Does anyone keep receipts for stuff they bought years ago............
No? So maybe it's time to book your slot at the funeral parlour............
The hidden, extremely costly LED lighting maintenance
- Thread starter Electric-Light
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Does anyone keep receipts for stuff they bought years ago............
No? So maybe it's time to book your slot at the funeral parlour............
Fulthrotl
~Autocorrect is My Worst Enema.~
- Occupation
- E
:happysad: what would compel someone to endlessly debate..... nevermind. i got it.
"Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain.
And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire,
"Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished.
Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants?
I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin
to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from
off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
jumper
Senior Member
- Location
- 3 Hr 2 Min from Winged Horses
Electric-Light
Senior Member
They work good. Well, aside from frost build upon on red light of LED traffic lights that led to a several fatal accidents.
This is actually true and there's a significant and entirely different reason that does not apply to regular lighting. An incandescent lamp is naturally a broad spectrum source but getting a vibrant color requires a narrow spectrum so tinted glass is used to absorb unwanted light. Say you start with 1800 lm lamp. There's some loss in desirable light when you have a tint dense enough to get the desired level of removal for unwanted colors. Only fractions of 1800 lm gets delivered as colored light after the filter. When LEDs get the same lumens to the watt as a tungsten bulb, it's already many times more efficient, because those lumens are in colored light needed.
LED traffic lights were practical far before LED general lighting. LEDs that only give light in a narrow band and traditional LEDs that's been around for decades and some types with lm/W similar to an incandescent lamp will give several fold increase in efficiency, because, that lm/W is in lumens at the desired color.
Exciting a fluorescent lamp requires a short blue or shorter stimulation and it is the blue LED that enabled solid state fluorescent lighting technology. UVC based fluorescent lamps derive almost all of the visible light through fluorescent conversion, but blue excited solid state fluorescent lamp hits the semi-transparent phosphor layer that makes yellow light that combines with blue light that directly passes through to form a white light.
As been said before, LED junctions rarely fail and traffic lights are large enough to allow adequate cooling for LEDs. Solid state fluorescent lamps face additional complications due to issues in the junction to phosphor interface and phosphor blend or filling agent degradation which traffic lights are immune from since they're not fluorescent lights. It's not the electrons getting tired that cause screen burn-ins and gradually dimming of plasma TVs or CRTs.
Traffic lights are also ballasted differently than general lighting LEDs since they're not on the same type of cost and efficiency constraints. It is almost always the ballast that fails in LED lighting.
- Location
- Bremerton, Washington
- Occupation
- Master Electrician
Drivers are used for LEDs not ballasts
Electric-Light
Senior Member
Pilots, conductors, drivers. Different vehicles, different words, but they're all operators.
A lighting ballast is a device that allows a lamp that can not start, stay lit, or remain lit without self destruction on a voltage source.
The device that receives an input such as "8755" from a controller and handles the firing order and rates across those 28 segments without needing 28 channels is a driver. As far as the controller is aware, the display is told "8755". The display driver is the one managing LEDs by shuffling the firing order and firing rate without actually having 28 separate outputs to address individual segments simultaneously.
A resistor used in series with the common lead of a 7-segment display block is a ballast that allows these LEDs to be powered from a voltage supply without burning out.
The (something) that sits between LED elements and the AC power is a ballast with no purpose other than constraining LED to a certain input power to allow LEDs to emit steady light without allowing the LEDs to emit smoke. That's it. Nothing else. LED sales effort sees ballast as a dirty word, because "no ballast to fail" is frequently a part of LED sales pitch.
12v rope LED uses a 12v DC output wall adapter and a whole bunch of strings each made of three LEDs and a resistor in series.
The resistor is never mentioned in sales literature and it is a tick sized device which isn't always visible due to frosted or textured covering. A series resistor ballast is almost immortal, but it is a tiny heating element that ends up consuming 20-30% of DC side power which was produced from utility power with 60-80% efficiency.
Factory made LED products that do not use ballast resistors use a constant current power supply that is applied as a lighting electronic ballast. Most screw-in LED bulbs and many factory made LED luminaires fall into this category. Well, while it can get wall to LED element in 80-95% range, this type of LED ballasts are quite failure prone.
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Fulthrotl
~Autocorrect is My Worst Enema.~
- Occupation
- E
<moved to spam, LEED AP, CALCTP-AT, and general nuisance bin>
hooray! i made it to the general nuisance bin!
gar
Senior Member
- Location
- Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Occupation
- EE
170722-2118 EDT
It seems that a lot of readers are critical of what Electric-Light has to say.
In my opinion you should study what he has to say, and then enter into an intelligent discussion with him on any points you agree or disagree with.
Unfortunately the acronym LED is applied to many different items from the very basic LED chip, to some very complex device. Thus, it can be difficult when the word LED is used to know what is being discussed, or what should be considered as the problem.
I have LEDs that I first used circa 1965 that still work. I have CREE LED bulbs made in recent years that do not work correctly, they cycle on and off with a period of minutes (clearly a thermal problem). But it is not fair to compare the 1965 devices with the 2015 devices.
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It seems that a lot of readers are critical of what Electric-Light has to say.
In my opinion you should study what he has to say, and then enter into an intelligent discussion with him on any points you agree or disagree with.
Unfortunately the acronym LED is applied to many different items from the very basic LED chip, to some very complex device. Thus, it can be difficult when the word LED is used to know what is being discussed, or what should be considered as the problem.
I have LEDs that I first used circa 1965 that still work. I have CREE LED bulbs made in recent years that do not work correctly, they cycle on and off with a period of minutes (clearly a thermal problem). But it is not fair to compare the 1965 devices with the 2015 devices.
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- Occupation
- Licensed Electrician
I would like to study what he has to say, but his posts are so long when I look at them it takes me to the same place in my brain as when my wife starts talking about the neighbours or her family. However, I've skimmed through enough of his posts that I get it. He is on a mission. He's not interested in intelligent discussion, he is interested in someone taking the bait and then he is going to wear them down in a barrage of words and figures. Meanwhile, the world is going LED and is not turning back. He's not he Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, he's the sailor left high and dry after the ship has sailed.
JFletcher
Senior Member
- Location
- Williamsburg, VA
mivey
Senior Member
Cutesy but lacking in substance. Either dig in and debate on science or don't.
If one can be wore down by words and figures perhaps they were ill-equipped to be in the debate to start with. Adequate opposing facts and figures do not get "worn" but can stand on their own.
Point and counter point. If one side has a weaker argument then they fail due to lack of debate preparation, not necessarily because they were "on the wrong side".
Some have complained that the world has changed and the topic is not worth debating. Fine, then sit on the sidelines and quit throwing rocks into the debate arena at those that choose to explore the science.
For myself, I see a lot of misinformation about LED lighting. I incorporate LED lighting but wish the information and presentation were more mature like legacy lighting so you know for sure what you have. I tend to be a bit apprehensive with the new tech because of experience getting bit many times. It is frustrating to have to make financial and operational decisions using information rife with hype. Give me facts and comparable figures/terminology so I can make the best economic decision.
I am not going to take the time to keep up with all the lighting tech journals so I appreciate those that do so and are willing to share, agenda or no agenda.
Add: ActionDave, I wasn't singling you out but yours was just the last that expressed some of the feelings from other posters.
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- Occupation
- Licensed Electrician
I don't,,, haven't,,, won't dig into the debate.
LEDs sales are market driven. You can't subsidize a good idea into success, you can't stop a good idea from succeeding. Argue about them, fight the fight against them all you want, point out as many flaws about them as you can, they are going to be more of them installed every day.
mivey
Senior Member
Like CFLs?
mivey
Senior Member
or AFCIs?
- Occupation
- Licensed Electrician
I have had good luck with CFLs. A quick count figures about 20 of them in my house. AFCIs are another issue altogether and you know that.
I did. They were dismissed. Discussion doesn't come into it.
mivey
Senior Member
I actually like the LEDs better than the CFLs. CFLs were over-pushed as the best solution. I don't mind the LEDs, I would just like better info and less hype so I can make a better deployment decision so I don't send out something before it has been fully cooked.
mivey
Senior Member
I thought your points were adequately refuted with sound enough facts. Your points seemed more subjective in nature and were not just dismissed without substantiation.
If you took issue with the counter argument, then provide better counter points. His argument seemed reasonable enough to me on the surface.
Simple enough.
Several decades of use. Zero failures.
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