This is one of those things where the discourse is just completely broken. Both of these takes are shit and no one is concerned about the actual problem.
Republicans want to bring back incandescents because they just want to trigger the libs and have decided light bulbs are woke.
And the “LEDs are fine” crowd are throwing people with flicker sensitivities under the bus. And, no, you don’t have to be “pretty far on the spectrum” to notice a difference. And even if you did… why in the world is this person so dismissive of the millions of autistic folks?
LEDs, for the most part, are superior to incandescent bulbs. Collectively they save people billions of dollars in energy costs and greatly reduce fossil fuel use. You have more options for color and brightness. You can control them with your phone. LEDs are fantastic.
Unfortunately there is a design flaw that makes LEDs hard to use for certain people. Due to AC power, most LEDs have a 60hz refresh rate. Meaning they turn off and on 60 times per second. With incandescents this didn’t matter because the filament didn’t have time to lose its glow between cycles.
Most people cannot see this flicker in LEDs. But there are millions of people who are sensitive to it and it can cause migraines and discomfort.
The solution is definitely not to go back to incandescents. There are flicker free LEDs and I think with some regulation we could make sure all LEDs are flicker free or at least make sure flicker free bulbs are easy to find and not priced at a premium.
Thankfully there is a group testing bulbs to find the ones that will most likely cause no discomfort. They call themselves the Flicker Alliance and their website has a pretty decent selection of tested and approved bulbs.
So if you feel like your LED bulbs might be causing you distress, that is a good resource to try. I think there is also something you can do to make sure the LED drivers are using DC power, but I haven’t really looked into that.
It’s probably not as important as preventing migraines, but bulbs with bad flicker also cause a lot of problems for photographers and videographers. Photos can have heavy banding and video can have these horizontal lines that just slowly travel down. There are some newer cameras that can detect the flicker and sync your shutter to it. And Sony just released a global shutter camera that also fixes this issue. But it would just be a lot easier if they started manufacturing LEDs without flicker in the first place.
In any case, I just thought this was an important subject that doesn’t get a lot of attention so I’d post it here as well.
amhrancas 