Why do some people hate LEDs?


Not being rude just asking.

They replacing lightsource that they aren't supposed to replace (Fluorescents, HID), have instant on and restrike, have high blue spike in the spectrum, faded, dim and at the same time superglaring, and light quality, and their short life, and the fact that you can't replace LEDs in a LED light fixture, and their promotion as an environmental friendly where in fact, they are not.
Lots of roads and places in Israel are dimly lit after the HID lighting replaced to LED, and the light pollution and sky glow increased dramatically.

How is LED not environmentally friendly? I think it's efficient and long lasting.

Why do some people hate LEDs?


Not being rude just asking.

Because their sales morons and brainwashed greenbrainers overboosted (and many are still overboosting, in an effort to boost sales) their real performance (efficacy so light output, color quality, cooling need, lifetime, reliability figures,...) to a level the real products could not and so did never delivered. To an extend to cause big disappointment among users. Mainly because it yielded to misspecification in many cases.
Many folks from here are able to understabd the "fineprint" and see they could never do the job they were forcefully pushed to by the greenbrainers. Like 20W LED panels instead of 250W HPS (even when taking the most efficient optics for LED and least efficient, like bare bulb, for the HPS, it can simply can not make it at all.
Consequence is, people dont trust them anymore. And blame the technology for that.
Mainly when well performing tradditional technology installation is replaced by something that does not do the task at all.

Some LEDs are just downright cheap and overrated. Meanwhile some LEDs are fine. On the streetlight side of things, they replaced perfectly fine Incandescent and HID fixtures when they will never live up to their captives. Plenty to hate IMO.

How is LED not environmentally friendly? I think it's efficient and long lasting.

The materials used to make them include many toxic chemicals and they are much more difficult to dispose of at end of life than a simple discharge lamp. They nearly always need the entire fixture changing when they do fail, and they fail a LOT. There may be some long lasting fixtures out there, but I've never seen one. The ones used around here have been known to fail within weeks of installation, needing a crew to come out and change it, where a similar HPS or SOX fixture would soldier on for years. There is a single remaining HPS fixture across the street from here that has been dayburning for at least 9 months to my knowledge and it's still going strong. Meanwhile, L*D's are failing by the dozen.

The most of the deadly chemicals are released to the environment from the manufacturing process of the LEDs, they dont make it to the LEDs themselves (atleast not in any significant quantities). Which is very convenient for everyone "green" to overlook, while pacnicking about single milligrams of Mercury in discharge lamps (which is by far less dangerous substance in itself, and recoverabe/recyclable)

The 2nd fallacy is in the effects of LEDs vs anyone using their lighting (even if he didnt get to choose, such as the case with city, school, workplace etc). There are 2 potential ways of harm caused by the Blue light. Both have been dismissed by the EU based on experiments that were, by the way how they were done, unlikely to detect the issue anyway

The 3rd fallacy is that LED technology allows manufacturers to enforce limits on luminire useful life - a thing which never was the case in the past. Mainly so by the fact, that even in luminaires with replaceable parts, the parts are non standard and the manufacturer gets to decide when they will stop being available. This had never been the case with any HID luminaire, all of which (with some oddball exceptions) have been always built around industry standard parts. The official lifetime of an outdoors luminaire is quoted as 10 to 15 years. With HID luminaires pretty much everything had been known to last in practice at least 2 times as much. You bet manufacturers won't like this to be the case, just look what happens in other areas : HP, John Deere, .....

The 4th fallacy is that LED technology provides very effective market lock in to a few manufacturers, who also lobby for the regulation to ban everything else. This have wide economical and political implications on many levels

The 5th fallacy is that in many cases the actual claims of savings are either fraudulent (you save half the energy but also get half the light, etc), assume worst case conditions for the old installation, or (in the versions provided to cities etc) account for money gained not directly by saving electricity, but granted by the EU just for the act of installing LEDs. This money comes from taxpayer money in countries inside the EU. So no one at all benefits from this except the LED manufacturers : The people who paid for it don't get better roads in their country, but their money goes to trash the environment and harm people's health in another country

Why do some people hate LEDs?


Not being rude just asking.

Only people on lighting forums hate LED, most people out in the everyday world haven’t even got a basic understanding of them, and nether know nor care about lighting in general, as long as they flip the switch and the room lights up!
Classic example, the light in our valet bay office at work went out last week, (Sylvania LED drum fitting), a guy came to us, (site maintenance), for a ‘bulb’, only to find, as he put it in his own words, “but it’s got an L-E-D err, driver something in it???, WTF???“!, “where’s the actual bulb”???

Only people on lighting forums hate LED, most people out in the everyday world haven’t even got a basic understanding of them, and nether know nor care about lighting in general, as long as they flip the switch and the room lights up!
Classic example, the light in our valet bay office at work went out last week, (Sylvania LED drum fitting), a guy came to us, (site maintenance), for a ‘bulb’, only to find, as he put it in his own words, “but it’s got an L-E-D err, driver something in it???, WTF???“!, “where’s the actual bulb”???

I'm cracking up as I read this

Oh yes!  , he described to me that he’d taken the cover off, and was greeted by, “a little knob thing in the middle of a plate with loads of yellow ‘buttons’ on”!
He grabbed hold of the knob thing, (the driver in the middle of the board), and tried to unscrew it to get to the bulb, only to find it didn’t unscrew and he couldn’t see a bulb anyway???

I just smiled and told him, leave it with me, I’ll get onto it now 

So it didn't last 15 to 25 years, then. Strange, that.

No, granted it was a bad one, didn’t have a driver in it actually made by Sylvania, and that’s the problem!
As long as ‘branded’ manufacturers can sell their products whilst farming out the business end of their fittings to the cheapest supplier, LED tech will always have a bad name.

On the plus side, wholesale DID honour the warranty and replaced it for free.

A few reasons

-First, the obvious fact that it's killing off basically everything else. No other light source in the past has done this, except for maybe when incandescent lamps first became available to replace fire.

-And the second issue is that, aside from things like color temperature, there's no standardization. With things like fluorescent or HID, you have tons of different manufacturers making different fixtures that all use the same kind of lamp and gear, which also means that if a component fails or a lamp burns out, you can replace it with one from any brand as long as it's the same. With LEDs the fixtures aren't even designed to have parts replaced, or if they are it's only the drivers. And even then, you're stuck with buying the part from that one manufacturer, and what do you do when that one thing is discontinued or the manufacturer goes out of business? LEDs don't last forever, they might last longer than other sources but they fail eventually. And when that happens you have to throw out the whole fixture, instead of unscrewing and putting in a new bulb. Now there are exceptions to this, for example LED tubes and high power LED filament lamps, which I'm hoping will eventually become the standard format of LED lighting, but I'm not too hopeful.

No, granted it was a bad one, didn’t have a driver in it actually made by Sylvania, and that’s the problem!
As long as ‘branded’ manufacturers can sell their products whilst farming out the business end of their fittings to the cheapest supplier, LED tech will always have a bad name.

On the plus side, wholesale DID honour the warranty and replaced it for free.

The other problem is a lot of local authorities buy the cheapest crap they can find, not seeming to care that it will cost them far more in the long run to replace all the failures. I don't think I'm being too cynical when I say I'm convinced they get erm.. 'encouragement' to install the things. Otherwise why replace perfectly working HPS/SOX fixtures..?

I generally hate LEDs because they are just taking over and replacing all other light sources. I prefer the old and reliable HID lamps, especially SOX and MV. LEDs are also not as “green” or environmentally friendly as they were said to be due to all of the harmful chemicals used in manufacturing, as well as many false advertised lamp specifications. For example, LEDs can be advertised to last 20 years. Maybe the diodes themselves would last that long, but the cheap driver used is lucky to last 2 years. I’m not saying there aren’t any good quality LEDs out there, but either way it won’t change my opinion on them.

On another note, I think most LEDs have a pretty ugly color temperature compared to incandescent lamps and sodium lamps. So yes, maybe they take slightly less power than all other lamps types, but that in no way makes them better. I’d prefer to see a Westinghouse Lifeguard lamp in service that lasts 300,000 hours, not a cheap LED that is advertised to last 25,000 hours and lasts 2000. Isn’t it “greener” to use a single lamp for 30 years while using slightly more power, than using an “energy efficient lamp” and having to dispose of it and buy more because it doesn’t live up to its advertised lifespan?

I also think that LEDs should NEVER replace older fluorescent fixtures and lamps, especially T12 and preheat. Nearly all LED tubes are generic junk and won’t last even close to as long as a good T12 lamp. I honestly think that fluorescent lamps and HID lamps are made cheaply nowadays with out of spec arc tubes purposely. I actually wonder if the manufacturers of those HID lamps WANT their out of spec arc tubes to fry your ballast, so then you believe that old lighting technology is unreliable, and then you want to switch to their expensive, junk LED lamps.

Just saying since they were the other lamps that were once called “efficient and environmentally friendly” I have nothing against CFLs, HPS, or halogen lamps. LED lamps only sell in my opinion because average people don’t care about lighting, as long as they can light up an area.