The New Light Is Bad

There's something off about LED bulbs-which will soon be, thanks to a federal ban, the only kind you can buy.

- By Tom Scocca. Photograph by Beth Sacca

The lightbulb was flickering over my head. Not the idealized cartoon lightbulb, the universal symbol for a flash of inspiration, but a Philips-brand 800-lumen A19 LED bulb. I'd put one in the bedroom-ceiling fixture only a few months before. In theory, it should have been the last I would put up there for years, maybe even a decade. Instead, the bulb was a dim, dull orange, its levels of brightness visibly fluttering through the frosted dome.

LED bulbs do this to me all the time. The two in my youngest son's bedroom went near dark not long after I installed them. When I left them alone for a week, they inexplicably came back on at full blast. At story time, the LED in the clamp light on his bunk revolts if you cycle the power too fast. It sits there feebly glimmering, its perimeter a semicircle of white jelly-bean light blobs, until you turn it off and wait a while.

For most of my life, I expected energy-saving lighting to be bad. Traditional fluorescents, buzzing in grim-colored tubes, were synonymous with institutional austerity and migraines. A new generation of streetlamps somehow made city nights seem darker; CFLs shattered into mercury-flecked shards. New lighting tech was something people resented and worked around. My generation, presented with thrifty overhead fluorescents in '90s dorms, countered by plugging in the newly popular halogen torchieres, whose 300 blazing watts would incinerate wayward moths or occasionally a stray curtain along with the university's planned energy savings.