A generation ago, homes were lighted with incandescent bulbs and flourescent lights. I grew up in a house like that. Next door, my grandmother had this crystal chandelier that hung from a double-height ceiling. It was her pride and joy. But sitting right under the antique lights on a sweltering summer night was a nightmare. So hot.
It wasn’t until after we bought this house twelve years ago that LED lamps started appearing in the market. Oh, man, they were pricey. So, even if my husband was desperately itching to replace the halogen bulbs installed on the living room ceiling, we put off the replace-everything-with-LED project on hold.
Then, we had to renovate last year. Not for vanity reasons but because some ceilings were threatening to collapse over our heads. With that renovation, we became a completely LED-lighted household.
Oh, yes, LED lighting for homes has become a lot more affordable. The kitchen has never been as bright. More lights and yet it doesn’t get as hot as it used to. Combined with the replacement of the old refrigerator (that I chose for its looks) and air-cons with inverter-equipped units, our power consumption is down. And that, of course, translates to lower electric bills.
Compared to an incandescent bulb, LED bulb gives off more white light. There’s a scientific explanation for it although comprehension escapes me. And, compared to incandescent bulbs and flourescent lights, LED light emits less heat. That means less trapped heat inside a room which translates to the air-con not needing to work twice as hard.
If you translate that on a global scale, it means lower greenhouse effect. Naturally, LED became the friend of environmentalists.
And if that’s not enough laurels to rest on, in regions where typhoons or snow, or both, can drastically affect production of edible plants, you can grow plants indoors using LED as light source in lieu of natural sunlight. Just Google “grow light for plants“. We have tried it and it works although ventilation was another issue so we have gone back to planting in the garden.
So, we had no reason to dislike LED lighting.
The trouble is that we started noticing that after going full-LED, more insects seemed to be coming in through the open windows at night. We seemed to be attracting more kinds and they’re getting bigger too. These past few weeks, we had more moths, bees and wasps than usual. And house flies, my goodness.
And that’s so strange, really, because when residential LEDs started gaining attention, one of the selling points was that the light did not attract insects. Is the “no bugs” advertisement a falsehood? I tried to find answers but there there is only one article that discusses the attraction of LED to insects directly.
LED lights produce intense beams of UV-A light that penetrate further into the surrounding environment and appear more attractive to certain insects than the light traditional lamps produce…
The house fly is attracted to UV-A as their eyes are sensitive to light at that wavelength.
Rentokil
The source of the quote is a manufacturer of LED bulbs which supposedly does away with the UV-A issue so I’m taking its expalantion with a grain of salt.
In conclusion, except for the possibility that LED lights might be the culprit behind the proliferation of unwelcome insects in the house, we’re really quite happy with our LED lighting. We’ll just have to discover a better strategy for keeping insects out.
Home and Garden: Integration of Art and Science