You're not crazy! My neighborhood recently replaced all of their streetlights with new LED ones. The new posts have very little shielding to prevent light pollution. The lights are practically white and actually blinding at night. Annoyingly, they also put up a new one in direct view of my bedroom window, so even with my blinds closed I get a bunch of light flooding in.
You’re definitely not crazy. I’ve had to replace almost all our bulbs with Hue bulbs because it’s nigh on impossible to find regular LED bulbs that are less than 3000K. Under my roof thou shall go no higher than 2700K!
Look at color changing LED light bulbs. You can tilt them towards warmer colors and even dim them without needing a dimmer switch. There are smart bulbs that connect to app and dumb ones that connect to a traditional remote. The remote ones are nice because they cost less and are ideal for anything connected to a switch.
I generally o to use smart bulbs for lights that are always powered on or hard to reach.
This doesn’t fix your neighbors flooding your bedroom. That you have to talk to them or install blackout curtains.
There is a light pollution tradeoff, but I prefer LED lights outdoors as much as I prefer them in my home. The inability to see stars (and oh man, there is that) is a small price, IMO, for the tradeoff of the depression I didn't realize I had felt under sodium light orange until they installed LEDs on our block. Additional, perhaps the LED bulbs Philadelphia is using aren't as bright as your city's, but I find them easy to look at. Again, I miss a starry sky, but I live in a city, the stars I could see were the ones that could compete with the light to begin with.
Around the corner, half the lights need replacing, and I can tell you that darkness isn't all it's cracked up to be either. There's always a compromise, and I hope they experiment until they find the one that works for the most people (I'd say for everyone, but just writing this out proves that can't happen.)
Weird, I've never seen BR30 light bulbs that are that dim before. Those ones are usually meant to be fairly bright, so it's not surprising to me that you're only seeing them as low as 650lm. I tried searching the internet for an incandescent lightbulb like that and didn't really find one; the closest one I could find was a 485lm rated 65w version, which is terrible efficiency even for incandescent. The lumen scale is logarythmic, so the difference between 485 and 650 is not as dramatic of a difference as it sounds - though I would assume you've tried it already and know it's too much for you.
Like every time someone talks about being unhappy with LED lights, I'm going to suggest changing your fixtures. They likely aren't designed to be used with LEDs to begin with and therefore any bulb you put into it has a greater chance of failing prematurely. The best options are the ones that have the LEDs built into them, as they are generally designed in ways that make them last longer.
There are well designed light fixtures, and there are badly designed light fixtures. And between all of those there are also variances in the quality of materials and craftsmanship. The people in charge of installing those street lights should have made a better decision. So no, you're not crazy, but it's important to realize the problem isn't with the LEDs, it's with the implementation.
I haven't noticed bulbs being too bright or brighter than spec. But I do notice them being poorly used in both public and private spaces. I've certainly experienced staying at a friend's house with a quasar of a street light beaming straight into the guest bedroom.
A brain dump of things I've learned and thought on this topic:
As you noted, LEDs typically have a whiter/bluer temperature. This is fine for kitchens, workspaces, or generally during the day. But most LEDs tend to have a very poor Color Rendering Index. Particularly with red tones (and yes, you can still have a warm colored bulb with poor reds). This is used by manufactures for a bit of misleading marketing where even products marked as "high CRI" will either leave red out of their analysis, or average across the spectrum (so many colors reproduce > 90%, but red is very low producing an average of 80%). As a result, spaces with LED bulbs can feel gross or cold.
Related to brightness, LEDs also tend to have issues with dimming. Even bulbs marked as dimmable will put out less light by flickering at a slower and slower speed. This is unpleasant in a way that most people couldn't point out if you asked them "what's wrong with this room". But for some people it's actively nauseating. If you want to see this in action, wave your hand in front of your face and see if your fingers move in a constant blur, or if they have a sort of stop-motion movement to them. You can also look at running water and see that it looks strange like a high shutter speed photo of water where the motion is stopped, but continuous.
So ultimately we want bright cool light during the day, but dim warm light in the afternoon evening. Sometimes this is simply a poor design, like bright cool street lights when they should be warmer and dimmer. High end living spaces have (long before LEDs) used different lighting in different rooms/areas with dimmer warmer lighting in bedrooms an living rooms, with cool bright lighting in kitchens.
How do LEDs compare to other lighting technologies?
Obviously classic incandescent bulbs are the the main reference point. These have a perfect CRI and are usually on the warmer side. They were more forgiving since the warmer light made them more acceptable in the evening in living spaces, and the CRI made it ok to use them in kitchens or task areas.
Fluorescent lights can have a high CRI, but usually don't. They miss out in colors other than red and (in my experience) make spaces look green and gross. If you picture an office cubicle farm hellscape, you're probably also picturing lighting created by bad florescents.
Finally, the holy grail (in my opinion) of lighting is halogen. Halogen is technically incandescent, but uses less power and has some fun qualities. Since it's incandescent, the CRI is a perfect 100. They typically have a cool temperature and are commonly used in jewelry cases to make gems sparkle. Like incandescent, they can be dimmed without flickering. But the really neat thing is that as you dim them the color temperature warms up. Often in museums you'd see large halogen lights with low power going through them to create warm, high CRI light for the installations. This dimming/temperature change combo is perfect for human life. Street lamps: want to have a street festival? turn them all the way up. Normal street lighting at night? dim it down and have a warm glow. Small living spaces with kitchens adjacent to the dining table? bright cool light for food preparation, turn it down for more intimate lighting while eating. Unfortunately they use about 4x the power of LEDs and humans are going to go extinct because we can't stop pumping coal into the atmosphere to create power. So that's a bummer.
Some people use color-changing smart lights to get a cooler light in the day and a warmer light at night. Unfortunately these tend to have an abysmal CRI (please let me know if you're aware of one that doesn't) and I personally prefer to have different lights that I turn on at different times of day.
GE's warm temperature ones seem decent. They're distinctly orangey, and still available in different brightnesses. I can't remember which line they're a part of (Refreh/Reveal/Rewhatever).
I have this complaint about harsh lighting in general, not just LED. It really affects my mood! I would address it with lighting fixture design and placement. Soften the harshness of the light by always diffusing it with a lampshade and/or (if it's a spotlight) pointing it towards the wall to create indirect lighting. Positioning lighting at around eye level or slightly lower (by having wall/table lamps, instead of just ceiling lights) also makes lighting seem softer and cozier as it creates softer shadows. Shadows look harsh when all the lighting comes from directly above.
The lumens isn't the problem, it's the color of the lighting. As others have stated (maybe indirectly), the hue of the actual light plays a huge factor. You can get "daylight", "soft", "cool", "warm"... the makeup of the actual colors that best mimic the sunlight usually do the best for "light" in general.
There are studies that show a steak looks better in sunlight[-mimicked lighting] than in most options.
i personally like the moderately bright street lights but i’ve also never lived next to one, so that might change my view if it kept me up at night.
i was traveling once, i don’t quite remember where—either denver or philly (usa)— and there were a couple of blue (almost purple, like those color changing LED that are everywhere) street lights and i thought that was super interesting. it lit the area quite well but didn’t seem to bleed out in the same way as “white” light. i’m fairly certain that it was a failing LED bulb though and not purposeful. separately, i have seen very neon yellow LED lights and those seem decent too. unsure if those are on purpose or another defect.
Fortunately the lights around here and in my home all seem to have the appropriate 2700K. I find the LED headlights in certain cars extremely blinding though. And some manufacturers seem to be adding these extremely, unreasonably bright blue LEDs as indicators to all kinds of electronic equipment. I had a gadget I'd duct taped over the indicator and the light was so strong it still shone through.
There's a few points in my opinion that are contributing to this. First of all, in Europe we have this thing called UGR rating which is basically a standard for how strong perceived the glare of a luminaire is: the higher the number the higher the glare. Now while the way it is defined is kind of a matter of debate, the fact is that in the US, this is just not a thing. In Europe, no matter the application, street lighting, architectural, industrial, office lighting, there's hardly a sector where this isn't mandated and where it isn't also strongly enforced. So from a regulatory point of view, the US is the wild west in terms of glare control meaning manufacturers are actually quite free to blast as much light out of a narrow opening under viewing critical angles as they want. Not ideal.
Second is of course the thing with color temperature. A lot of people would die for the idea that in order to properly illuminate something, you absolutely have to have cold white light. Now while it is true that warmer color temperatures need more lumens to reach an equally strong perceived illumination than cold white light, it is just that, a matter of how many lumens you have per illumination task, not what color temperature.
The thing that most people are struggling with these days is the abuse of their circadian rhythm. In the industry, its quite a big topic (at least in Europe) - search for human centric lighting - because science backs this quite strongly that it really matters which color temperature you are exposed to at which time of the day. The reference here being the behaviour of the sun again of course, color temperature in nature shifts during the day from warm to cold to warm again. Exposing yourself to cold white light at night time for example basically messes up your circadian rhythm, telling your body to keep you awake when all other cues are pointing towards bedtime. Some are more sensitive to this than others but it is a big thing.
There is a point to be made for the warmth and gentle glow of a light bulb but with energy efficiencies being an order of magnitude and more better for LEDs, there's just no going back anymore. Lighting needs are a serious contributor in the overall energy bill of the planet and savings there have a huge impact. Interesting fact here: It's mostly the use phase of a luminaire that matters for energy. This means if your luminaire is running for a lifetime of let's say 30 years, single digits in the efficiency percentage have very large impacts in terms of equivalent CO2 emissions. BUT: It really matters where the energy comes from that you are using to feed your luminaire. If you are in Poland and most of your energy comes from burning coal, the use phase is the most important thing to focus on. It doesn't matter how poisonous the extraction of the LED rare earth metals was for the environment. If on the other hand, your energy is mostly from renewables, such as Sweden for example, then it really matters what the raw material foot print is as during the use phase the CO2 impact is more or less irrelevant. The Fagerhult group, being one of the largest manufacturers in Europe, have great info material about this and great products to accompany their findings such as this one: https://www.fagerhult.com/Products/kvisten/
I do agree with the sentiment that some people here have mentioned that for the layperson, choosing the right kind of light has become infinitely harder. The most obvious choice for the consumer seems to be harsh chemical white light in amounts that exceed the need for most tasks while also being mostly the cheapest option. Picking up a light bulb in contrast to that is a child's game. Good thing we still have candles :)
You're not crazy! My neighborhood recently replaced all of their streetlights with new LED ones. The new posts have very little shielding to prevent light pollution. The lights are practically white and actually blinding at night. Annoyingly, they also put up a new one in direct view of my bedroom window, so even with my blinds closed I get a bunch of light flooding in.
You’re definitely not crazy. I’ve had to replace almost all our bulbs with Hue bulbs because it’s nigh on impossible to find regular LED bulbs that are less than 3000K. Under my roof thou shall go no higher than 2700K!
Look at color changing LED light bulbs. You can tilt them towards warmer colors and even dim them without needing a dimmer switch. There are smart bulbs that connect to app and dumb ones that connect to a traditional remote. The remote ones are nice because they cost less and are ideal for anything connected to a switch.
I generally o to use smart bulbs for lights that are always powered on or hard to reach.
This doesn’t fix your neighbors flooding your bedroom. That you have to talk to them or install blackout curtains.
Headlights in cars are awful these days as well.
There is a light pollution tradeoff, but I prefer LED lights outdoors as much as I prefer them in my home. The inability to see stars (and oh man, there is that) is a small price, IMO, for the tradeoff of the depression I didn't realize I had felt under sodium light orange until they installed LEDs on our block. Additional, perhaps the LED bulbs Philadelphia is using aren't as bright as your city's, but I find them easy to look at. Again, I miss a starry sky, but I live in a city, the stars I could see were the ones that could compete with the light to begin with.
Around the corner, half the lights need replacing, and I can tell you that darkness isn't all it's cracked up to be either. There's always a compromise, and I hope they experiment until they find the one that works for the most people (I'd say for everyone, but just writing this out proves that can't happen.)
Shouldn't be too difficult to find 2700K bulbs online. As for lumens have you considered adding dimmers?
Weird, I've never seen BR30 light bulbs that are that dim before. Those ones are usually meant to be fairly bright, so it's not surprising to me that you're only seeing them as low as 650lm. I tried searching the internet for an incandescent lightbulb like that and didn't really find one; the closest one I could find was a 485lm rated 65w version, which is terrible efficiency even for incandescent. The lumen scale is logarythmic, so the difference between 485 and 650 is not as dramatic of a difference as it sounds - though I would assume you've tried it already and know it's too much for you.
Like every time someone talks about being unhappy with LED lights, I'm going to suggest changing your fixtures. They likely aren't designed to be used with LEDs to begin with and therefore any bulb you put into it has a greater chance of failing prematurely. The best options are the ones that have the LEDs built into them, as they are generally designed in ways that make them last longer.
There are well designed light fixtures, and there are badly designed light fixtures. And between all of those there are also variances in the quality of materials and craftsmanship. The people in charge of installing those street lights should have made a better decision. So no, you're not crazy, but it's important to realize the problem isn't with the LEDs, it's with the implementation.
I haven't noticed bulbs being too bright or brighter than spec. But I do notice them being poorly used in both public and private spaces. I've certainly experienced staying at a friend's house with a quasar of a street light beaming straight into the guest bedroom.
A brain dump of things I've learned and thought on this topic:
As you noted, LEDs typically have a whiter/bluer temperature. This is fine for kitchens, workspaces, or generally during the day. But most LEDs tend to have a very poor Color Rendering Index. Particularly with red tones (and yes, you can still have a warm colored bulb with poor reds). This is used by manufactures for a bit of misleading marketing where even products marked as "high CRI" will either leave red out of their analysis, or average across the spectrum (so many colors reproduce > 90%, but red is very low producing an average of 80%). As a result, spaces with LED bulbs can feel gross or cold.
Related to brightness, LEDs also tend to have issues with dimming. Even bulbs marked as dimmable will put out less light by flickering at a slower and slower speed. This is unpleasant in a way that most people couldn't point out if you asked them "what's wrong with this room". But for some people it's actively nauseating. If you want to see this in action, wave your hand in front of your face and see if your fingers move in a constant blur, or if they have a sort of stop-motion movement to them. You can also look at running water and see that it looks strange like a high shutter speed photo of water where the motion is stopped, but continuous.
So ultimately we want bright cool light during the day, but dim warm light in the afternoon evening. Sometimes this is simply a poor design, like bright cool street lights when they should be warmer and dimmer. High end living spaces have (long before LEDs) used different lighting in different rooms/areas with dimmer warmer lighting in bedrooms an living rooms, with cool bright lighting in kitchens.
How do LEDs compare to other lighting technologies?
Obviously classic incandescent bulbs are the the main reference point. These have a perfect CRI and are usually on the warmer side. They were more forgiving since the warmer light made them more acceptable in the evening in living spaces, and the CRI made it ok to use them in kitchens or task areas.
Fluorescent lights can have a high CRI, but usually don't. They miss out in colors other than red and (in my experience) make spaces look green and gross. If you picture an office cubicle farm hellscape, you're probably also picturing lighting created by bad florescents.
Finally, the holy grail (in my opinion) of lighting is halogen. Halogen is technically incandescent, but uses less power and has some fun qualities. Since it's incandescent, the CRI is a perfect 100. They typically have a cool temperature and are commonly used in jewelry cases to make gems sparkle. Like incandescent, they can be dimmed without flickering. But the really neat thing is that as you dim them the color temperature warms up. Often in museums you'd see large halogen lights with low power going through them to create warm, high CRI light for the installations. This dimming/temperature change combo is perfect for human life. Street lamps: want to have a street festival? turn them all the way up. Normal street lighting at night? dim it down and have a warm glow. Small living spaces with kitchens adjacent to the dining table? bright cool light for food preparation, turn it down for more intimate lighting while eating. Unfortunately they use about 4x the power of LEDs and humans are going to go extinct because we can't stop pumping coal into the atmosphere to create power. So that's a bummer.
Some people use color-changing smart lights to get a cooler light in the day and a warmer light at night. Unfortunately these tend to have an abysmal CRI (please let me know if you're aware of one that doesn't) and I personally prefer to have different lights that I turn on at different times of day.
GE's warm temperature ones seem decent. They're distinctly orangey, and still available in different brightnesses. I can't remember which line they're a part of (Refreh/Reveal/Rewhatever).
I have this complaint about harsh lighting in general, not just LED. It really affects my mood! I would address it with lighting fixture design and placement. Soften the harshness of the light by always diffusing it with a lampshade and/or (if it's a spotlight) pointing it towards the wall to create indirect lighting. Positioning lighting at around eye level or slightly lower (by having wall/table lamps, instead of just ceiling lights) also makes lighting seem softer and cozier as it creates softer shadows. Shadows look harsh when all the lighting comes from directly above.
The lumens isn't the problem, it's the color of the lighting. As others have stated (maybe indirectly), the hue of the actual light plays a huge factor. You can get "daylight", "soft", "cool", "warm"... the makeup of the actual colors that best mimic the sunlight usually do the best for "light" in general.
There are studies that show a steak looks better in sunlight[-mimicked lighting] than in most options.
There have been more than few articles discussing the problems that LED lighting creates, particularly in art museums. Restaurants are also going to be plagued by the same problems. Explaining all the nuances and the whys/wherefores takes some work, so here’s one such recent article discussing the issues and difficulties that LED lighting creates.
i personally like the moderately bright street lights but i’ve also never lived next to one, so that might change my view if it kept me up at night.
i was traveling once, i don’t quite remember where—either denver or philly (usa)— and there were a couple of blue (almost purple, like those color changing LED that are everywhere) street lights and i thought that was super interesting. it lit the area quite well but didn’t seem to bleed out in the same way as “white” light. i’m fairly certain that it was a failing LED bulb though and not purposeful. separately, i have seen very neon yellow LED lights and those seem decent too. unsure if those are on purpose or another defect.
Fortunately the lights around here and in my home all seem to have the appropriate 2700K. I find the LED headlights in certain cars extremely blinding though. And some manufacturers seem to be adding these extremely, unreasonably bright blue LEDs as indicators to all kinds of electronic equipment. I had a gadget I'd duct taped over the indicator and the light was so strong it still shone through.
There's a few points in my opinion that are contributing to this. First of all, in Europe we have this thing called UGR rating which is basically a standard for how strong perceived the glare of a luminaire is: the higher the number the higher the glare. Now while the way it is defined is kind of a matter of debate, the fact is that in the US, this is just not a thing. In Europe, no matter the application, street lighting, architectural, industrial, office lighting, there's hardly a sector where this isn't mandated and where it isn't also strongly enforced. So from a regulatory point of view, the US is the wild west in terms of glare control meaning manufacturers are actually quite free to blast as much light out of a narrow opening under viewing critical angles as they want. Not ideal.
Second is of course the thing with color temperature. A lot of people would die for the idea that in order to properly illuminate something, you absolutely have to have cold white light. Now while it is true that warmer color temperatures need more lumens to reach an equally strong perceived illumination than cold white light, it is just that, a matter of how many lumens you have per illumination task, not what color temperature.
The thing that most people are struggling with these days is the abuse of their circadian rhythm. In the industry, its quite a big topic (at least in Europe) - search for human centric lighting - because science backs this quite strongly that it really matters which color temperature you are exposed to at which time of the day. The reference here being the behaviour of the sun again of course, color temperature in nature shifts during the day from warm to cold to warm again. Exposing yourself to cold white light at night time for example basically messes up your circadian rhythm, telling your body to keep you awake when all other cues are pointing towards bedtime. Some are more sensitive to this than others but it is a big thing.
There is a point to be made for the warmth and gentle glow of a light bulb but with energy efficiencies being an order of magnitude and more better for LEDs, there's just no going back anymore. Lighting needs are a serious contributor in the overall energy bill of the planet and savings there have a huge impact. Interesting fact here: It's mostly the use phase of a luminaire that matters for energy. This means if your luminaire is running for a lifetime of let's say 30 years, single digits in the efficiency percentage have very large impacts in terms of equivalent CO2 emissions. BUT: It really matters where the energy comes from that you are using to feed your luminaire. If you are in Poland and most of your energy comes from burning coal, the use phase is the most important thing to focus on. It doesn't matter how poisonous the extraction of the LED rare earth metals was for the environment. If on the other hand, your energy is mostly from renewables, such as Sweden for example, then it really matters what the raw material foot print is as during the use phase the CO2 impact is more or less irrelevant. The Fagerhult group, being one of the largest manufacturers in Europe, have great info material about this and great products to accompany their findings such as this one: https://www.fagerhult.com/Products/kvisten/
I do agree with the sentiment that some people here have mentioned that for the layperson, choosing the right kind of light has become infinitely harder. The most obvious choice for the consumer seems to be harsh chemical white light in amounts that exceed the need for most tasks while also being mostly the cheapest option. Picking up a light bulb in contrast to that is a child's game. Good thing we still have candles :)