Justin Ohms
1 min readJul 9, 2024

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No, your math is incorrect and you don’t understand the physics. LEDs are just not as efficient as you and most people believe,

For comparable light output, (of say a 60w incandescent) the incandescent will output about 54w as heat ( 90% of input energy) an LED bulb of the same light output will output about 7w as heat (70% of input energy). This means that for the same light output an LED will output 12% -13% of the heat of the incandescent (not 1% as you claim)

The reason this is fatal to LED bulbs and not incandescent bulbs is that LED bulbs are semiconductors themselves and also contain additional control circuits. These semiconductors degrade when exposed to high temperatures. Compare this to incandescents which not only do not contain these temperature sensitive parts but are designed to work at high temperatures and in fact require a minimum temperature (about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit at the filament) to even begin to glow.

This is why LEDs fail faster if used in enclosed fixtures and why some LED bulbs have restrictions on being mounted upside down. Heat kills semiconductors and even 12% of the heat of an incandescent will still degrade an LED. Fixtures designed for incandescents never worried about heat because incandescents love heat. This is why you’ve never seen an incandescent bulb with a heat sink or cooling fins but nearly every LED bulb has some kind of passive cooling.

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