Setsuden?

[Yokohammer]

Thanks for posting that PDF, this is indeed Nakano I'm talking about. Well I'm happy I was wrong about them being some inefficient shit burning through the already taxed grid....nice to see something being done right for once.

Nakano-ku seems to be going for it in a big way. Other wards too.
As you say, that's really good news ... and the pure reasonableness of it actually kind of surprised me when I started poking around.

It's always reassuring when sanity prevails in an almost insane world.

[matsuki]

Nakano-ku seems to be going for it in a big way. Other wards too.
As you say, that's really good news ... and the pure reasonableness of it actually kind of surprised me when I started poking around.

It's always reassuring when sanity prevails in an almost insane world.

Just wait, some scandal will eventually pop up with the LED maker or the pricing or something. TIJ, nothing is ever this reasonable.

[Coligny]

Slow day?

Just to point out how consistent information on the Internet can be, this ...

Typically a fluorescent lamp will last between 10 to 20 times as long as an equivalent incandescent lamp when operated several hours at a time. Under standard test conditions general lighting lamps have 9,000 hours or longer service life.

... from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp

Same Wikipedia. 20,000 ~ 30,000 hours vs. 9,000 hours. Go figure

Also, some outside light fixtures are managed by the "chonaikai" rather than the local government.

General lighting is not for the fluorescent linear or compact...

[Coligny]

When it comes to public lighting they normally don't wait for a bulb to burn out before it's replaced (unless it's a very small town). The bulbs are preemptively replaced at regular intervals. In some cases a burnt out bulb can result in serious liability.

Not around here they don't - And it isn't a very small town. Bulbs are replaced when they clap out. Anyway from Wikipedia

" Conventional linear fluorescent lamps have life spans around 20,000 and 30,000 hours based on 3 hours per cycle according to lamps NLPIP reviewed in 2006."

So, burning say 10 hours a day a bulb would last 6.8 years which seems about right to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_lamp

3 hours per cycle is a reference to the duty cycle ? Or a surreatic 3 hours of use per day ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_cycle

If it's duty cycle the math on wear and tear become much more complicated. I think...

Can this thread become even more confusing or can we settle this with a pillow fight before everyone needs aspirin ?

[Wage Slave]

Just wait, some scandal will eventually pop up with the LED maker or the pricing or something. TIJ, nothing is ever this reasonable.

Exactly. Or kickbacks and/or employment opportunities down the line. Here's a statement from Hampshire County council. All I ever said was that fluorescent is better than you are saying and that LED is still pricey and relatively unproven at the moment. Quite why that has caused so much outrage baffles me.

Note the radical idea of controlling the lights better rather than leaving them burning all night - and all day in my neck of the woods.

As a general rule any lighting stock over 15 years old is being replaced with white fluorescent light in residential areas, giving greater clarity and colour representation. Carbon emissions will be reduced through the introduction of remote lighting management, having the ability to change lighting times and levels. And as faults can be automatically registered, there should be no more need for staff driving around looking for problems.

http://www3.hants.gov.uk/roads/street-lighting/street-lighting-pfi-faq.htm

Some, and it must be said not that many, other places have decided to go for LEDs now and good luck to them but I just can't see that it is a no brainer. Bear in mind that we haven't yet had LED street lights in service for the promised 10 to 15 years. They promise it, but haven't yet proved they and their power supplies will do it.

Anyway I am a tired of the dogmatism, ego and shouting. Fine. If you want to believe that every single light in the world should be replaced with a LED as soon as possible then go ahead.

[Coligny]

From experience in my whip. Every led bulb I used needed replacement every 10 month. Except the combo tail-brake light 7443 since they where used at 50% intensity most of he time.
Also see recent Daihatsu with factory led tail light often with one or more high intensity led already busted.
Leds are good, but talking heads touting them as the next best thing to a line of coke from the ass of an underage prostitute should step back and watch how things are going in the real world. Unfortunately, if you want Bubba to dump his incandescent dollar store bulb, you need to make him believe it's socketted miracle. Being so shortly after the compact fluo semi fiasco, pricey with lifespan really not up to propaganda, it might be a tough sell...

Also, from a manufacturing standpoint, we are still rednecking it. A big led bulb is made of dozen of small smd mostly 5050 family these days. Costly and prone to dry soldering failure...

[Wage Slave]

From experience in my whip. Every led bulb I used needed replacement every 10 month. Except the combo tail-brake light 7443 since they where used at 50% intensity most of he time.
Also see recent Daihatsu with factory led tail light often with one or more high intensity led already busted.
Leds are good, but talking heads touting them as the next best thing to a line of coke from the ass of an underage prostitute should step back and watch how things are going in the real world. Unfortunately, if you want Bubba to dump his incandescent dollar store bulb, you need to make him believe it's socketted miracle. Being so shortly after the compact fluo semi fiasco, pricey with lifespan really not up to propaganda, it might be a tough sell...

Also, from a manufacturing standpoint, we are still rednecking it. A big led bulb is made of dozen of small smd mostly 5050 family these days. Costly and prone to dry soldering failure...

That's a good point. They are indeed made of a huge number of SMD diodes arranged in a dense array. Dry joint development is a worry especially since I assume it is all lead free solder. The fact that the streetlights will be subject to a fairly wide range of temperatures doesn't help either. There seem to be a lot of people in possession of time machines given the confidence with which these 10 to 15 year lifespans are asserted. No LED street light has yet burned that long. And anyone who thinks that switched mode power supplies are bound to be reliable when run for a large number of hours needs to take a look at what happened to so many flat screen TVs and computers.

Not sure I agree with you about compact fluorescents. My experience with them has been good both in terms of service life and power consumption. And they are so cheap now it is ridiculous. In the early days, as in the early 90's, they were too big, didn't give a great light, took a time to warm up and so on but they didn't fail and they didn't use much power.

[jingai]

New York is going entirely over to LED: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/nyreg ... .html?_r=0

My own town did tests against existing sodium halide lamps for lumens, light spread, etc. and is slowly changing over to LEDs. They also use timers and dimmers on certain lamps to further reduce costs.
My main three lights in my house are LED. Two are fairly cheap but have lasted 2 years so far and the third is more expensive (Phillips) and works great. I think the quality of the internal components is what explains at least some of the cost difference between LEDs.

I think CFLs work fine for most applications. There is a stigma about them, but when we ran a free lighting program and served a few hundred homes we had next to no complaints. Of course there we were helping pick the right bulb for the application.

[jingai]

By the way, are they still really using fluorescent street lighting in Japan? I'm not sure I've ever even seen that in the US as it's outmoded. Here it's primarily mercury vapor (green) and high pressure sodium (orange.) I have definitely seen mercury vapor in Japan as I have night photos with that tell-tale color balance. These are switching over to induction and LED.

[Yokohammer]

New York is going entirely over to LED: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/nyreg ... .html?_r=0

Hiya Jingai (haven't seen you around for a while).

Thanks for that. Very interesting. I think by now the performance of LED lighting has been proven enough that large scale trends like this are inevitable (despite the best efforts of the FG Luddite contingent).

The oldest LED bulb in my house, by the way, is about four years old. I bought it not long after I bought the house, and it was my first foray into the mysterious world of domestic LED lighting. It's a nice sort-of-inandescent-color 40-watt equivalent bulb that is rated at and actually only draws 4 watts. I know it actually only draws 4 watts because I measured it (using both a wattmeter and the more primitive line splitter and clamp meter method). I was seriously curious about these things. 4 watts. That's 10 times more efficient than a 40 watt incandescent bulb and a little more than twice as efficient as a 40-watt equivalent CFL.

Anyway, that bulb is in our hall lamp which, for safety reasons, is on every day from dusk to dawn. There are seasonal variations but on average it goes on at six in the evening and then off again at six in the morning. That's about 12 hours every single day for the past four years (except for the week after 3.11 when there was no power).

So ... 12 hours x 365 days x 4 years = 17,520 hours so far.
Still going strong, and I expect that the promise of a 40,000 hour lifespan will be fulfilled (at least).

The others I have are all somewhere between about two and four years old, and I haven't seen a single failure yet.

As you say, quality is key, as it is with everything. Cheap LED lights from China (particularly those strip lights and automotive fittings, Coligny), are notoriously bad. Buy quality, buy once, and be satisfied.

[matsuki]

Some of the recent LEDs I bought for my soccer mom van have some pretty terrible soldering. Won't be surprised if they don't last too long but it would be nice.

Like Yoko, I've had LEDs at home for 4+ years and they're still going strong. They are Mitsubishi Osram branded and have a clear plastic shell. The more recent ones I bought are hand made in Japan, more powerful, and have a glass shell and retro looking base.

Should also be noted that LEDs are the new big thing for salt water (coral ) aquarium setups. Talk about money saving...

[Wage Slave]

a little more than twice as efficient as a 40-watt equivalent CFL.

That's one way of presenting the data. Another would be to say that fitting an LED over an equivalent CFL uses 4 watts less power - but that doesn't sound nearly as impressive.

[Coligny]

Some of the recent LEDs I bought for my soccer mom van have some pretty terrible soldering. Won't be surprised if they don't last too long but it would be nice.

You have to post picture of that thing...

[Wage Slave]

P1000249.JPG

Just to prove I am not as Luddite as you so boldly assume.

KS Denki are selling these bulbs at about 800 Yen the pair. At that price, I bought 6 of them and have fitted them in the hall, kitchen and dining room pelmet lights. Being very directional they are perfect for that application and produce a nice pool of light exactly where it is wanted. For example, over the sink.

However, for omnidirectional wall fittings and for lights in the centre of the room that are used to illuminate the whole room they are not so ideal because of their directionality. A CFT or circular fluorescent is better because it has a more diffused light.

I had one 75W dual tube fluorescent ceiling mounted fitting fail on me recently. The ballast failed - Electronics, especially those involving power supply, are not infallible. Kahma had a no frills Toshiba LED fitting on special for about 8,500 Yen as opposed to about 5,000 for an equivalent fluorescent. Since it is in a high use location, it's job is mainly to illuminate the dining table and is fairly high power, I decided to go with LED. The light we get is not quite as good as the fluorescent it replaces but since there are other lights illuminating bits it misses it's fine. We will see how long it lasts. The fluorescent it replaced did about six years with no tube replacement.

The point of all this is simply to say that it is not as simple as saying LED lights are so much better than fluorescent in all cases that only a Luddite moron would still be using them. It is more complex than that - assuming that you care about utility and economy that is.

[Coligny]

For CFC, of the 1 generation we bought (nationnal back then pre 2003) Nearly all that were used daily failed within 2 years. I have few rooms in the clinic with light always on, the CFC died in a year, led are reaching 2 or 3 years, even the super low power with just 1 led in the center of a clear glass.

For the emergency firepost light, switched to special LED, 3 years ago, still good. The incandescent was dying every year and a half...

[Wage Slave]

P1000251.JPG

I happened to be in Daiso today to get some velcro, pens, files, post it notes and other boring essentials and this little thing caught my eye. Given the thoughts of running lights all night for safety country I wondered if I might rig up some sort of 0.5W nightlight at the top of the stairs or somewhere like that. I have a mini Edison screw lampholder and an inline switch from one of the kid's JHS projects and there is always cable/staples etc around. On the other hand I have been curious for some time how they manage to make these things so I am sorely tempted to do a teardown to find out. Given that the hall lights both upstairs and down have those neons that glow when switched off I am not convinced a nightlight is really of much utility so a teardown is looking the more likely option.

Unless one of you knows how it's done - In which case you can save a LED light from vivisection.

[Russell]

P1000251.JPG

I happened to be in Daiso today to get some velcro, pens, files, post it notes and other boring essentials and this little thing caught my eye. Given the thoughts of running lights all night for safety country I wondered if I might rig up some sort of 0.5W nightlight at the top of the stairs or somewhere like that. I have a mini Edison screw lampholder and an inline switch from one of the kid's JHS projects and there is always cable/staples etc around. On the other hand I have been curious for some time how they manage to make these things so I am sorely tempted to do a teardown to find out. Given that the hall lights both upstairs and down have those neons that glow when switched off I am not convinced a nightlight is really of much utility so a teardown is looking the more likely option.

Unless one of you knows how it's done - In which case you can save a LED light from vivisection.

What do you mean, how it's done?

Inside that bulb are one or more LEDs. Since they are unlikely to match the voltage (100V) when connected in series, there is likely to be a switching power supply included. LEDs are just diodes, which have a minimum voltage above they start to glow and a maximum voltage beyond which they blow. Connecting them directly to the grid will require them to be separated in two circuits in opposite directions. Just imagination though. Maybe there is a specialist around...

[Wage Slave]

There appears to be one LED in there. As you say it will need about 3V DC or at least fairly ripply DC to work unless its very special. Connecting two diodes back to back to 100V AC or in fact any AC is a non starter surely. So how do you make a switching power supply or any form of power supply that fits in that tiny base, that consumes 300 milliwatts or so and costs so little you can sell the whole product for 100 Yen? The light it gives doesn't visibly flicker.

[Coligny]

Voltage regulator chipset . Also, led are amp sensitive more than volt sensitive.

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm5017.pdf

This one have 9 to 100v input and output down to 1.25v at an excessive 600mA

[Russell]

There appears to be one LED in there. As you say it will need about 3V DC or at least fairly ripply DC to work unless its very special. Connecting two diodes back to back to 100V AC or in fact any AC is a non starter surely. So how do you make a switching power supply or any form of power supply that fits in that tiny base, that consumes 300 milliwatts or so and costs so little you can sell the whole product for 100 Yen? The light it gives doesn't visibly flicker.

Even if it flickers, the frequency is too high to see it. Last week there was news from some university (I remember it was a Chinese university) in which they used flickering of LED lights as a wireless connection to laptops, tablets, etc. Seems 10 times faster than current wireless, but the computer should be in the line of sight of the LED.

Alternatively, if flickering is a problem, you can easily put a low-pass filter in the circuit (capacitance).

But your point is good. How can you make it at a low price?

I found this Russian dude on YT.

I suspect that his power supply circuit is not very energy efficient since the current all has to pass through resistance R1, which means heat dissipation.

[Coligny]

Ehm... Guys... Led flickering is pwm and is how you dim them and extend their lifespan... Half intensity gives you double the lifetime...

[Wage Slave]

Russell - I can't see that video for some reason - grrr. But yeah using a resistor is pretty standard and cheap but from 100V down to a few is going to need a 3 watt resistor or so and that is going to get warm. And then you need to rectify and smooth(ish) the 100V.

[Wage Slave]

Voltage regulator chipset . Also, led are amp sensitive more than volt sensitive.

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm5017.pdf

This one have 9 to 100v input and output down to 1.25v at an excessive 600mA

A tiny little buck regulator. Very nice and it will do very nicely but how much is it? And it needs smooth(ish) DC no? And it needs extra components. Can a Chinese maker selling to Daiso do all that for, what?, 70 Yen or so?

Curiosity well piqued now. I don't think that bulb has long for this world.

[Russell]

Voltage regulator chipset . Also, led are amp sensitive more than volt sensitive.

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm5017.pdf

This one have 9 to 100v input and output down to 1.25v at an excessive 600mA

That looks like a chip used in a switching power supply. You have to add a few resistors and electrolytic capacitors and you are done.

Your point in your other post is correct: flickering does not pose a problem for LEDs. I suspect you could cut down on capacitors when using the above chip for a LED power supply.

Returning to Wage Slave's question about cost: electronics is cheap, certainly this type of standard components.

[Wage Slave]

Voltage regulator chipset . Also, led are amp sensitive more than volt sensitive.

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm5017.pdf

This one have 9 to 100v input and output down to 1.25v at an excessive 600mA

That looks like a chip used in a switching power supply. You have to add a few resistors and electrolytic capacitors and you are done.

Your point in your other post is correct: flickering does not pose a problem for LEDs. I suspect you could cut down on capacitors when using the above chip for a LED power supply.

Returning to Wage Slave's question about cost: electronics is cheap, certainly this type of standard components.

I think you would also need a rectifier. Parts are pretty cheap maybe but not that cheap surely and then add in the manufacture/assembly/packaging costs, transport costs and duty.

Maybe, but surely some sort of capacitive dropper circuit would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Like this perhaps ....

http://www.electroschematics.com/5678/

It's still astonishing though. I buy standard parts to fix old things and I wish I could get orders of magnitude near that sort of price.

[Wage Slave]

Or even cheaper and simpler using 2 zener diodes and two coventional:



http://www.electroschematics.com/5935/12volts-transformerless-power-supply/

[Russell]

Voltage regulator chipset . Also, led are amp sensitive more than volt sensitive.

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm5017.pdf

This one have 9 to 100v input and output down to 1.25v at an excessive 600mA

That looks like a chip used in a switching power supply. You have to add a few resistors and electrolytic capacitors and you are done.

Your point in your other post is correct: flickering does not pose a problem for LEDs. I suspect you could cut down on capacitors when using the above chip for a LED power supply.

Returning to Wage Slave's question about cost: electronics is cheap, certainly this type of standard components.

I think you would also need a rectifier. Parts are pretty cheap maybe but not that cheap surely and then add in the manufacture/assembly/packaging costs, transport costs and duty.

Maybe, but surely some sort of capacitive dropper circuit would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Like this perhaps ....

http://www.electroschematics.com/5678/

It's still astonishing though. I buy standard parts to fix old things and I wish I could get orders of magnitude near that sort of price.

That schematic looks similar to the Russian dude's. Also include a 100 Ohm resistor R1 with heat dissipation.

I think mass production is what keeps the price low.

Anyway, if you decide to open up that LED lamp, then let us know what is inside it.

Getting curious now...

[Wage Slave]

Will do - I'll no doubt decide at some point to open it up. Why can't I see your video? I just see a bit blank space. Is it a Chrome thing maybe?

Anyway, yes. I think that is likely to be it. A very simple and very low power capacitative dropping/rectification circuit. One of the comments on the second circuit sneers that 30Ma is barely enough to drive a single LED but that is all we need for this application.

I wonder how safely and well the thing is made - ha,ha,ha - luckily we only have 100V here eh.

[Russell]

Wage Slave, I can play the video on my Firefox browser without problems, whether it is inline or on YT.

[Coligny]

Smd components cost nex t to nothing. When I joke aboot buying leds by the bucket on ebay... In fact I'm not joking. Sure, it's not the same quality as you will find on Audi's led highbeams headlights. But Tokyu hands 5 led for 500 yens are criminally expensive. Ebay don't sell them by the kilo yet, but unless you dig, usual minimal quantity is 100 forfew bucks transport included.