Presidential BEEF, Difference of Light Technology

I imagine the values collected for the CFL also apply to traditional Fluorescent Tubes right?

I have an incandescent bulb that's probably 30 or more years old. It's on a dimmer and we only use it on dim settings (leaving it on in the bedroom so we don't trip when someone else is sleeping). Nice thing about incandescent for this specific case is that it can be set from incredibly dim all the way up to full brightness. None of the other bulbs are able to do super dim. Hey - how about 3-way bulbs?

Mehdi, you are the funniest creator on Youtube. I was laughing until I couldn't breathe on this video. Absolutely unbelievable timing and editing. PLUS I learned a great deal about a subject I thought I had a good grip on. Premium-tier content and I am very happy to help contribute.

LED lights in my experience have NOWHERE NEAR the life they claim. Yes, the LED itself can almost last forever, but the electronics in the earlier bulbs goes pop within a year or so. When they first came out in Toronto, Philips gave a 7 year guarantee. Well mine started to go in a year. I wonder how much they lost on that. The newer bulbs seem to be better, but they still seem to be only 50% longer lasting than incandescent.

Michael Mirsky

I used to change all my bulbs to incandescent during winter, then back to LED during summer because my house had electric-restive heat anyway. After a hurricane damaged my HVAC system, I replaced it all with a much more efficient system and now just keep my old incandescent around as future museum pieces, perhaps will be worth as much as my mint "Atom Bomb" Garbage Pail Kids cards are now ;-P

Michael Scott Williamson

This is a political comment: we want Mehdi as next Queen of Canada.

Lorenzo Novara

There are some other important factors, like decreasing light and color temperature due aging: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/par30-bulb-aging-comparison.jpg?resize=400,400 And light bulbs are intentionally made to last shorter and be more expensive. Some (Tungsram) bulbs in my childhood lasted for about 10 khrs.

I think the comparison to Trump is more relevant than comparison to Feynman or Lewin.

Light vibration and warmup time is missing from the comparison.

I’m sorry, but whenever I see that orange guy, it makes me puke, political or not. He just makes me vomit

Rocco Rizzo

anyone else here from RPI?

Andrew Salinas

And you have not mention hazardous materials emitted during production. (However it is naturally incomparable.) But generally I agree in LED being the best, however not by this much. it is a good try to make quantitative comparison. And showing spectra is very interestng. You should expand that part! And maybe you could at least mention CRI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

The value calculation is obviously wrong, because you have not calculated the sum of the costs (purchase, installation, operation). Fast check: with a theoretical zero consumption lamp you got infinite value which is obviously not correct. The same goes for lifespan. An eternal lamp doesn't worth infinite.

3:38 LED made of silicone? Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Blue_and_ultraviolet

Texas, LED bulbs cost more than Edison bulbs but consider, instead of initial cost, the cost per year and total cost of ownership. As Mehdi says, LEDs are the big winner.

Dave Mausner

Another GREAT video. Thinking a small grid-tied home solar panel setup could offset at least 6.81 more LED bulbs to 1 old school bulb. 👍

All your valuable time and hard-earned money going to waste, instead of just replacing one wife. 😁

Matt Dawson

Disclaimer...I have been buying LEDs for years now... However they were always MUCH more expensive than incandescent...AND didn't last proportionally longer. They may have gotten cheaper...but most of my lights are ceiling pot lights, and nice bulbs for those are still very expensive....I am still in favor of the LED...but I am paying a premium.

Mike in Texas

If only I could get my wife to agree! Unfortunately, for her the light color is the ONLY factor that matters. I've tried swapping out incandescent or halogen for LED, but she spots it and rejects it out of hand. The color spectrum is improving, but it does not give the same feel. Also, halogen and incandescent dim very gracefully, whereas the dimming of most LEDs is uneven, especially at very dim settings. I'd be interested to see the color spectrum as a function of the dimming level. So, you need to add independent weighting to all of the factors, as they are not all equally important. The lifetime boost of 7.5x accounts for a huge portion of the final score, but that isn't top priority for some folks. And until the LED manufacturers fix their spectrum and dimming performance, I'm stuck with incandescent/halogen... :(

Loved it! Perhaps you could make a video about UV light which the President also brought up lately. Particularly UV-C and it's dangers. People are buying UV-C lamps online without being fully aware of the dangers. And no I'm not blaming President Trump. People would be buying UV-C lamps regardless and they were buying them before the President mentioned it in a press conference.

Steve Bartlett

Jenifer! No, it is a Red Tide USB650

ElectroBOOM [Mehdi Sadaghdar]

7:47 "Maybe our little orange guy wasn't wrong after all"

I love it!! Excellent and informative. I even have an LED bulb in the fridge!

That moment at 8:01 where the ElectroBOOM studio almost became an environmental hazard cleanup and he didn't even break cadence!

Mr. Money Mustache actually has quite a few data driven comparisons on transportation options on his blog. His approach is both scientific and fiscally driven.

You know a great follow-up on this would be a review of the mechanical efficiency of the internal combustion engines multiplied by the weight of conventional automobiles. Then compare this to the effieiency of a bike. Both vehicles being occupied by the same... say... 160 pound (73 Kg) human. Then consider the disease tranfer potential of mechanical transportation vs... bikes. And add in politics, if you must for flavor. Your channel is fantastic.

Craig Larson

I'm only at 1:51 and I love you even more!

Craig Larson

Do you mean RF interference with other electronics?

ElectroBOOM [Mehdi Sadaghdar]

Hey Steve, President's video ad speech was from 7 months ago though: https://youtu.be/K_iFi1qH8Cg . I would agree with president if it was many years ago when LED lights were garbage, and indeed they were! but my LED lights at home are already a few years old.

ElectroBOOM [Mehdi Sadaghdar]

Interesting point of view, I should have added that to my list of parameters. But of course I would say there are some odd ball jobs that incandescent would be required for. Same as even when we have a new safe source of energy to fully replace fossil fuel, there would still be some use for fossil fuel .

ElectroBOOM [Mehdi Sadaghdar]

This is NOT a political response: :-) Keep in mind this video was several years ago, and was DEFINITELY about CFLs ,and NOT LEDs.. Even LEDs have come a long way since the Trump speech.. I am a big fan of LEDs, especially the modern ones that are both reliable AND cheap.. Up until a couple years ago, you couldn't get reliable AND cheap.. Trump was expressing a very common view of Americans, who aren't against good tech, but we dont like regulations FORCING us to make changes by regulation - This is viewed as a direct governmental overreach, for better or worse.. We love new tech, but it has to be OUR idea.. :-) An unfortunate side-effect of the artificial forces on the market was that all our lightbulb factories literally just shut down. There was a GE factory in Virginia near me, and everyone there lost their jobs almost overnight and GE just shut the plant down. This is decidedly unAmerican.. That being said, I think even without the regulations, we'd be in the same place today anyway - The LEDs definitely have little to no downside in ALMOST all use cases..

Steve Jones

There is still a valid use for incandescent bulbs. In my experience, only the lowly incandescent light bulb will handle temperature extremes. Try replacing the incandescent bulb in your oven, or refrigerator with a CFL or an LED. Neither will survive a 425°F oven. And every CFL or LED I've tried in the refrigerator or freezer take forever to warm up enough to be useful. CFL won't even light up at 0°F. LEDs will...eventually. I live in the desert southwest and even on those extremely rare cold 40°F Arizona mornings, my back porch light (which IS a yellow LED "Bug" bulb) takes several minutes to get to full brilliance. I realize that there are some specially designed LED bulbs in the latest model refrigerators, but I'm not about to replace my refrigerator just because the incandescent bulb burns out! That being said, all of my lights inside my house HAVE been replaced with LED bulbs, and I am in the process of replacing all of the 4 and 8 foot Fluorescent tubes in my workshop with LED tubes. The light IS much better and uses a lot less electricity. But, I'm still sticking with the old standby incandescent bulbs in my appliances.

Earl

According to the spec sheet (Ocean Optics Red Tide USB650 Fiber Optic Spectrometer) it is a 200-1000nm range. Shame there are so many so-called "UV Germicidal" lamps being sold when they are not. Big Clive has been doing a fair amount of teardowns on them. Maybe Mehdi has some lying around that he can test while he has it?

It's an Ocean Optics Red Tide USB650 Fiber Optic Spectrometer. Roughly 1500 USD on Amazon.

Different bulbs for different uses. Free market > Big government. Plus how many cheap LED's have you bought that had problems well under 15k hours? I have had a bunch...

I want that light sensor. What is its name?

Przemysław Brojewski

At least in USA, you can get dimmable CFLs. These have been around for at least 5-7 years because I bought some around that time. Nowadays, most retail stock has been replaced with LED in my area. A few more nice things about LED is you can get color temperature changing ones (or even full RGB), and can get them in lots of different form factors not available to the other technologies.

Shouldn’t cfl make you look green, so wouldn’t it make an orange person look gray?

Jason Hoffman

I was surprised at how smooth the Ikea bulb is. I have a few of them and still find them a little bit lacking. does that dip in the blue really account for the lower light quality? Can they fix it??

Andrew Weir

1000% this. In my experience, I'd guess CFL last about 2-2.5 times as long as incandescent, and LEDs 5 times.

Andrew Weir

I didn't realise halogen bulbs had a shorter life on 110V. Before Incandescents were banned in Europe (frosted type banned back in 2009!), they had a 1000 hour rated life and halogen was rated for 2000 hours. We moved to LED several years ago back when bulbs were €5-€10 a bulb, but better built. About half the LEDs in our hose are still the original and still appear just as bright. CFLs were a pain for losing intensity - If a CFL went in a chandelier, we always had to replace the lot as even a spare bulb from the original multipack would stick out like a sore thumb. When CFLs failed, about half of ours ended with a bang, some tripping the circuit breaker and a few even stinking up the room with a burnt plastic smell. I'm glad to see the end of them in our house.

Seán Byrne

Those fluorescent lights don’t last as much as LED lights

Thank you for doing these comparisons, however, there is one test I would have liked to have seen, the RF interference of LED Lighting but not limited to just domestic lighting is becoming an issue around the world

Unfortunately I’ve never had a CFL that lived up to the lifetime claims they made. Seen similar problems with LED (not as bad as CFL though) sometimes even in open fixtures where overheating shouldn’t be an issue!

Mark Roberts

Resisting the urge to make political comments

Zephy Foxy

Wow, that spectrum analyzer was very cool! Can it detect UVC at somewhere around 180-250nm? There are a lot of 'Ultraviolet germicidal ozone sterilizer lamps' being sold on eBay that it would be good to test and rectify. I seriously doubt they can kill any germs at all. People are going to buy them trying to clean their houses of viruses, etc, and they are useless.

Rich Rector

Dont apologise so much for the politics, you were right every step of the way

New Patreon member and I thoroughly enjoyed the video. Keep up the good work my friend!!

Dean Hintz

I'm a little bit surprised that halogen is so bad. From all the conventional light bulbs I had the halogen is working the longest time. And it's constantly turned on and off. I cannot agree on environmental friendliness of compact LED bulbs, you have to consider electronics that is inside and the cheap ones you flashed like to die very quickly cause of high heat in small area. Also you have to dispose them too in separate bin for electronics. Other than that, I think they are the best way if you need cheap and natural looking light.

Where abouts did you get the spectrometer from? By chance are they available to purchase?

“not a political video” MEHDI2020

Hey! Glad to be in your patreon page, I’m a new member

Light bulb