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Commander Kinsey Commander Kinsey is offline
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Default Why do LEDs generate heat?

On Fri, 04 Oct 2019 20:32:33 +0100, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 10/3/19 1:29 PM, Robert wrote:
On 03/10/2019 14:29, Commander Kinsey wrote:
Why do LEDs generate heat? I want a technical answer not "because
they're inefficient". And will we ever make them more efficient?

Besides the inefficiencies in the LED itself which other posters have
covered, LED lamps have some current regulation or power supply built-in
which will not be 100% efficient and thus generates heat.


I have a LED


That irritates me, why don't you write "an LED"? How do you say "LED"? I say "Ell Eee Dee", not "Light Emitting Diode". So it needs an "an", not an "a".

bulb (60W equivalent) in a lamp here.


60W? Are you a Klingon and love darkness? I use 100W and 150W bulbs only. And lots of them. My living room (7 metres by 4 metres) contains 13 90W bulbs.

The bulb itself
doesn't get hot like an incandescent bulb does. What gets hot is an area
around the base.


Through the heatsink probably, most of the heat is generated by the LEDs, not the far more efficient power supply.