Comment by stevenkkim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenkkim | Hacker News Reader

I came across this article on HN recently:

https://www.sevarg.net/2023/02/11/how-your-leds-are-killing-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34902429

After reading it, I realized that having overhead led lights in our home were possibly contributing to my worsening sleep and general tiredness over the past few years. Granted, we used 4100k lights which are much bluer than 2700k.

We swapped all our leds back to incandescents and halogens (which were a bit tricky to find, but not impossible). Anecdotally, I've been sleeping so much better since, finally feeling well rested and far less stressed. I just feel a tremendous amount of relief after not sleeping well for years.

Also, while we had leds, I had to replace a surprising number of them for burnout/failure, and also experienced flickering, dimming issues, buzzing and more.

> Granted, we used 4100k lights which are much bluer than 2700k.

You had this realization and yet still went the route of switching back to all incandescents?

It's trivially-easy to find 2700K LED bulbs. The ones I have look just as good as the old incandescent. And despite the article making it sound like you need a PhD to sort it out, you don't: most medium-end 60W-equivalent, 2700K LED bulbs look good and are easily available in any hardware store.

The article says that even 2700k leds have a blue light spike (albeit smaller than the 4100ks) since the led source is blue light.

Also, maybe it just in my head, but I think the light from incandescents/halogens look nicer than leds... it feels more natural.

I've set up Kelvin[1] to lower the colour temperature of my LED bulbs in the evening, and reduce their brightness. In fact, they end up pretty deep red when doing middle of the night bathroom runs.

[1]https://github.com/stefanwichmann/kelvin

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I don't have any home automation stuff, but good to know this exists.

The light temperature plays a lot into it. It's why those industrial edison bulbs are so trendy and popular. The warmer the light, the cozier at night. Warm being color and not tempurature. 2700k being the ideal.

Nice little rhyme, never heard that one.

Yes, I think 2700k would have been better, we had originally picked 4100k because we prefered the look.

But the article says that even 2700k leds have a blue light spike (albeit smaller than the 4100ks) since the led source is blue light.

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