GE or Philips. Both are pretty reliable from my experience. For EcoSmart, Utilitech, and Great Value, you get what you pay for. Cheaper bulbs and shorter life.

Don’t buy the Philips Warm Glow filament LEDs, those have a very high failure rate where the whiter filament fails leaving only the warmer one working. Try to avoid the cheapest non-dimmable Philips LEDs as well. You’re better off getting a cheap EcoSmart or Great Value bulb that’ll last three years than getting a Philips warm glow filament lamp that’ll last one. The warm glow snow cone LEDs, however, are good bulbs. Otherwise Philips is good. GE’s snow cone bulbs are good but their filament ones have a relatively high failure rate. Avoid the “basic” line as well. Every “basic” line LED from even the big name manufacturers is something to avoid.

Haven’t heard much about Utilitech but the older Utilitech Pro line of bulbs was pretty good. Not sure about the newer ones. The EcoSmart snow cone LEDs are junk but I’ve heard good things about the filament lamps from EcoSmart.

Great Value is junk too, and in my expeience those usually flicker badly before they go out. I’ve never had a Great Value LED that simply died in the sense that it stopped working. They usually flicker first, then go out, and then randomly began to work again. I believe the ones I used were made by TCP. I don’t think TCP makes GV LEDs anymore.

Avoid buying cheap products off of Amazon because they can be safety hazards in some cases. Some LED bulbs sold on Amazon aren’t UL listed, so be careful.

 My Backstory: For as long as I can remember, I've always liked lights. Ever since the age of three, I could never stop but look at them. As a child, whenever my parents would take me to the grocery store, to school, or wherever, the defining part of the experience was what type of lights were in the parking lot. It would always make my day as a toddler if I saw a Gardco Gullwing G18 in the parking lot (my favorite fixture as a kid). It would come to a point where they would become the sole thing that completely sucked everything else out of my mind. However, I knew from a young age that society would harshly judge me for this, and I always knew that publicly expressing this hyperfixation would lead to me being branded as weird or eccentric. I never openly shared my lighting fixation for decades, and when I reached my teenage years, I tried to permanently omit this interest from my mind entirely (out of a desperate desire to fit in). I could always recognize the specific models, configurations, and finishes of all the HID lights in my city, but up until recently I could never identify their model or manufacturer. Up until I discovered my community (you guys at Lighting-Gallery.net), I thought I was the only one.

However, lights were never just wire, metal, and glass to me—they always had souls and personalities. I would tilt my eyes to see them 30 feet high in the sky, and they always looked like they had something to say. They never had the same expression; they looked like they were resting or dozing off during the day but looked like they were smiling or excited when they were active at night. I even went as far as naming certain light fixtures after people I knew. For example, the MH lights at my local Costco parking lot were called Jackson. The post-top decorative lights in a neighborhood I used to live near as a kid were called Dominic. I gave them these names because, somehow, they reminded me of the people I worked with. I'm just wondering—do any of you actively experience or relate to what I'm describing? 

The lithium deep red line at the spectrum of the Osram HQI-TS 70W/WDL Excellence looks too strong to be an impurity from the quartz, and more like an intentional dosage, because of its intensity compared to the /NDL and /D lamps, so the lamp actually have Dy-Tl-Na-Li.
Your opinions?

New here, but not new to lighting. Twenty-five years in the business.

We're manufacturing A19 LED lamps in Fargo, North Dakota. First one shipped July 4th.

I know what this industry has been for the last twenty years. One closure after another. Every announcement was a plant going dark. I've watched it the same as everyone here, and I got tired of it.

So here's what we built, and I'll give you the details because I think this group is the one that will actually care.

We took three buildings sitting side by side and made them one. Sealed the shell from the roofline down and insulated it end to end, because you can't build precision electronics in a drafty steel building. Static-proof paint on the walls, static-proof epoxy on the floor. Then the systems: power, HVAC, precision temperature and humidity control, compressed air to every machine.

The line starts at SMT, and the board is ours, designed and engineered in-house. The bulb is ours too. We had a custom A19 mold built for our automation rather than copying a lamp designed to be built by hand overseas. It's a true A19 shape with a longer body, which gives us the surface area to actually dissipate heat, and heat is what kills these things. That mold was the decision that changed everything downstream. From there, automation produces the lamp, automation packages it, and robots palletize.

Board to pallet, one continuous line. I have not seen another that does all of it. At full capacity it runs 30,000 lamps in 24 hours, three shifts, three people a shift.
That last number is the whole answer to why the majors failed here. They tried to reshore the overseas model, which is people-heavy, and that math never works in this country. Then they tried to run LED in plants built for incandescent and fluorescent, which is a different product with different environmental requirements entirely. We didn't compete on labor. We competed with automation, and it works.

There was no playbook. Nobody hands you a blueprint for building a lamp factory in a country that quit making them. I traveled and looked at how it's done everywhere else, then we did it differently.

The important part isn't that we built one line. It's that we built a repeatable system. Every step documented, every problem solved once and written down. We're already working toward the second line.

I'm posting this because this industry has gone a long time without good news, and this is some. American lamp manufacturing isn't a memory. It's running today in Fargo, and it's going to run again. If we can bring one bulb home, the rest can follow.

@LightBulbFun
Definitely a good find, thanks. It only seems to list the wattages and not the actual current and voltage, but a reasonable estimate can be made assuming the total lamp power factor stays constant (definitely not the case but maybe close enough).

if only there was a great archive of historical datasheets and catalogs that might contain the info your looking for

i'd highly recommend you check out the literature section on James's website, lots of juicy technical details in the various catalogs, technical data sheets and technical manuals that will answer many of your questions and I am sure you will find most fascinating (I have certainly lost many an hour to it in the past)

https://www.lamptech.co.uk/Literature.htm

if only...




page 167 (as per the PDF counter) 

https://www.lamptech.co.uk/Documents/Catalogues/Philips%20-%20Catalogue%20-%201989%20UK.pdf





the question I am wondering is why does the CCT change through out the wattage range, whats going on there!

I am pretty sure that a good number of LG members have been members of the Facebook lighting group “Lamp Life: The Duration of Light and its Followers”. In my experience throughout this group, I have been seeing plenty of other members on that group presenting false information as absolute correct fact. It does bother me that some people on this forum are refusing to do thorough research into lighting and claim that thoroughly researched information is wrong. If any of you are members of that Facebook group, have you also been bothered by the false information shared there?

Considering modern day internet, acting like an expert is pretty common and coming of the AI isn't helping this at all. Actually, even outside the internet it isn't that rare. And if there are people who aren't native english speakers the tone of their output might sound a bit different than what they had intended.

If someone just has their RMS voltages I can sort of approximate the currents and wattages

I do this by default, on my way home from work, since many Mercury Vapor and HPS Cobras more recently got replaced by LE... sigh... LED.
As far as memory lane drives in areas I use to live in back in the day, around like 2007, I sometimes found myself taking the Genesis for
a drive around Beavercreek Ohio, for this very reason... remembering the HPS or MV Cobras that use to be in those neighborhoods.
I've got absolutely no interest in the LED street lights that are there now -- there's just nothing remotely interesting about any of them.
However, there are a few old school fixtures still lighting the streets in Beavercreek, like on Indian Ripple road. Plenty of tear drop HPS
street lights still illuminating Indian Ripple road, and it's been that way since back around 2011, so... 2011 or 2010ish vintage with those.
Unfortunately a couple of them have been removed completely and I don't know why.

I do not fully understand what you mean by going beyond criticism. I would love to learn more in detail. I always appreciate your beautiful collection though. On LG, I prefer to be addressed by my username rather than my real name just so you know.