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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

I still have no idea why an led bulb is better than CFL for home lighting. From what I can tell, people just like new stuff.

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> I still have no idea why an led bulb is better than CFL for home lighting

* They use 30-40% less power, costing you less to operate

* Cheap CFLs commonly had ballasts that died in 1-3 years despite higher life expectancy claims on the packages; LEDs are backed with 10+ year warranties

* CFLs burn out quickly if used in fixtures that are turned on and off frequently

* LEDs don't flicker/strobe like fluorescent lighting

* Virtually all LED bulbs work in dimmers, not just more expensive specialty ones

* Cheap LED bulbs don't produce bluish light like cheap CFL bulbs

and they rise to full brightness immediately... and they're indestructible... and they're not filled with mercury...

To be honest, I like my bathroom light to wake up alongside me in the morning.

An CFL bulb has less mercury in it than a can of tuna: http://www.lamprecycle.org/public/images/docs/LD+A%20August%...

Exactly. With small children in the house this is a good thing. I use them in torch style lamps to save energy and not break when tipped over.

With incandescent bulbs I was also concerned with electric shock from broken bulb, cuts and burns... though I wonder if the LED bulb would be a fire hazard if it were to rest on something.

> They use 30-40% less power

That isn't true. Only LEDs with poor color accuracy are more efficient than CFLs.

> CFLs burn out quickly if used in fixtures that are turned on and off frequently

People claim that, and it makes sense, but it doesn't actually happen. Modern CFLs do just fine.

> LEDs don't flicker/strobe like fluorescent lighting

Florescent lighting does not flicker, and cheap LEDs actually flicker more than CFLs.

> Cheap LED bulbs don't produce bluish light like cheap CFL bulbs

Walmart CFLs cost $1 and have excellent color. It doesn't get cheaper than that.

It seems you made your mental list more than a decade ago and have not updated it as CFLs have gotten much much better.

Hm. I went to the store and compared CFLs and LEDs for the same lumen rating. Their electrical power was about the same.

Flicker - I actually have an Ikea LED lamp that has two active elements inside (2 LEDs). The supply is a simple 12 V AC transformer. I suspect the two elements are connected in a push-pull (anti-parallel) circuit, because they've started to flicker recently - if mounted push-pull and not equal in terms of brightness, that would explain it.

I thought CFLs produce more of a weird green hue - at least that's how both my eye and my cameras see it. At any rate, the main emission line of Hg is smack down the middle of the green part of the spectrum.

Very high failure rate (including one case where my wife called the fire department because something was burning in the house and she couldn't identify it), warm up time, and has to be treated like HAZMAT after it has completed it's six months of duty—indeed, what's not to love about CFLs, and why should I bother checking out an alternative?

Yes, I purchased my LED bulbs in anger. We'll see if I've been had.

I've had that too - fire department and all.

The UL has now required end of life circuits in all CFLs so this won't happen again in new CFLs. (And new is relative - this regulation came about a few years ago.)

At least in theory, they're more power-efficient and last longer (though, as this article suggests, that may or may not be true). Things that are pretty much universally true, though: they turn on faster, have no warm-up time like most CFLs, are more often dimmable, and typically have better spectral distribution (though not as good as incandescents), which tends to make them less likely to impart the sickly cast that things lit with CFLs take on.

No mercury inside.

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