaw in the design--and don't quite know what to do about it to keep it from repeating. The lamp is a power supply that drives a string of series-parallel LEDs. 5 paralleled in a group, which groups are then series-connected. Here's the design rub. Should any one of the LEDs in a 5-group string go open (that's how they usually fail), the remainder of the parallel LEDs shoulder the entire current load. Then another LED in the string goes open and the individual LED load gets greater...you can see where this is headed.

I'm going to try a fix and replace the bad LEDs, then lower the driving voltage to see if that makes things better.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Finally had a chance to look at one of my 4' t8-size borked LED tubes. I discovered a fatal flaw in the design--and don't quite know what to do about it to keep it from repeating. The lamp is a power supply that drives a string of series-parallel LEDs. 5 paralleled in a group, which groups are then series-connected. Here's the design rub. Should any one of the LEDs in a 5-group string go open (that's how they usually fail), the remainder of the parallel LEDs shoulder the entire current load. Then another LED in the string goes open and the individual LED load gets greater...you can see where this is headed.

I'm going to try a fix and replace the bad LEDs, then lower the driving voltage to see if that makes things better.
Click to expand...
A common cheap fix is to short failed open LEDs, it only extends the life but sometimes can last years.

I had a few with infant mortality and wrapped a wire around the failed element and 4 years later it still works.

YouTube videos exist for “repairing “ LEDs and for increasing their efficiency like the middle eastern bulbs
 
Shorting an open LED only increases the load on other series-connected LEDs, which will then fail by being over-driven.
I'm going to lower the output voltage on the power supply (matter of changing a resistor value) on the repaired lamp to see if it works.
 
A 2 tube replacement from Home Depot is fairly cheap, so is the repair effort even worth it. Although if you have the time . . .
 

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Amazon has them cheaper. Bought a box recently that ran about $6+ per tube. But I'm not content to throw broken things away. You should have garnered that about me by now...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Amazon has them cheaper. Bought a box recently that ran about $6+ per tube. But I'm not content to throw broken things away. You should have garnered that about me by now...
Click to expand...
I have but I thought I give you a slight nudge anyway. :)
 
Chuck(G) said:
Shorting an open LED only increases the load on other series-connected LEDs, which will then fail by being over-driven.
I'm going to lower the output voltage on the power supply (matter of changing a resistor value) on the repaired lamp to see if it works.
Click to expand...
They do eventually fail, mine sat in a box years then died almost instantly.

4 years later it still works (-1) overdriven.
There are ways to turn down the juice after shorting one out.
 
So you replace a slowly dimming flouescent with a more rapidly dimming led when one led causes a whole string to go dark.

Most modern LED lights are fed a constant current, and the power supply is often just a buck regulator and directly mains connected, so tinkering can potentially be hazardous, with
the unidentified switching chips making for plenty of guess work for mods.
 
mark0x01 said:
So you replace a slowly dimming flouescent with a more rapidly dimming led when one led causes a whole string to go dark.

Most modern LED lights are fed a constant current, and the power supply is often just a buck regulator and directly mains connected, so tinkering can potentially be hazardous, with
the unidentified switching chips making for plenty of guess work for mods.
Click to expand...
Yeah modern LEDs in lightbulb’s really aren’t, all sorts of shortcuts taken, very few components, heck your lucky if they (the factory) install the LEDs with the correct Polarity in respect to the circuit. (From past experience with one that popped a chip)
Usually it’s extremely simple to modify one if you have more time than sense.
Sadly some bulbs are so cheaply built with so few components it’s not possible to modify enough if one chip fails unless you have other similar bulbs.




Amazing honestly they don’t light up more often,(in a bad way) just typically fail open which I guess is a safety mechanism.
 
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I haven't had a spectacular failure with an LED yet, but several with incandesent and fluorescent.

The most spectacular gave a very loud bang and the glass part of the bulb dropped out of the base, and luckily onto carpet and not a hard floor.
 
mark0x01 said:
I haven't had a spectacular failure with an LED yet, but several with incandesent and fluorescent.

The most spectacular gave a very loud bang and the glass part of the bulb dropped out of the base, and luckily onto carpet and not a hard floor.
Click to expand...
I have had The old LEDs with the proper power supply and gigantic heatsync burn up a component , makes a horrendous electric fire stink.

The one I had pop had an LED wired up in reverse, blew the corner off the chip.
 
I hate this "you must use this new technology because we say so" thing. I don't have any LED lights in my house, instead using some flourescents, some incandescents and some compact flouros. If I want to waste electricity, that should be my business so long as I'm willing to pay for it.

Incandescent lights got banned for sale ages ago, yet I find that they just keep on working, as do the traditional tube flourescent.
 
I've had good luck with LED's so far. My luck with cfcl curlicue's, not so good. I bought a cheap brand one time and nearly all in the pack lasted a few months.

One thing I like about the LED's is they are less sensitive to colder weather than the flourescents I had in my pole barn and back porch. The flourescents would start out dim, then get brighter as they warmed up. The LED's start up bright, then stay bright.
 
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