Stupid Light Fittings

[SteamyTea]

I hate ES stuff, it really should be banned.

 

Had to remove a light bulb for my Aunt, it did the inevitable an fell apart, leaving the metal bit behind.

 

 

Edited November 7, 2017 by SteamyTea

[ProDave]

Make sure the power is off and long nosed pliers will extract that. Done it many times.

 

I thought you were going to talk about silly light fittings, the sort where it is impossible to to get two 1mm cables into a terminal etc.

[SteamyTea]

I found a pair of of wire strippers with insulated handles.  Managed to poke them up and open them just enough to grip the screw.

Why don;t they think about these first and use an adhesive that does not break down with heat over time.

I did tell my Aunt to get some LED bulbs, but she bought the last two incandescent ones in the shop.  So if I come over in another 28 years I may have to change them again.

[ProDave]

I have a customer who (she claims) gets a headache under flourescent or LED lighting so is now on a mission to stockpile filament bulbs to see out her days.

[SteamyTea]

LED lighting is hard on my eyes since I had my cataracts replaced with shiny clear acrylic.

I find a single 3W LED from a pendant is a simple glass shade perfectly adequate for a 12 m² room.

Loads of electricity savings as well.

[Jeremy Harris]

There are two main issues with LEDs.

 

The first is the fact that many of the cheap (and not so cheap) constant current drivers don't drive the LED with DC, but with pulsed DC, so the damned things flicker.  Because LEDs can turn on and off very quickly (in the 100s of ns range) this flicker can appear as a subtle strobe effect, even if it's not normally visible.  The way I found I could see it was if my eyes moved quickly, where the flicker was apparent.  I would guess that this may have some subtle effect on the way we perceive the light.  Certainly LEDs run on clean DC don't have this effect, and it was noticeable that when I changed all ours to pure DC drive the light quality seemed to improve; it just felt more comfortable somehow.

 

The other problem is that the core emitter in the LED is a single light wavelength, and that it converted to an approximation of white using wavelength conversion phosphors, in much the same way that the fixed wavelength in a fluorescent light uses phosphors inside the glass to convert the mainly UV from the discharge to visible "white" light.  Changing the phosphor composition changes the light wavelength range, but it's not very even and will have peaks at certain emission wavelengths.  This is unlike filtered sunlight, that tends to have a far more even light wavelength spectrum.

 

LEDs driven from a DC source and fitted with a diffuser that will help to even out the spectrum should be able to get pretty close to filament lights, in terms of light quality, I think.