Are Energy-Saving LED Lights Also Creating Glaring Problems? (washingtonpost.com) 53
LED streetlights "shine brightly while using less energy than traditional bulbs," reports the Washington Post. After switching to LED streetlights one county in Washington state conserved 2,612,491 kilowatt-hours.
But they also discovered a downside. "One year after the change began, the additional glare masked about half of the previously visible stars." Over the past decade, scientists found, the night sky has become nearly 10% brighter each year because of artificial lights, mainly LEDs emitting too much glare. Streetlights are part of the problem, as are sources such as illuminated billboards and stadium lights. Those same outdoor lights are also affecting our health. Common types of LED lights contain higher proportions of bluer wavelengths, which can affect people's nighttime patterns... Without melatonin to trigger sleepiness, people are more likely to stay awake longer. Disruptions in our circadian rhythm have been linked to cancer cases, such as breast cancer, and labeled probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization. Other research has shown interruptions to our circadian rhythm are linked to some heart problems.
The article has suggestions for your home — everything from blackout curtains to equipping lights with motion detectors or timers and dimmers. And when shopping for new bulbs, "Because our eyes are sensitive to blue light at night, doctors recommend buying LED lights with warmer-color hues, such as yellow or amber. That means using LED lights below 4,000 Kelvin."
City governments are already taking this seriously, according to the article. ("Some cities, such as the District of Columbia, paused a transition to LEDs after residents complained about the bright lights disrupting their sleep.") The article even includes a photo from the International Space Station showing how two cities appear differently from space because they used a different shade of LED light for their street lights.
One thing's certain: the popularity of LED lights is expected to continue: They consume up to 90% less energy and can last up to 25 times longer than traditional incandescent lights. As the most energy-efficient bulb on the market, it's no surprise that so many people are adopting the technology. The Energy Department estimated LEDs made up about 19 percent of all lighting installations in 2017, saving about 1 percent of total energy consumed in the United States. By 2035, the lights are expected to comprise 84 percent of lighting installations. Roadways, parking, building exteriors and area lights — which are applications typically high in lumens, a measure of brightness — are expected to see nearly full conversion to LED lights by 2035.
But they also discovered a downside. "One year after the change began, the additional glare masked about half of the previously visible stars." Over the past decade, scientists found, the night sky has become nearly 10% brighter each year because of artificial lights, mainly LEDs emitting too much glare. Streetlights are part of the problem, as are sources such as illuminated billboards and stadium lights. Those same outdoor lights are also affecting our health. Common types of LED lights contain higher proportions of bluer wavelengths, which can affect people's nighttime patterns... Without melatonin to trigger sleepiness, people are more likely to stay awake longer. Disruptions in our circadian rhythm have been linked to cancer cases, such as breast cancer, and labeled probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization. Other research has shown interruptions to our circadian rhythm are linked to some heart problems.
The article has suggestions for your home — everything from blackout curtains to equipping lights with motion detectors or timers and dimmers. And when shopping for new bulbs, "Because our eyes are sensitive to blue light at night, doctors recommend buying LED lights with warmer-color hues, such as yellow or amber. That means using LED lights below 4,000 Kelvin."
City governments are already taking this seriously, according to the article. ("Some cities, such as the District of Columbia, paused a transition to LEDs after residents complained about the bright lights disrupting their sleep.") The article even includes a photo from the International Space Station showing how two cities appear differently from space because they used a different shade of LED light for their street lights.
One thing's certain: the popularity of LED lights is expected to continue: They consume up to 90% less energy and can last up to 25 times longer than traditional incandescent lights. As the most energy-efficient bulb on the market, it's no surprise that so many people are adopting the technology. The Energy Department estimated LEDs made up about 19 percent of all lighting installations in 2017, saving about 1 percent of total energy consumed in the United States. By 2035, the lights are expected to comprise 84 percent of lighting installations. Roadways, parking, building exteriors and area lights — which are applications typically high in lumens, a measure of brightness — are expected to see nearly full conversion to LED lights by 2035.
I thought we knew about this? (Score:2)
I'd swear I've read several articles ( here and elsewhere ) over the years about this exact problem. I thought we had figured this out by now?
I know for my own use I only buy 3000k temp bulbs, because of learning about this exact problem. Well, and I like how they look better too.
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The cheapest bulbs by far in my corner of the world is IKEA and they're 2700K. I don't even know where to get the 4000K+ the article warns about.
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Wouldn't ya know it, the light manufacturers are at it again, making lights that burn out prematurely so they can sell more product. LED lights should last practically forever, but I'm finding plenty of burned out bulbs due to the manufacturers employing cheap-ass AC to DC power conversion boards that seem to be designed to burn out after a few years of use.
If you take a burned out LED bulb, open it up, and apply DC to the LEDs themselves, these bulbs pretty much always still work just fine. Since I'm using solar power and would rather have lights running off DC anyway, I've been converting all the "burned out" LED bulbs I can get my hands on into DC bulbs and giving them a new lease on life.
Great that you're able to put them to good use! What voltage are they and and are they usually the same (asking because someone i know has been talking about setting up a DC system having basically free access to 12v lead batteries)?
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Thanks!
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Re: lifetime is a scam (Score:1)
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The cheapest bulbs by far in my corner of the world is IKEA and they're 2700K. I don't even know where to get the 4000K+ the article warns about.
WTF are you talking about. IKEA sell cool white variants of all their standard bulbs (read not the fancy filament ones) and have a colour temperature of >4000K and they are the same price.
Literally every manufacturer offers 2850K and some or multiple variants over 4000K because it's a very standard practice to put daylight coloured lighting in offices and many modern homes.
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Looking at the IKEA page, the bulbs I use Solhetta E27 470 lumen is only available in 2700K, the E14 and E27 806 lumen are available in 4000K.
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Don't worry about the 4000K bulbs in your home or office, there it's actually pretty good to have. Especially during winter time where there's way too much darkness and the 3000k temp lights makes it feel like it's time to go to sleep.
However when it comes to street lights and car headlights it's a pain to experience in the dark.
Bring back the low pressure sodium lights! A single yellow color that don't impact your night vision as badly. Some claims that you can't see other objects in that light, but it's b
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color temperature "comfort" is related to light intensity. lower light intensities look good with lower temperatures.
for my shop, especially my workbench, i'm using 6 x 18W 6500K LED tubes, 1M away from the workbench. it's a pleasure to work under such light. if i leave only one of the tubes on, it looks awful.
when i worked at an office they had 4000K lights that were BRIGHT and they always looked odd, until they replaced them with 6500K LED and the improvement was very noticeable.
so, in the kitchen and eve
Re: I thought we knew about this? (Score:2)
IMHO, dim 5000K+ lights are awful to endure. I spent 5 days at a hotel with ~800 lumen 5000k LED bulbs in all the lights, and had to go to Walmart and temporarily replace a bunch of them with 3000K bulbs for the sake of my own comfort and sanity while I was there.
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Except it's not a problem. It's just a case of overbrightness. Our eyes are more sensitive to blue. Yes. Which is also why you can get away with a lower lumen cool white LED than you can warm white. If you're replacing 1050lm warm white bulbs with cool ones, consider going to 850lm or even lower.
Idiotic design decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
"More glare" is caused by morons who design LED streetlights and give priority to "we must show off that this is a LED light" over practical considerations.
This includes:
- not placing a hood over the light, allowing you to look directly into the LEDs.
- using fully transparent glass instead of matted glass, again so you can see that there are LEDs inside.
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"More glare" is caused by morons who design LED streetlights and give priority to "we must show off that this is a LED light" over practical considerations.
Agreed...the problem is not that the fixtures are LED-based, but that they are a bad overall design. Any poorly-designed light is going to generate excess glare, LED or incandescent.
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I have examples of both in the direct vicinity of my home. They replaced well-designed sodium or CFL lights with dumb LED lights. Where the previous lights just lit the street, the current ones blind you as you approach them.
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On the other hand, in my experience the street lights are not the problem. It is the residential security lights.
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- not placing a hood over the light, allowing you to look directly into the LEDs.
- using fully transparent glass instead of matted glass, again so you can see that there are LEDs inside.
Also frequency of light itself is important since the high frequency light is preferentially scattered by the atmosphere. Old sodium lamps output much lower frequencies than current LED crap at least around here.
Some of them are so ridiculous they literally look like mini B type suns with a ridiculous purple hue.
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Actually the problem is that the LEDs have worse optical control compared to an arc lamp because the area of the light source is larger. (You need a reflector assembly about 6x the diameter of the light source for good optical control.)
Some of the early streetlight LEDs had refractors-on-chip which could provide amazing optical control. Unfortunately these seemed to have shorter life than bare chip LEDs, and competitors started pushing higher spacing-to-mounting height ratios, which pretty much by definit
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You forgot the "convincing people they need, or deciding to buy, a 6.023e27 lumen LED to show that my dick is bigger than yours". I've got 5W luminaires at 2700K that are plenty bright. Friend of mine put in six I-don't-know-what but at least 1000lm each luminaires on a rail in his kitchen. Makes it impossible to talk to anyone in there where you're sitting in the dining room because you'll be blinded, but the ability to project an X-ray of the bones in your hand onto the wall behind them may come in use
Diffuser (Score:5, Insightful)
Use a diffuser. Problem solved. Go back to your regularly scheduled time-wasting.
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Who modded this insightful? The problem isn't luminous intensity, it's LUMENS. If you want to nitpick, the blue spectrum shift is also problematic.
Neither is solved by diffusion.
Directed light (Score:4, Interesting)
Reducing brightness is important. Even more important is requiring lights yo only illuminate their specific target. Street lights, for example, should only shine downwards.
A corollary: there is no reason to allow lights to shine sideways or upwards. A business sign, for example, only needs to be visible from the road it is on, not across the whole city. Place it high on the building and put a shade over it.
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There are two problems with that statement. First off, street lights actually do need to provide a component of vertical illuminance; they aren't there just to light up the pavement. Lighting designers can be lazy with using uplight rather than downlight because it is significantly easier to provide even illumination. Self-illuminated signs are another issue... but are equally solvable with integrated micro refractors (think the cheezy "holog
Not an LED problem, a specification problem. (Score:2)
LEDs can be made to have any characteristic, maybe start requiring warmer light and less blue wavelengths. Also just because you can go brighter doesn't mean you should. Safety doesn't require being lit up like you are performing on stage.
Dark Skies Initiative (Score:5, Informative)
If they had spent 10 minutes on this site:
https://www.darksky.org/ [darksky.org]
Before replacing their streetlights, they wouldn't have that problem. LEDs aren't the problem. Nearly every one of the DSI approved lighting products are LEDs. Outdoor lighting simply needs to illuminate the ground, not the sky. It's not a particularly difficult problem to solve.
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Is blue light actually a problem for sleep? (Score:4, Interesting)
Could someone point me to a peer reviewed study that says blue light specifically affects people differently with regards to sleep?
Because all of the sleep research papers I've seen so far either...
1) Fail to control for whether blue light behaves any differently than other wavelengths, or else they...
2) Single out bright light as the problem, rather than blue light, because they didn't observe a meaningful difference between wavelengths.
The summary's link near a mention of blue light causing sleep issues actually said nothing about blue light doing so. The only mention of blue light in the paper is with regards to age-related changes to how we perceive it, rather than anything to do with sleep.
Likewise, whenever I see news articles, they're always careful to use weasel words around such claims, or else they'll say things in a suggestive manner that might lead you to think there's something different about blue light, but if you parse what they're saying they're never actually making a refutable claim that blue light is in any way different.
Anyone here know what the non-clickbait research actually shows?
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misunderstood and warped...and scams...
UV bleeding into the violet and blue range in the bulbs that do not precisely emit only UV is why people will think blue or violet for UV. The UV triggers a reaction in human skin to produce vitamin-D and also makes you tan and that also reduced the impact of the UV so you need more of it... Anyhow SAD is pretty much a vitamin-D problem in the winter due the tilt of the earth that causes UV to largely bounce off the atmosphere which cuts your natural reaction to sunli
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The inner clock—Blue light sets the human rhythm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] So yeah, wavelength does matter.
Well, there's that & the fact that I've heard a number of sleep experts, i.e. researchers, say that "blue light" in particular is an issue. I believe them.
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That paper is exactly the sort of reason why I asked for additional information from someone who knows the research. Your link is a survey that engages in no primary research and it was conducted by people who disclaim that they are in the employ of a company that makes lenses for glasses, but what they did not disclaim was that the company makes blue light blocking lens filters for those glasses, so it seems like there's a conflict of interest despite their assertions to the contrary. Which isn't to say th
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Could someone point me to a peer reviewed study that says blue light specifically affects people differently with regards to sleep?
Anyone here know what the non-clickbait research actually shows?
It's certainly not clear cut. There was a recent article [newscientist.com] that suggested it's not just the wavelength, but also the intensity of the light that causes us difficulties in falling asleep. There are additional links from within the article but, honestly, I haven't followed them all, or taken the time to deep dive the research, so maybe take this post with a pinch of salt...
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Currently we seem to shift away from the the blue light theory, but in general the answer is "it is complicated", and e.g. the following review article arrives at the non-conclusive conclusion:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Acute alerting effects of light: A systematic literature review
On the research side, there might be some confounding just by availability bias, as most current bright light sources have a high amount of blue light.
But you can also e.g. use red light to increase alertness in shift worke
Scattering (Score:2)
On purpose (Score:1)
Save more money (Score:2)
Use lower power bulbs and reduce the problem while saving even more money.
That will be easier than getting grown-ups to stop clinging to their huge pole mounted night-lights.
Sigh. (Score:2)
"Oh no our bulbs are TOO energy efficient now".
Try turning them down a bit.
Smart lights (Score:1)
Oh, Come On! (Score:1)
bs (Score:2)
This is bogus. An LED cobra-style street light is far more directional than the sodium vapor with a roundish lens. The problem is actually that in order to be chic, planners these days replace the workdog cobra lamps with stylish old-timey streetlights that cast huge amounts of light upwards and sideways. You can get them with caps, but they still cast a lot of light sideways due to the lens like a table lamp. They have to cast more light sideways because they are half the height of cobra-head lights.
Care about vision? Pollution? (Score:2)
And I suspect the toxic chemicals and resources required to make the "un-recyclable" electronics outweigh their energy-saving benefit. I mean, an incandescent bulb is arguably biodegradable: metal and glass. No poisons involved. No recycling required. Easy to manufacture. Easy to make. Cheap. Works in all temperatures. [slashdot.org] No special knowledge required to cre
Some photons are just better than others (Score:2)