• Lighting
  • Awful LED lights everywhere in USA...and upcoming incandescent ban!

I unfortunately had to visit a hospital, a hotel, and a funeral home recently. All of them had replaced (in the last few years since I've been there) with awful flickering LEDs! I had to leave after 15 minutes 🙁. The lack of regulation of LEDs is making it harder to live a normal life.

To make it worse, USA is banning halogen & incandescents by August. This seems to include rough service bulbs too:

DOE reaffirmed its conclusions in the January 2017 Definition Final Rules and discontinued the exemptions from the GSIL definition for rough service lamps; shatter-resistant lamps;

Any advice what I can do?


I've been:

  1. Trying to buy as many incandescents as possible. But very hard to find; impossible to find my go-to brand. Even light fixtures/lamps are being made to only power LEDs (only have 7W instead of 45W, for example). Sigh, now need to buy extra lamps.
  2. Commented on the DOE rule.
  3. Commented for the FDA to regular LEDs.
  4. Signed the Reverse Incandescent Ban petition
  5. Also, Jen's advice on reporting health problems caused by LEDs to the FDA is good

I fear there will be a time when flickering LEDs will be completely unavoidable and it is very frustrating. How are other people dealing with this crap?

    I am already living in this inevitable "future" that you speak of.

    https://blog.nus.edu.sg/jeremiahchan/2020/10/12/singapores-lighting-and-its-effects-on-our-health/

    In this city, ranked with the highest light pollution in the world, has already been completely replaced islandwide with the following led specs:

    Extremely bright light of over 1500nits
    7500kelvin
    PWM 200 hertz with 99% modulation / 2000 hertz but with even higher brightness intensity

    They can be found in everywhere with every 3 - 6 feets (or 1 - 2 meters), across the entire city. Streets, shopping malls, subways, stations, you name it. During the covid lockdown they took the opportunity to renovate ceiling lamps to leds. They even put neon signs and digital bill boards with the above led specs everywhere as well. I have to wear sun hat indoor as their ceiling is typically only 2.5 meters low and I stand at around 1.9m. Therefore, the led is right in my central vision, and only around half a meter from my head.

    To cope with this,I have to wear shades (to cut down on the glare and brightness intensity) and 98% blue light fitover glasses(to reduce my sensitivity to flickering) wherever I go outside.

    Occasionally, I could even see the led light source flickering in my peripheral vision. That's because while their switch to cheap LED have increased brightness by 2-3 times, they kept the PWM hertz low and modulation high to reduce overall electrical energy consumption. Being able to percieve brighter light flickering in the peripheral vision is due to critical flicker frequency.

    Yea, that's just how bad and awful it is. It's inevitable.

    • KM likes this.

    I can't deal with this. There are places I shouldn't go or I'd have to suffer the consequences (headaches, unable to focus, sick the whole next day etc.). I can't change store lighting or other people's home lighting, so there's no strategy other than avoiding such places. Which increase in number lately: many stores and even street corners are putting up LCD panel advertising with no way to avoid, as symptoms are triggered by having something flicker in the peripheral sight. The wonderful sodium-vapor street lamps are slowly being replaced with LED. There are now streets in the neighborhood I can't walk at evening/night because their lighting instantly triggers symptoms that last for hours. It's only getting worse at this rate.

      KM I can't change store lighting or other people's home lighting, so there's no strategy other than avoiding such places.

      Hahaha exactly that’s the typical response I get from people when I brought up my struggles in my everyday life. “Just change the lighting”. Like how can i change others’ store lighting or houses? 

      The installation of led everywhere is really getting quite ridiculous imo. At least in my city, they even installed a huge 50inch lcd right in the bus. I don’t know if this was specially installed by the transport service provider here or was it shipped with one. This caused me serious inconvenience anyway for I have to restrict myself to standing at the entrance of the bus, where I will be behind the LCD screen. The awkwardness of standing at the bus entrance during rush hours.

      Now because of all the cheap leds, I cant be out after sun set because of all the temporal light modulation. 

      I sure hope some kind of strict regulation will be enforced worldwide. No invisible flickering should be allowed.

      KM What do we do? Move to some rural area?

      6 days later

      According to Ban Blinding LEDs FB Group, nearly all incandescent and halogens will be banned this August in USA, including rough service. However, there is an exception for appliance lightbulbs of a max of 40W, typically 400 lumens.

      Sad times.

      You can probably still order them from Canada, Mexico and China.

      2 months later

      It's August 1 . Incandescent / halogen are no longer available in USA 🙁.

        ryans Crap, and I meant to order up a bunch. Is it really a hard stop? Before in Canada they just did a "stores can keep selling their stock on shelf until it's gone".. so the US has to chuck everything in the trash?

          Unfortunately it is very similar in Australia, with potentially catastrophic results for nocturnal insects and stargazers as well. This is not to trivialize the issue for people - but these insects and some plants are vital for ecological balance and the "skylore" is part of our heritage, the lights block out the stars.

          I came on here as I have to upgrade computers -am working on an ancient iMac after I had to sell a brand new iMac due to (evidently) vestibular migraines - hoping to find a recommendation for a usable one. Apple the company was absolutely useless when I sought information and insist on acting as if this is an isolated condition, that I was the first person/logged support reach-out mentioning the issue.

          a year later

          beyondthelight woah that's super cool. I wonder if their panels they use are true 8 bit and not 6+2frc. Also regarding the bulb ban, WinCo food store still seems to sell the banned bulbs. I have a stock pile of the bulbs I bought from them.

            jordan I dont know about the bits but they have by far the best colors I have ever seen in a monitor, really, not even a match with the expensive mac cinema displays, its the incandescent backlight, its another realm altogether.

              jordan Not sure how to take the photo as the light you will see will still be luminescent, but using as daylight backlighted in front of my window, hooked up to my macbook laptop, with its screen permanently turned off.

                beyondthelight Thanks for the pics. How does the back of it look? I would try it if I was able to contact them first and ask about if it uses frc or not. You can have a super safe backlight but it can still cause bad issues if the panel itself uses frc or even vcom.

                  jordan Reds are especially rich, the laptop screen colors are much pale in comparison, and besides color, the strain totally vanishes, you can look at the monitor all day and have zero strain.

                  jordan back has a milky white glass, have it permanently fixed in my window so cant really take photos of the back, it lets the light coming from the back thru. I would not worry about the frc and those details, the important thing is that it works, and works like a miracle.

                    beyondthelight unfortunately FRC is a huge part to this eye strain issue, you can't ignore it if your sensitive to it (I am). That's why people still had issues with the eazeye monitor which uses natural light, it ended up using 6+2frc. You can get rid of flickering backlights but the frc will still rapidly flicker the pixels. If I knew the model number of the panel in this monitor I could figure out if it uses it or not. How did you find out about this monitor btw? I couldn't find anything about it online, only the link you posted here. Definitely interested with the incandescent light box but I don't think anyone else even would buy it without knowing the panels native color depth.

                      dev