https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8xaBesc/

99% of the people in the comments don't know a thing about fluorescent lighting.

Fluorescent lamps will only flicker when used on magnetic ballast, and almost all fluorescent fixtures that currently exist use electronic high frequency ballasts, no flicker will be caused.

Any UV created by the lamps would be blocked out by any plastic lens used, and in almost every example shown in the comments it is a fluorescent troffer with a plastic lens.

Many of these people also make the claim of high levels of blue light, any other efficient lighting technology would have the same problem without sacrificing efficiency.

Lastly, the claim that fluorescent lighting is too bright doesn't make much sense, if they got the place to switch to LED, it would be equally as bright if not brighter.

By the looks of it, most of these people straight up want to switch back to incandescent if not get rid of indoor lighting entirely. I'll stop my rant now.

https://eco-story.com/uncategorized/led-outdoor-lighting-vs-metal-halide/

That's the sort of fraud which enabled LED to gain the popularity in the 1st place, during 15 years in which it was NOT the most efficient light source

If the same effort and resources would be put into traditional lighting, we might have had 200 Lm/W halides and 120 Lm/W Fluorescents by now

The page i linked is as old as the existence of Tiktok as whole, and is by far not the earliest example on the internet



Regarding Fluorescents and flicker - Yep, they do flicker, and even at 100Hz here

My workshop right now is lit up with 36W T8's and the outside has a 400W halide, all on magnetic gear, and you don't see the flicker at all because it is soft. You really have to set up a test to detect it

Nearly all LED high bay luminaires on the market have mad squarewave flicker that you immediately see with your eyes

That type of stuff really makes my blood boil. 3800 lumens out of 45W is pretty bad for LED by modern standards, but 3000 lumens out of a 150W metal halide bulb is just pure BS! That's practically the efficiency of a good halogen bulb, and very far from the actual efficiency of a 150W MH bulb.

If the same effort and resources would be put into traditional lighting, we might have had 200 Lm/W halides

How do you think we would have been able to achieve 200 lm/W metal halide lamps? After all, that's about as good as a 131W SOX-E lamp today.

TikTok is still brain rot. At my work we had some F32T8s on an electronic ballast get replaced with Ledvance selectable-color LED tubes, and unlike the old fluorescent tubes, these actually flicker to the point being nauseating. When a fan is on the desk you can see it as the blades spin on medium speed.
 

https://eco-story.com/uncategorized/led-outdoor-lighting-vs-metal-halide/

That's the sort of fraud which enabled LED to gain the popularity in the 1st place, during 15 years in which it was NOT the most efficient light source

If the same effort and resources would be put into traditional lighting, we might have had 200 Lm/W halides and 120 Lm/W Fluorescents by now

The page i linked is as old as the existence of Tiktok as whole, and is by far not the earliest example on the internet



Regarding Fluorescents and flicker - Yep, they do flicker, and even at 100Hz here

My workshop right now is lit up with 36W T8's and the outside has a 400W halide, all on magnetic gear, and you don't see the flicker at all because it is soft. You really have to set up a test to detect it

Nearly all LED high bay luminaires on the market have mad squarewave flicker that you immediately see with your eyes

Although if we had focused on conventional lighting technologies we would not have the versatility of LED.Take a deformable garage light for example-the type that screws into a light socket. It would be *possible* to do that with fluorescent. But it would be a bit bulkier and somewhat dimmer. There are so many things that you can only really do with LED........but not all of them are only possible with it.

Folks, do realize that not everything is about the efficiency. It's also about mercury content (10mg in each of a couple billion of discharge lamps used throughout the world adds up) and simply cost (LED stuff is a lot cheaper).
Doesn't mean there's not a ton of misinformation about lighting stuff, but i see that even here with people spreading misinformation about LED flicker.

LED stuff in fact is not cheaper. Regular halo fluorescent tube is next to nothing in material costs. Soft glass and halo phosphor are very cheap, so cheap that recycling is negatively efficient economically until sponsored by governments. Truth to be told, LED recycling is not economically efficient either

I've never been able to buy €1 CFLs like i'm able to buy €1 LED lamps.

In fact I was able to pick some CFLs close to $1. But the comparison is not fair as electronics for CFLs is somewhat more complicated than LED supplies. For linear tubes, some still available are $1 new with warranty at retail, ~$2 remaining triphosphor stocks. Available T8 LED substitutions are generally 3-5 times more expensive.

@Laurens , @RRK — CFLs can go for as little as 25 cents each here. NO ONE likes them in the States. There are either LED adopters or incandescent diehards. You could probably put 1000 CFLs for $10 and no one would show up to grab them. 

Those are probably the same type of people who don't know anything about the electromagnetic spectrum and claim that 5G will give us cancer. The only downside of 5G is that everyone, even those idiots on tiktok get super fast internet to spead the bs even faster than before.

@Laurens , @RRK — CFLs can go for as little as 25 cents each here. NO ONE likes them in the States. There are either LED adopters or incandescent diehards. You could probably put 1000 CFLs for $10 and no one would show up to grab them. 

give me the 1000 cfls.... I would prefer 1000 incans.... but 1000 cfl is fine too.

Yep. Fluorescent lights do not normally flicker if it’s on an electronic ballast. The strobing effect only occurs when the ballast is failing. A failing fluorescent lamp can swirl or have striations but if it flickers like a failing LED then it’s probably a ballast. A decent electronic ballast shouldn’t have any flickering.

When the ballast fails, it does flicker. Sometimes the type of light can give them a headache or whatever. I honestly prefer fluorescent tubes over LED tubes, because LED tubes are dimmer than fluorescent tubes (they’re like 1800 lumens to replace a 2900 lumens T8 when 1800 lumens isn’t much brighter than a 100W incandescent). I do prefer electronically ballast fluorescents over magnetically ballasted ones even if the magnetic ballast is usually more reliable. Because, electronic ballasts are flicker free and electronic fluorescent ballasts usually last way longer than the ones used on CFLs or circline adapters.

The newer circline adapters often used the same ballasts as spiral CFLs and as a result the ballast commonly failed before the lamp. On some CFLs and circline adapters, when the tube fails, the ballast also does, because after the tube is dead, the ballast tries so hard to ignite the lamp and it keeps trying until it blows up. This seems to especially be a common fsilure with the programmed start CFLs and adapters.

They can flicker on magnetic ballasts and they in fact do. I’ve seen like a partial strobe effect with magnetic ballasts. People either love LEDs or love incandescents. Never in between.

I bet even if you sold 1,000 CFLs for free, no one would buy them. But, CFLs were pretty bad anyways. I’m not a fan of them either because they use very poor quality ballasts and it’s not uncommon for the ballasts to fail catastrophically at the end of its life. It’s rare for one to burn down a house but it’s common for them to smoke or even produce some flames. Most CFLs have a fuse so it doesn’t stay that way forever and it extinguishes quite quickly. LEDs actually have a flicker rate very similar to CFLs. Cheaper LEDs often have more flicker. I’ve seen one YouTube video titled “CFL bulb burnt my bathroom”, but I’m not sure if it was the CFL that caught on fire or if it was the fan motor, since it originated from the fan, and the exhaust fan motors can in fact catch fire.

All HID, fluorescent, and LED light sources emit blue light. It does not matter what the color temperature is, they all emit blue light. However, a 2700K LED bulb does emit less blue light than a 5000K LED bulb because the blue light is more filtered with warm white phosphor, but they still emit more blue light than incandescents because most LEDs use blue diodes coated with phosphor. CFL, fluorescent, metal halide, and mercury vapor bulbs also emit blue light. Even HPS lamps do, but not nearly as much as mercury vapor or metal halide because the sodium filters out a lot of the blue light in HPS. The only light source that emits no blue light is low pressure sodium, though incandescent lamps emit very little blue light too especially for a broad spectrum lamp. It is a fact that daylight lamps emit more blue light than soft white lamps because daylight lamps have less phosphor to filter out the blue light.

The fact that purple street lights exist is prove that there is no such thing as a white LED. All those purple lights used to have yellow phosphor (either a warm or cool white color). Most LEDs have blue LEDs. Purple street lights are prove that LEDs are just blue diodes with phosphor. There are so many myths about purple street lights too, some blame it on COVID, some blame it on FG, some think they’re used to reduce crime, even though they’re not used for that. They exist because the phosphor came off the diode.

We’ll probably have more flickering and poor CRI LEDs when the new 2028 law (minimum 120 lumens per watt). Philips makes a decent ultra efficient lamp, but I bet many would make them for as cheap as possible and make them 70 CRI and have bad flickering, I don’t know yet though. LEDs are already efficient anyways. Early LEDs often weren’t much more efficient than CFLs, but times have changed. High CRI reduces efficiency in both fluorescents and LEDs, so it’s possible that after the law comes into effect, 70 CRI will be a new standard for LED bulbs.

A lot of people on TikTok want to remove overhead lighting and want everything to be lit up with lamps, it is stupid indeed but many seem to want to ban overhead lighting from indoor use.

I still don't understand how the LED eventually became the most efficient light source if @Ash said that everyone began to recommend LED when its lumen efficacy was highly inferior compared to most traditional light sources?