LED Bulb Recommendations?

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone here has tried several types of LED bulbs looking for the ones which emit the least amount of RF noise, and have any recommendations on which manufacturers/models are best for this?  I'm wondering about the bulbs that run off of standard household power (e.g. 120 volts AC).

Just wondering if any of the current LED bulbs are as good, or almost as good, as incandescent...

Thanks,
Marc  

I have measured a number of LED lamps ( 230Volts).
LED: E-27 as well as the GU10.

1. - LED lamps can emit dirty power, that is *dirty* frequencies back into the mains electricity net.

2. - LED lamps can emit dirty air, that is *dirty* frequencies into the air surroundings.

3. - LED lamps can emit dirty power, as well as dirty air.

4. - LED lamps do not emit dirty power, nor dirty air.

LED lamps by Ikea (the Ledare types) belong to category 4.

They are relatively warm, not cool.

Kathy, usually the bulb manufacturers list the color temperature... if you want something similar to an incandescent bulb, it would either be labelled as "2700K" (not 5000K), or "warm" (not "daylight").

Ikea also sells 120V bulbs in the USA, although I don't know if these are as good as the European ones Charles mentioned.

Marc

About a year ago I tested a 23 W CFL ('equivalent to a 100 W incandescent'), a 18 W LED ('equivalent to a 100 W incandescent'), and a 9.5 W LED bulb ('equivalent to a 60 W incandescent'). The 18 W LED bulb was made by Cree and purchased at Home Depot. The 9.5 W LED bulb was made by Feit and purchased at ACE Hardware. The input power and the output lumens were very close to the claims on the packages.

The only evaluation of RF noise was with a Stetzer meter. This house has low Stetzer readings, usually between 10 and 30, rarely bumping up to 50. Stetzer readings do not change with incandescent bulbs are turned on and off. The CFL caused Stetzer readings of 400 to 600, depending on line voltage. The 18 W LED caused Stetzer readings of about 460 at 110 V, increasing to 590 at 126 V. The 9.5 W LED caused Stetzer readings mostly between 1900 and 2000 (the upper limit for the Stetzer meter), without any obvious drift with input voltage level.

Based on these readings I decided to not use the 120 VAC LED bulbs. I have built two LED light fixtures from the LED strips available on the Internet, that plug directly into the 120 VAC outlet, one to replace an incandescent piano lamp and one to replace a CFL over the kitchen sink. I used the 24 VDC strips. These were cut into 7 equal length sections and connected in series ((7)(24) is fairly close to 120(square root of 2), the peak voltage on a 120 VAC line). The power went through a full wave bridge rectifier before going to the LEDs, to convert from AC to DC. I put a 60 microfarad electrolytic capacitor across the rectifier output on the piano lamp and 300 microfarad on the kitchen sink, to smooth the current waveform slightly. Nothing critical on those values. Now my wife can see to get the dishes clean! Her piano students all appreciate the 'cool' piano lamp. (The word 'cool' applies to both temperature and esthetics).

Gary

Thanks Gary, that's what I was concerned about.  Although I suspect what Charles says is also true, that all LED's are not the same.  I guess measuring with a Stetzer meter (for the dirty electricity) and an AM radio (for the "dirty air") would be one way to test, although I'm sure there are other meters that might give a better picture (or judge by my own symptoms).

Marc

DC is the way to go, as long as it comes from a battery or is smoothed well by capacitors.
Light on AC flickers and get on ones nerves.
Even on DC, LED and CFL are both horrendous though, if you know natural light.
Don't even look at the spectrum-charts, you'll get a heart-attack.
I stick to the old incandescent and halogen lamps.
The efficiency is not that bad as stated by the technophiles that seem to love anything that is sickening.
LED's are a waste of natural resources too, like rare earth elements that are unlikely to be recycled.
CFL's contain mercury and a lot of copper, that often ends up in a landfill too.
And then we did not even mention EMF.

Yes, there seem to be very few companies concerned about the spectrum of light being put out by LEDs.  Although I did find one:

  http://yujiintl.com/high-cri-led-lighting

Don't know if these are any good from an EMF standpoint, though.

Marc

Thanks for that link, very interesting.
The EMF's should be checked, same thing for the 110 volt  Ledare LED's from Ikea to be certain the usa-version is similar.
Preferable with a better meter than the Stetzer one though.
This company is shameless and their products are not much better.

The meter I am using is the Line-Emi meter. He goes up to 10MHz.

http://www.priggen.com/Line-EMI-Meter_1

P.S.

Concerning the Stetzer-mania :
Once i read their business strategy somewhere, it was by far not as customer-friendly as they claim to be ...
Besides that, the whole issue is not that simple.
See under (3) : http://www.conradbiologic.com/articles/EMFscams.html
Or see under "Issues with dirty electricity filters" here : http://www.emfrelief.com/capacitive-filters.html
Together with increasing one's overall health, the wisest approach is usually avoiding EMF as far as realistically possible, not making attempts to filter and shield ( as a layman i will not suggest never to do the latter, but only that it's usually not the first nor the second wisest step to take ).

Concerning the spectra of LED's, these look certainly much less spiky than those of FL's, but when zoomed in more close, these smoother lines are nevertheless still nothing compared to proper light.
We are using monitors with unnatural back-lights, it's unfortunately a question of choosing between evils so to speak, a pretty crazy game ... ;(.
In the meantime, let's find the least appalling LED lamps with close to zero EMF-pollution.

Prof. Balck has done quite a number of very interesting studies.

One of them is about special biological effects of LED lamps.

http://www.biosensor-physik.de/biosensor/led-stress.htm
With Google translate this page can be translated from German to English.

that was a very thorough study.
i bought a led lamp for my cabin. plugged it in and scanned it with my radio. strange slow high pitched sinus sound came out. never used it since. would be nice to use led to save battery power.
do you or anybody else know a good laser brand ?  does it matter which type/color ?
i guess voltage output and such does matter.

any information would be appriciated.

-Hawk

Nice link !
Good news here is that the OLEDs are coming :
( taken from point 2.1 and translated )
" There is a new generation of televisions with organic LEDs (OLEDs), obviously causing a lot less stress.
In a technology market in May 2014 many LED devices were placed in a long double row.
At the end there was a single OLED device with "viewing direction" at a square angle to the other ones (outside the range of other devices).
Observation : The OLED device was a pure delight !! "

Of course it still won't be natural light like incandescent and halogen lamps give.
But an option to consider if batteries are running flat too fast or for certain devices when there is no better alternative.
Right now the prices are still steep and the choices poor, but within 5 years also that picture may have changed a lot.
In the meantime other unpleasant things will have gotten much worse or been introduced though, like automatic electric cars with radar, other kinds and more intensive use of smart-meter-systems and rfid-chips, new smart inventions still unknown, so let's remain negative.

Yes, I've been waiting for OLED to become more mainstream for years.  So far, we see it in some smart phones, music players, and HDTVs that are 55" or greater.  It'd be nice to see some light bulb replacements, computer monitors, laptop monitors, etc.  One of these days I'm sure it'll happen.  Of course, these products could still have noisy power supplies that ruin them, but it's possible that an OLED version of something is better than an LED version.

Marc

It's probably sooner than later, it's starting to move, perhaps just three years.

"So what's organic about OLEDs?
OLEDs are organic because they are made from carbon and hydrogen. There's no connection to organic food or farming - although OLEDs are very efficient and do not contain any bad metals - so it's a real green technology."

This sounds okay also, a move in the right direction, now the rest.
From a larger perspective preservation of nature is on the long run more interesting than being an undisturbed consumer.

I probably am not much value here. I do find the warm more pleasant. I use all LED now, but NO 120, all DC. I have a light string of fairy lights in the bedroom that runs on AAs and all the candles do to.  To cook or see more I have little DC bulbs.  Seems OK but sometimes the DC bulbs bother my eyes, but that may be location.

I had halogen track lighting that always made me tired. Could have been the dimmer on that and not the bulbs.