Screw in bulbs make plenty of sense. You are not going to get people to convert to LEDs by forcing them to replace every single fixture in their home. That would be ridiculousmaxxing.
It would be nice to have an updated standard for newer buildings, though. In practice fewer and fewer fittings are using screw-in lightbulbs at all but there's not another standard.
What happens when something does go wrong though? Now, you have to replace the entire thing instead of just simply replacing a bulb. If only we had some other previous existing examples of fancy tech that used non-replaceable parts requiring a full replacement...
The lightbulb that you're throwing away also contains all the same electronics that a larger light fixture does, just in a smaller and less thermally efficient space.
Mounting options that allow larger LED lights allow you to use lights that are more thermally efficient without sacrificing any replaceability. JIS C 8310 mounts for example.
I think they're suggesting a lightbulb equivalent of going from USB-A connectors to USB-C. Replaceable bulbs in sockets that are just as easy to use, but with a smaller profile.
The problem is going from mains voltage to 3.3v means some sort of waste heat. Rewiring the whole house to 12v is one idea I've seen, but again, total house rewire and fixture replacement. In the mean time, it's A9 bulbs with LED electronics going from 120v to 3.3v generating heat. Making cheap electronics means that heat will kill the electronics. Making good electronics at a higher retail price is the solution, but consumers are not educated enough so all they see is sticker shock.
Your comparison of USB-A to USB-C is nonsensical and does not actually acknowledge the issue of why the existing screw in bulb direct replacement have issues
My vote would be 24v or 48v. You cannot power substantial LED with 3.3v. You’d spend a fortune rolling out ultra-thick gauge wire to avoid pissing away non-trivial amounts of power into heat. Many, many LED strips come as 24v. It’s the perfect balance of wire gauge for the amount of power you’ll be drawing.
Screw-in sockets are more durable and long-lasting than any replacement so-far, most of which have been replaced again (remember those weird fluorescent mini-bulb sockets?).
12V is too high for your LEDs, you still have the power supply. 12 volts is not near enough voltage for a house. You can get around it with very big wires but copper is extremely expensive. Even in cars, 12 volts is borderline. Trucks are fairly often go to 24 or higher voltage because even at the size of a large truck (semi), higher voltage is an advantage.
Well, we can certainly argue with 110 or 220 is a better voltage for a house. It is quite clear that 12 volts is too low.
It doesn't need to be for the whole house, it just needs to be for the lighting fixtures. Obviously nobody is going to use a microwave or blender on 12V. It's not like our bulbs plug into NEMA 5-15 outlets. Having good DC standard voltages and plugs would be incredibly useful. Don't bother running 12V everywhere, but like after the 120V light switch go to a single controller that then drives the lights for that room. Or have that be in the box with the switch, although that might still have the same kind of cramped heat issue.
And it's not like we need to just stop producing Edison socket styles tomorrow. But let's make sane standards today.
I don't know how it is where you live, but most apartments where I've lived in Paris didn't have dedicated wiring for the lights in the "living" spaces. They had them in the bathroom / hallway / kitchen, but not in the living rooms, for example.
My current apartment has dedicated circuits in the living room and bedroom. But in the living room they're in awkward places.
I always had to resort to multiple lamps that would plug into an outlet so I could place them where I needed them. Running 12 V for the bulbs would require rewiring most of the apartment.
Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Its not like your bulbs are plugging straight into your wall outlets. You've got some kind of lamp fixture that the bulbs screw in to, correct?
Your lamps would still plug into mains, same as they do today. The lamp fixture overall would contain the driver components, hopefully in packaging which lets it manage heat well and have good build quality. But whatever parts do fail routinely should be able to be easily replaced with some kind of standardized socket. It just seems like we're trying to squeeze too much too cheaply into a form factor that's ill suited for the requirements by trying to shove all the driver circuitry into the same envelope of an older Edison A-shape socket style bulb.
This has already kind of been a thing for a while with low voltage halogen lamps. The bulbs themselves aren't made for mains voltage, the lamp structures themselves give the right voltage for the halogen mini bulbs. I've replaced a few bi-pin halogen lights for LEDs with drop-in replacements (especially for outdoor lights), but this same kind of bulb packaging hasn't really been very common for interior lighting from what I've seen.
> Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
> Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
I was talking about the lamp itself. Maybe I used the wrong term? I meant the fixture which holds the wire and expects a bulb. That fixture needs to go into mains, because that outlet may have to also service something else entirely.
Now, sure, usually those fixtures tend to be larger than the bulbs, so they could hold the conversion circuitry. I'd be fine with that. But the commenter I was replying to talked about having an alternative DC circuit for the lights.
Sure, and we can have that too, in the places where the lights are built-in to the ceilings or cabinets or whatever. When we have lights in the ceilings, the fixtures again can handle this specialized LED bulb style. And one might even link several lights into a single DC circuit for all the lights in the room versus having each individual light do its own AC->DC conversions in compromised envelopes.
That is fairly typically in the US as well. Most often there is a switch in the living spaces, which controls have the outlet half of a duplex outlet. Plug something into the top (sometimes bottom - there is no standard) and the switch controls it so you can get the lights on/off when you enter/leave the room, plug into the bottom (again sometimes top) and it is always on, perfect for whatever else you have in the room.
Yeah 24VDC or 48VDC would make more sense but tbh you only need to drive the LEDs with it.
At 48VDC you could run 16AWG like 100ft and still be fine as long as the lights pull around 60W or less all together (which works out to ~12 lights on a circuit). And that circuit would only add another ~2W or so in power losses when energized.
That circuit is essentially what power over ethernet does today so you could replace romex with PoE Type 3/Type 4 plenum rated ethernet and it'd be like half the cost.
And if you really want to optimise for losses you could put the switches on the ethernet data line and use that for sensing rather than running the PoE circuit out to each light switch (and then de-energise the PoE circuit when the switches report off). Bonus points in that this would allow you to "reprogram" which light switch controls which circuit without needing to do any re-wiring.
You still have to run Romex everywhere, though. People want to run other things in various rooms. They want the option of turning a bedroom into an office should that make sense. That means they're going to see enough power to run a decent sized computer. TV's and bedrooms are common. Stereo systems. Just me and my wife charging our beds by the phone overnight is going to take a significant amount of the power that you allocated to the room.
And again, your whatever voltage, 48 volts, is way too much for an LED, so we still have a power supply. What's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC? Ultimately, there's not much of a difference, well, you could do a very cheap linear regulator and be horribly wasteful of power, but more likely you're going to be doing a social power supply, which is going to be more complex and have similar efficiency losses. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to know this for sure but I would suspect the power supply in your Ethernet switch and then the second one to get to that your voltage is less efficient than just having a single power supply that goes from regular line voltage to whatever the LEDs need.
You still have to run romex for the other circuits. But it's not hard to run those on a separate breaker. Rooms often have like one and a half 15A circuits each because lighting used to draw so much power but now you can drop it down to one 15A circuit per room and run a single circuit that switches out to the entire house off of one 15A breaker.
> what's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC?
It's already DC. A properly sized buck converter based LED driver is going to have like 80-95% efficiency when the LED is on (and it's trivial to draw no power when off) and they are like 0.25USD per IC.
They are going to have equal or better performance than AC->DC switching mode power supplies because buck converters are already the simplest and most efficient type of SMPS.
I've seen on Amazon packs of 4 bulbs for $7 which is significantly less than the price of a single Hue bulb for $25. While the Hue bulb is "tuneable" white adjustable from cool and warm, the price is 3x for 1/4 of the number of bulbs. Not really sure that counts as marginal. Unless you're marginal is describing the cost to manufacture, but what's that got to do with anything?
