Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Considering how far the pricing has fallen on good LED lighting it would take a significant breakthrough to displace them. I was able to replace nearly all the lighting in my house late last year and earlier this year.

LED lighting today is leaps and bounds better than just a few years ago and magnitudes cheaper. I have found replacements for all bulb types I have use of.

View on HN

I have fluorescent tubes in the garage. There are plenty of LED replacement tubes, but all of them emit a lot less lumens. I'm faced with having a dimly lit garage or adding more light circuits.

Since I work in the garage, having it dimly lit is a problem. Also, I have the age problem of my eyes losing the ability to change their focal length. Bright lighting alleviates much of this.

While most LED fixtures in that form factor do underperform on lumans foot-for-foot by a margin of around 30%, integral LED shop light fixtures usually have about 30% lower power consumption as well and are usually chainable internally (e.g. you can run wiring between fixtures through the metal channel of the fixtures, similar to what's done with the fluorescent). So unless you're hitting a space limit you can likely install 30% more integral LED fixtures without too much trouble. Since LED retrofit pretty much requires changing the ballast anyway you aren't really looking at that much more expense going to integral fixtures.

Adding more light fixtures might actually prove to be a very good thing: always having a light source that is (almost) exactly above you is really nice. The more light sources you have, the fewer shadows you'll have to contend with. This was a real revelation when I accidentally discovered it a few years ago.

I did pretty much the same with the Ikea LED lights, which aren't too pricey.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com