For those who may not have been paying attention, the last 20 years in the lighting industry have been an absolutely wild ride. Pretty much all thanks to these things - the light emitting diode. This is an incredibly important technology
and we should thank our lucky stars (and of course the countless folks who contributed
to its invention and refinement) that we can take advantage of it. But itās also made everything so much more complicated! At this point, the very concept of the light bulb...
is pretty much over. Oh, sure, you can still buy light bulbs in
a dazzling array of varieties, and a few old-fashioned ones hang around for those special cases. But most of āem these days are a far cry
from the hot glowy tungsten wires in fragile globes of glass us olds grew up with. Frankly, modern LED light bulbs arenāt so
much light bulbs as they are electronic devices that mimic light bulbs in form and function. And the key part of this video is that the
form and function of a light bulb is actually pretty handy. But at the same time, it also kinda stinks. Looks like we found one of them situational situations, huh? Today, Iād like to talk to you today about these things today. Theyāre starting to become quite commonplace,
and theyāre only possible thanks to the LED. Theyāre a clever implementation of the technology
and have several distinct advantages over the drop-in light bulb replacements youāre familiar with. But these particular things are also not really any different at all. They have pretty much the same guts as any
other LED bulb, but those guts just so happen to connect to a couple of wires sticking out the back. This isnāt a light bulb; this is the spirit of a light bulb plonked into a cheap light fixture. And I have feelings about this. Which youāre now about to hear. If youāll indulge me with a little bit of
electric lighting history, we can see why this is at once great and awful. When you get right down to it, all you really
need to make an electric light is a thing which makes light from electricity somehow
and a way to make that thing touch energized wires. The Edison screw-socket is an ancient
(and pretty bad frankly) way to do that, and the traditional light bulb (which remember is really just a piece of wire which gets real hot when you run current through it) was designed to work holistically with the socket. It provides both electrical contact and a mechanical interface to mount the bulb. The socket provided two key benefits. First, it provided a marginally safe, and standardized interface between the energized electrical system and the light bulb, and second it did that in such a way that the bulb could be
easily replaced by the user when it failed. Early incandescent lamps really did not last long at all, and while improvements were made with time,
they never got too far beyond one or two thousands hours of runtime. And yes, there are those stories of light bulb
cartels and planned obsolescence which are fun to tell and rile people up, but there was a real, actual trade-off you made when you designed an incandescent lamp that lasted longer and that was a not-quite-as-hot filament which produces a duller light less efficiently, so there was some reason to that rhyme
and it annoys me that nobody ever talks about it! I mean, incandescent light bulbs are very simple and once the tech was refined became pretty cheap so people would rather spend a little bit more and replace them more frequently than have dull light bulbs everywhere. But anyway, I digress. Ordinary light sockets provide raw mains AC power. Take a look at this bare-bones thing and youāll
see that the terminals for hot and neutral go straight to the bulb socket. In some cheaper designs the terminals and the lamp contacts are literally the same piece of brass. Really, the socket is just a rudimentary interface
between the light bulb and the electric grid. It just has to get the hot wire touching the
bottom bit and the neutral wire touching the side somewhere. And thatās fine for incandescent lamps which
are nothing but resistive electrical loads. However, making light that way is just not a good way to do it, and every other technology out there requires an intermediary device to handle the electricity and drive the light-producing bit. Thatās not new. Weāve had those technologies for a long, long time. Fluorescent and discharge lamps require a
ballast and starter to drive them properly, which are integrated into the fixture. That made the fixtures more expensive, however the lamps lasted many times longer than incandescent lights,
and they were much more energy efficient. They had severe performance and light quality
penalties which made them less suitable for general use,
but fluorescent tubes found their way into some places at home. Regardless, no matter which of these long-lived
technologies weāre talking about, re-lamping was eventually necessary. Lamps wear out, itās just a fact of life. And so, even the light fixtures which housed
the most enduring of lamps were always designed in such a way that the component with a limited life-span - the lamp - could easily be replaced. The lines started to get blurry, though,
around 25 or so years ago. In a desire to bring the efficiency of fluorescent
lighting technology to more places with a simple drop-in device, the self-ballasted lamp was born. Now, I made a video on a weird, early device
which was more of an adapter than it was a self-contained lamp, so Iām not counting that in this discussion. Instead, I mean these things. I also made a video about my appreciation of
these as an important stepping stone technology. Theyāre not great, and they have problems, but hey. We all do. Side-note, there were/are other self-ballasted
lamps besides just fluorescent but Iām just talking about the CFL here because it was
by far the most mainstream. These twisty boys are their own itty-bitty
self-contained fluorescent lighting systems which just happen to be about the same physical
size and profile as the light bulbs they aimed to replace, and which just so happen to receive
their electricity through an Edison screw, which conveniently also allows for convenient
mounting of the device conveniently inside an ordinary light fixture. How convenient. Itās like they were designed to be backward
compatible or something. You get your line voltage here, your neutral there, and wires inside the device attach to the screwās contact surfaces and then bring that electrical energy to a tiny little ballast inside of this part which then drives the tube out here and makes the photons happen. These became feasible in large part because
of innovation in the electronic ballast, both in cost and size. Eventually ballasts became cheap enough that it made sense to produce single-use ballasts meant to be disposed of with the lamp when it wore out. Of course, those ballasts were so cost-cut
that they often failed prematurely, especially in certain circumstancesā¦ Like I said, these were problematic in various
ways, but we have the LED now! Mercury-free, better light quality, more energy efficient, and longer-lasting. Usually. Weāll get to that. However, we still have the same fundamental problem. Just like a fluorescent tube, you canāt just hook an LED up to mains voltage and expect light. Well, actually you can expect it but it
would be very brief. Uh, but anyway LEDs need some sort of device
to regulate the power they receive. For some reason we call that a driver and not a ballast,
the reasonās not important, itās probably because it outputs DC, but in any case weāre in roughly the same boat as before. But now, this boat can fly. Not only can the driver for LEDs consist of
just a few electronic components on a circuit board, but the LEDs themselves are teeny tiny little things. We donāt have this big tube thing anymore,
we have these little chips with a dab of phosphor on them and theyāre freaking neat! They can look like this, sometimes theyāre a little bigger, and we can put them behind lenses to make more focused sources of light, or we can put them on little sticks of glass and make old-school lookinā light bulbs, we can even make the sticks less like sticks and more like noodles and get all twisty again, the skyās the limit. And, wouldnāt ya know it, we are starting to see really interesting light fixtures for sale these days which are taking full advantage of the LEDās amazing versatility. And that is what this is. Aside from the interesting part. This is merely a commodity, builder-grade light emitting device. This thing essentially cuts out the middle
man that is the light socket and brings AC power straight to a unified driver-and-emitter circuit board. That board is then attached to a larger piece
of aluminum with some holes stamped through it for mounting to an electrical box, and then a diffusing lens covers up the board (and the holes) and makes it look pretty. And if youāre in the position of constructing or remodeling a home, this is versatile, effective, easy, and cheap. And we love those words! OK, so a little bit of background on light
fixtures is required here. For those that may not know, the wiring in your home passes through and ends up in
electrical boxes inside the walls. If you were to examine most light fixtures
you would find that they are attached to the ceiling or wall with a couple of screws. Those are in fact attaching it to the electrical
box and not the wall directly. The purpose of electrical boxes is to provide
standardized mounting points for electrical devices and a protected space for making electrical connections. Naturally, inside the electrical box are some wires. Usually three: live, neutral and ground, though if youāre in a place like Chicagoland the wires have to be run inside of metal conduit even in residential applications and the local code often allows using that conduit as the
ground path, so you may only find two. Thatās why the ground lead has been snipped off this unit - simply mounting it to the box grounds it. At least, in theory. The paint on this thing makes me a little nervous but it did get rubbed off where it was mounted
(with just ONE SCREW) to the box. Yeah, I know this doesnāt weigh much at all, but cāmon! Anyway, the wires inside the box are what
gives power to the fixture, and ordinarily what youād really be doing
when you install a light fixture is connecting the leads coming from its bulb socket or sockets to the wires inside the wall (please enjoy the inevitable discussion on wire nuts vs. Wago connectors that Iām confident is happening down below) and then you secure the fixture to the electrical
box using its mounting screws while finagling the excess wire into the box and now youāve
got a light fixture. Just add some light bulbs and youāre done. But what if you just slapped one of these puppies on that box? Then youād be done in one step! Lamp, fixture, all in one solution! And, And! this thing sotra looks and behaves like the much more expensive recessed can lights which people go gaga over, even though itās just a simple surface mount light. Say, when building or remodeling we could
just put some dirt cheap ceiling boxes up there and stick these things on āem! Rather than go through the trouble of putting in actual cans. What a fantastic solution we have stumbled upon here! Except, oh right... now youāre stuck with it unless youāre comfortable dealing with electrical wiring. Are you ready for some nuance? Because there be pros, there be cons. Now, Iām actually pretty OK with this particular
class of product because in addition to being sleek-looking, cheap, and easy, they also have some real advantages compared to the old way of doing things. First, letās talk about efficiency. If we were to look at the unfortunate architectural
staple that is the boob light, weād find a fixture which interferes with and thus reduces
the light output of the bulbs inside of it. A general-purpose light bulb spreads light in all directions, and that means a lot of the light it produces ends up getting absorbed on the top inside surface of the fixture before it even has a chance to be further attenuated
by the glass on its way out. You can have really efficient lamps in here, but theyāre always going to perform somewhat poorly because not all of their light actually makes it out to where itās useful. These things, on the other hand, have entirely down-firing diodes. Essentially all of the light output from those
diodes makes its way out of the fixture, so the 950 lumens these things are rated for will
seem much brighter than a boob light with a single 950 lumen bulb in it. And of course that means you need less energy
to get the same actual light output, and thatās always good. To be fair, there are plenty of LED bulbs
you can buy that work just like this. Most diffused flood lights, for instance, are pretty much this exact device, just packaged a little differently. But these are designed for the most part to work in recessed
cans or spotlight fixtures which you may not have or want. The other significant advantage these have
which makes their design less of a... crime is that they can also be more reliable than a
typical LED bulb because, if designed right, it can more effectively deal with heat. Premature failures of LED light bulbs are
unfortunately somewhat common, and in a great deal of cases those failures occur because
the lamp couldnāt keep itself cool. Heat stresses electronic components,
particularly certain capacitors, and even when thatās not an issue thermal cycling
as the lamp heats up and cools off with use can lead to fractures in solder joints on the circuit board
if those thermal swings are too extreme. And thatāll lead to all sorts of problems. Rather unfortunately, lots of cheaper LED
light bulbs have barely adequate cooling. I mean, just look at a bulb like this. While many of them utilize materials with
decent heat conductivity, this is the only surface it can radiate from
(the plastic diffuser is just covering an air pocket). Thatās not a lot of surface area, and so
even in open air these units get pretty hot. And you make things even worse when you stick
āem in enclosed fixtures which trap in that heat. Some clever lamp designs have temperature
sensors on the driver board and will reduce their light output slightly to prevent exceeding
a certain design temperature, but thatās almost never marketed as a feature
so it might as well not exist. Devices like these, being free from the massive
design constraints that crop up when emulating a light bulb, can rather easily be optimized for a long service life. Of course, that doesnāt always happen
because we canāt have nice things, but this particular model seems to have done a pretty good job
in my estimation. The circuit board with all the parts that
get hot is made of thermally conductive material and is bonded to a large aluminum housing. That spreads the heat produced by those components
away from the board, keeping it relatively cool, and all this surface area allows that
heat to dissipate into the air before anything gets too hot. And of course, this wonāt be enclosed inside
a light fixture becauseā¦ it is the fixture! Taking a look at it with a thermal camera
reveals that yeah, itās just not getting that warm even after being lit for a half-hour. The light saucer is dissipating about the
same quantity of heat as this LED bulb, but with much more surface area to go around,
nothing manages to get that hot. Again, some designs are gonna do better than
others, but for the record I think this one is quite good. I especially like how the electrolytic smoothing capacitor, arguably the single most prone component to failure from heat damage with time, was attached to long leads
so it could be mounted away from the circuit board entirely. Smart thinking. I imagine that this thing outperforms nearly
every LED drop-in bulb when it comes to component cooling. And lastly, I mean you gotta admit these things are
wonderfully versatile. You can stick āem pretty much anywhere,
and have a sleek, effective, and efficient light. If you have a light fixture somewhere that
just isnāt cutting it, and you canāt put bright bulbs in it because they keep cooking themselves to an early grave, products like this one might be a great solution for you. They also satisfy certain code requirements,
for instance in closets. These days simple bare-bulb fixtures arenāt allowed because itās too easy to break the bulb and potentially cause electrical or fire hazards. So itās no surprise that these are popping up
everywhere in new construction, and you might be looking for something similar when remodeling. And, good news, models with pull-chains exist
for closets where the box is unswitched. But despite how much I kinda admire this idea, Iām probably never going to buy one of these. In fact, Iāve taken them down from my new home because, unlike some of you weirdos who want their home to feel like a hospital for some reason, I much prefer cozy, warm lighting and not just because I live in a cold place and evidence seems to suggest that's a pretty good predictor of color temperature preference but because Iām right. And these are balanced at 3000 kelvin degrees. Now, thatās pretty warm, but you see I like
to go with the true incandescent look of 2700 kelvin, and these two lights were both in places where they turned on with another light fixture, and if thereās one thing I like less than cool white color temps, itās clashing color temps, so these had to go. And the fact that I needed entirely new light *fixtures* and to be comfortable replacing them just to fix that problem... is pretty sad. Now I should point out that there are a number of products like this that are available with selectable or sometimes even tunable color temperatures. Thatās nice, but youāre still locked into
however good or bad the actual LEDs might be in those devices. The diodes in here are pretty good. I've left of number of these in place because,
where they arenāt clashing with some other lighting, I find them totally fine - surprisingly good, actually. I have no issues with them at all. But if they had, for instance, a really bad
color-cast or had a poor color-rendering index, well thereād be nothing I could do outside
of taking the things down. And what happens when it fails? Thatās gonna happen eventually, and it may
happen in a rather unpleasant way. Youāve seen dying LED lighting, Iām sure, and rather unfortunately this often means flashing, pulsing, or even rapid strobing. To be clear, thatās largely a fixable problem. The driver, if itās smart enough, could
notice when that's happening and shut itself down. But smart designs cost money and so are frustratingly rare. Frankly, for the sake of folks who can be
significantly affected by such flashing lights, I feel like some regulatory action might be
warranted on that front. But regardless of how these meet their eventual demise, when they go you now have a problem which canāt be solved with a light bulb. Now you need electrical work! Itās simple work, yeah, and someone like
me will be confident doing it. But itās not correct to assume everyone
is, nor should we assume people will want to learn. They shouldnāt have to, that is a completely
unreasonable expectation. And, uh, some folks might try who, letās
be frank... shouldnāt which presents some risk of danger. Plus, letās not forget the swaths of renters
who couldnāt do it even if they wanted to and knew what they were doing. Even if we assume a best case scenario and
you are totally confident and competent around electrical wiring, letās say you bought a number of these things, put them in a nice arrangement inside your remodeled kitchen, and 5 years down the line one of them fails. Now the model you installed isnāt available anymore. What now? Do you buy an entirely new set? Or do you live with one of them not matching the rest? Best case scenario you bought some spares
five years ago, but the ones that remain in service have shifted their color a bit or worn in
some other way, and the spare you have annoyingly is not quite like the others. Thatās not gonna bother some folks but it
definitely would bother me. Still, I appreciate these things for what they are. A very good, incredibly flexible and inexpensive solution; models similar to this cost about $10 each. Thatās very cheap for such a sleek looking light. And arguably these are a better use of resources than the same electronics packed into a light bulb which canāt keep itself cool and dies way too early. But the cost of the problems it solves is
paid for by the new ones it creates. And unfortunately, this concept is creeping
into more and more light fixtures. Some of them, like I mentioned way back in the beginning, are genuinely quite interesting designs
which are only possible thanks to the freedom of the LED. But a lot of them are just rehashes of old
concepts but made disposable. Like this thing. This is just another boob light but worse! Itās got selectable color temperatures, yeah,
but it doesnāt go all the way down to where I want it and its CRI is quite poopy. And you know each of these has a custom driver
board so serviceability is probably zero. Seriously, donāt even entertain fixtures like these, get it out of your head. If you want this look, find something with light sockets. Then buy whatever bulbs you want. Every time you install one of these light fixtures, or even something like this, youāre locking yourself or someone else out of future choice. Maybe itās the wrong color temperature for that personās preference. Or your future preference. Maybe youād like to put in a smart bulb
but now you canāt because this thing has nowhere to put a bulb. Or even simpler, as technology progresses
LEDs get more efficient and have better light quality, and this might be pretty great right now, but itād be unwise
to bet on it being the gold standard in 10 years. Or even just five. User-serviceability is a pretty good thing, and we nailed that concept over a century ago with the light socket. And these days not only is it giving us the ability to replace a dead light bulb, but it's giving us options to customize our lighting. Maybe itās best to hang onto it, for just a little while longer. Iād like to end with a bit of advice. If you experience a lot of premature LED bulb
failures you might want to give the filament-style bulbs a try. They come in frosted varieties now if youād
prefer that look, just look for ātraditional glass styleā or some other marketing language like that, and itās my personal assessment that these tend to have more effective cooling thanks to two key design differences: First, the driver ends up separated from the diodes so the heat those two components make isnāt compounded together. Thatās good as neither gets as hot. But also, since the driver is inside the metal
screw-base which is in physical contact with the light socket, a lot of the heat the driver produces ends up getting sunk there, where the surface area of the socket then helps
to dissipate that heat. Bonus points if your fixture has a porcelain socket since thereās a lot of thermal mass to slow the warm-up and cool-down processes, reducing thermal cycling stress. I have had great luck with this bulb style
from various manufacturers, even dimmable versions. While I had some premature failures, I remember only two, and they both happened within a month of installation, so they were almost certainly just due to some manufacturing defect. As far as the rest? I installedā¦ 21 of them in various styles back in the fall of 2016, several of which were run for many hours a day at various dimmer settings. And they all were working flawlessly through the spring of 2021 when I moved out. Now, none of those were in enclosed fixtures,
so they did have that going for them, but I figured I would share that with you. Four and a half years without changing a light bulb is pretty great. Though, I did take them down once to dust themā¦ Frankly Iāve had great luck with LED bulbs in general for the past 6 or 7 years, and every time Iāve had a premature failure ā
regardless of the bulb style or manufacturer ā itās happened super early. My experience is so long as the bulb makes
it past a month or two, itās probably in it for the long haul. I really donāt know whatās happening to all the folks who claim they canāt even get an LED bulb to last as long as an incandescent. I think youāre just cursed or something. OK, Iām gonna cut in here because I decided
to put one of these LED filament style bulbs in front of the thermal camera to get a sense
of how it dissipates its heat. And this is very interesting, this confirms something that I had read at one point but since this was at the very end of the video
I didnāt bother fact-checking it, which was that these are actually filled with a
gas which is pretty thermally conductive. So the heat thatās being produced by the LED, uh, emitters on the sticks of glass is actually convecting inside the glass and getting to the outside surface. Now, the number that the camera is showing
is almost certainly inaccurate because glass is a bad surface for an infrared camera to
detect heat from, however clearly itās getting warmer and, ya know, I can just feel it with my hands. The glass is actually pretty warm, itās about as warm as the surface
of the, uh, surface mount light fixture. The other thing is we can see that clearly
the socket is sinking some of its heat. Uh, this is a plastic so itās gonna be more
accurate as far as the numbers, let me see what it reportsā¦ about 32 degrees Celsius at the top there. And, uh, yeah itās warm but not very warm. Uh, and if we unscrew the bulbā¦ again the metal surface, because itās shiny, isnāt a good indicator but we can see the plastic ring right around at the bottom and that is plenty warm. So, theā¦ this is the lava lamp behind there
that youāre seeing. So anyway, Iām pretty confident in saying
that actually this design is pretty great when it comes to its thermal performance, and so again if you keep having issues with LED bulbs that are failing quite frequently, you might want to try these. Particularly in those fixtures that might be problematic for you. Oh, and if you have can lights or some sort of spot light situation going on, I would highly suggest you look for an LED bulb which emulates
PAR lamps. Putting in a frosted lamp is fine but the
difference between a diffuse light and a directed light can make a dramatic impact on a space. Itās pretty popular to put these LED adapter
thingies into can lights, and they can be a great refresher especially if your cans have old trim rings, but theyāre usually frosted. You really oughta try something like this if you can, it makes a surprising difference. This doesn't really have anything to do with
lamp lifespan, but I recently got some high CRI floods at 3000K and I gotta tell ya they look exactly like halogen lamps to me. And they also demonstrated quite well that
color temp and CRI figures donāt necessarily mean a whole lot. This is also 3000K, but it clashed badly with the 2700K lighting in the room. Yet the PAR 38 bulbs I put in the kitchen
donāt at all despite being 3000K. At least, they donāt to my eyes. Color rendering and perception is really complicated. Have you heard about brown? ā« serviceably smooth jazz ā« But itās also made everything SO MUCH MORE COMPLICATED-AH Theyāre only possible thanks to the LED. Theyāre a clever implementationā¦ is that right? I guess it is! They're a clever implementation of the technology
and have several distinctā¦ I wasnāt... You probably couldn't see that but now Iām worried that you could. Early.. *coughs* Bleughuh But, there is a real, actual trade-off you made when you designed an incandescent lamp to last longer andā¦ oh, thereās a... Thereās a tense problem in the sentence. Did you catch it? I did. Thatās why Iām starting over. I donāt like how that sentence started. Let's just ignore how weird it is and keep going. There were slash are other self-ballasted lamps becauseā¦ whoops! Besides! Yeah I know it doesnāt weight much at all
but cāmon *clunk* anyway... [laughs] Theyāre designed to work in recessed cans or spotlight fixtures which you may or not have want need what now? Sorry for being away for so long. I was moving. Which was great because, as you can see from this video, it has presented the opportunity for CONTENT. Anyway, yeah, I don't hate the idea, exactly, but I find it quite troubling. Do what you want, though, I won't stop you. YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON USER-SERVICABILITY!
YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
Something to brighten up our Friday.
and yes; I do think I'm funny
Can I address another troubling design? Flir puts a visible light camera next to the thermal camera on their devices, runs the visible light image through an edge-detection filter, then overlays the image over the thermal image, while making absolutely no attempt to correct for misalignment or parallax.
Yeah, it's difficult to make the whole thing perfect, because parallax varies with distance, but at least correct for it at one distance, and if not automatically, let the end user move a slider to line it up.
As it is, we get a thermal image of a light bulb, and off to the side there's an outline of the same light bulb.
I've found the best work around is to put a piece of tape over the visible light camera, which effectively disables the feature.
Very informative, as always. My biggest problem with LED fixtures has always been that the whole unit has to be replaced upon failure instead of just replacing a bulb. That seems more wasteful to me. The fluorescent uplight tubes in my kitchen lasted 22 years. When LED bulbs/tubes first came out they were very expensive, but they were being pushed for the consumer to use. I unashamedly hoarded CFL and fluorescent tubes while they were still available. I may never have to buy another one in my lifetime.
Iām currently doing a remodel on my home and the contractor put in kitchen lights just last week. I wish this video would have come out a little bit sooner, but thatās how it goes sometimes haha.
As an aside, I just discovered TC about 2 months ago and when the option came up for replacing the water heater and the HVAC in my home, I decided to look into heat pumps for both based on the info I learned from this channel. Obviously I consulted with a contractor to make sure heat pumps would work for me. I was able to get around $10k in rebates for going full electric.
So interesting story on LED light bulb and heat. When they first came out CREE was a big brand name and HomeDepot was pushing them hard as a long life replacement with a long warranty. So I got a few 60 watt equivalents. After many years, the hallway one, the one used for several hours a day, burned out. So I cracked it open. I had to do it with a hammer as it was a rubber covered glass bulb epoxied to the housing. What I found inside was a massive heatsink arrangement. A aluminum tube up the middle connected to the base of the bulb with fins going all a round it. The LED PCB, of the aluminum heatsink style was wrapped around the tube 360 degrees. Everything was built to extract the heat from the LEDs and keep everything cool. It is very overbuilt and expensive to make. The thing that failed was the LEDs from overheating. CREE didn't use any thermal compound on the LED PCB to heatsink mating services. So all that work making that complicated heatsink and it was doing very little.
Modern LED bulbs have a single little PCB and no custom heatsink at all. They also have fewer LED to output the same amount of light, and they run cooler. So something changed in the tech. I was thinking that the dedicated light driver IC has thermal regulation built in now to as Big Clive told me was common.
HomeDepot stopped selling the CREE bulbs shortly after I got mine and based on what the Internet tells me, it was due to the high failure rate. So I don't think mine was the only one to skip the thermal paste step at the factory.
I think a decent option could be to make a unified standard for a plate shaped object which projects light downwards with a removable panel that has all of the LED's/circuitry with a simple locking mechanism to hold the plate in place. This would both have the energy efficiency advantages of that design while still having replaceable LED's and the potential to use new lightning technology by swapping the panel + provide more electrical safety than an Edison socket. Of course this would only really work if most major manufacturers worked together because otherwise those lights wouldn't be compatible with anything other than the specific sockets they were designed for and would be useless.
I used to work as an engineering intern for a poultry lighting company. It's really fascinating how organisms measurably react to their lighting conditions (such as growing up quicker). Perhaps you could do a video about that and the implications this might have on human productivity, health and wellbeing.
It's possible that you already know this, but I thought I'd drop it in for those who don't know: CRI is a terribly outdated metric, but manufacturers keep using it because the general public has passing familiarity with it.
It was originally designed to give a quality metric for fluorescent lamps, and uses quite only eight (usually) quite desaturated test chips. Sadly, manufacturers haven't caught on to the much more accurate TM-30 specification, which gives you two metrics: fidelity and gamut, instead of trying to shoehorn everything about a light into one number!
YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!