Very pleased with Sylvania Ultra-Led 40w bulb

[PNjunction]

I'm slowly making the move from CFL to LED with solar, and things are improving from when I tried a few years ago.

Part of my hobbies are high-frequency shortwave listening, along with vhf-uhf scanning. When I tried LED's a few years ago, the drivers in the bulbs tended to spew garbage all over the spectrum, but usually not both at the same time. This limited my choices greatly, so I went back to CFL's that were quality enough not to spew so much junk.

I'm pleased to find that the Osram / Sylvania Ultra LED 40w incandescent equivalent (6.5w in use) is well-behaved across the spectrum that I monitor. UNLESS of course you put your radio or other device within a foot or two.

I also want to be able to run from solar / battery backup with an inverter. And, like my cfl's, I don't really want to dedicate a pure-sine-wave inverter to this task, although obviously I can. Instead, I'm running backup lighting solely from msw inverters, and putting the Sylvania led's to the test. We'll see as it has only been two hours now. But no immediate poof! I'm trying to beat it into submission running it in the garage at about 97F too.

I used an infrared pointing thermometer and did notice about a 5 degree increase in temperature at the driver base, as compared to running it off pure ac from the poco.

Some interesting power measurements:

With the same setup and same msw inverters, I measured the amperage drawn from a big 12v agm to compare against my CFL's. Power factor in both cases is obviously in play here. These are the results for the "40 watt equivalent" CFL's vs the Sylvania Ultra LED. Power drawn also takes into account the inverter's load as well.

CFL - 14 watt / 40w equiv
1.95A drawn from the battery

Sylvania LED
6.5 watt / 40w equiv
1.35A drawn

So while I have nearly the same luminence with the bulbs, I am saving a considerable amount of power with the led. BUT in my case, if that meant spewing out a lot of noise in the spectrum, that would have been the end of that like when I tried some others years ago. And the color temp and so forth are pleasing enough to me to not make me feel like I'm camping out with cheap led's inside my house.

What I also learned then was that you can't just count on a brand to behave the same way all across the board either. So for right now, this model is working well for me.

I'll let you know if the MSW type inverter makes the Sylvania led groan.

[DanKegel]

I love those bulbs, too. Good to hear they've RF-quiet.

[PNjunction]

I'm being cautious and will test every one I get for rf-noise quietness.

Of course I read reviews later, and was amazed at how crazed some consumer reviews about bulbs are. Kind of compares to the top vs bottom balance issues for the lightbulb enthusiast!

[SunEagle]

I'm being cautious and will test every one I get for rf-noise quietness.

Of course I read reviews later, and was amazed at how crazed some consumer reviews about bulbs are. Kind of compares to the top vs bottom balance issues for the lightbulb enthusiast!

The pros and cons of LED usually revolve around their color and amount of light output but not the noise or RF they emit.

Maybe that is because most people (me included as been told by the wife) are hard of hearing.

[bcroe]

The pros and cons of LED usually revolve around their color
and amount of light output but not the noise or RF they emit.

In my vacuum tube days, I noted that every time Mom ran the vacuum, it wiped out my
radio listening. I rigged a filter on the cord, and the noise was completely killed.

Ever since then, at home and at work, my quest was that each process/machine should
be designed to not contribute any additional RF noise to the spectrum. However, politics
are not so strict, and these days it seems to be a lost cause. Bruce Roe K9MQG

[PNjunction]

That's why I was totally surprised with the 40w Sylvania. .5-300mhz seemed clean, unless you did something dumb like get within a foot of it. My earlier experiments with leds led to being clean in either HF, but not in VHF/UHF, or visca versca.

Those that set up an emergency / outage backup and don't test their cfls / leds may be in for a rude surprise when they go from cable or sat-tv to local OTA signals.

[PNjunction]

Being fair to GE Led's

To be fair, I also tested a recent-model GE 40w led bulb. Just as quiet across the spectrum, and no immediate problems with the MSW inverter, although I'm going to let it run for 12 hours or so to weed out any infant teething issues.

Similarly, a 60W Osram / Sylvania was pleasingly quiet across the spectrum - but like the others you can't just be on top of it - 2 to 3 feet away with any antenna and I was good to go.

This is so much nicer than led's were to me a few years ago that I'm making the switch. Either GE or Sylvania brand for me would be fine for me. I'm probably not going to test the off brands just to save a buck.

The power company probably likes me since my cfl's ran about .5 to .6 PF, and the led bulbs are typically .7 to .8 PF as measured by a kill-a-watt meter. Not that I get billed for power factor, but for them with a large commercial installation, it probably helps to be a nice guy to them.

Here in earthquake-country, when / if the big-hand takes my house, turns it upside down and shakes for good measure, (already did that - not a fun ride) I don't have to worry about dragging my hands or feet across broken CFL guts. Still, *decent shoes* are one's first priority in a quake. You don't want to lacerate anything at this stage of the game. Save that for another forum I guess.

For now, goodbye CFL's in this household.

[Bynumite]

I am glad man. I was on the fence about getting them.