looking for low-power, low-light, long-life, warm-tone LED lamp or bulb.

November 14, 2014 5:54 PM

I am looking for a reading lamp which closely imitates the light of a single candle.

The specs would be a color temperature of 1850k and 13-15 lumens. Lumens can scale up somewhat but the typical light output of three-LED headband flashlights is way too intense.

Headmount or book-mount is fine. Something like the old incandescent itty-bitty book lamp is sorta in the neighborhood but I prefer a mount point over my shoulder or on my head so that I don't accidentally drag my eyes over the light source. All the extant clones of the itty-bitty that use LEDs that I am aware of use brighter LEDS than I want and have a color temp closer to 5000k. Seems likely someone would have seen a product differentiation strategy here but my google-fu is weak on this.

Thought I'd drop a line here. Any leads?

posted by mwhybark to Technology (2 answers total)

You could do a bulb from:

https://www.lowbluelights.com/index.asp

I used to use candles at night, and I finally switched to a low-wattage bulb from these guys. It's brighter than a candle, of course, but I get the same effect. You could poke around for something that works for you--I see some LED stuff.
posted by zeek321 at 6:18 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]

The less woo-y version of "low-blue" is called "warm white." Link is to individual component LEDs from superbrightleds.com -- I've bought from them before for several applications. They used to have even warmer LEDs that were warm-white LEDs coated in some sort of phosphor that emitted warm light when energized by the LED, but they don't seem to sell them anymore. You'll need to rig up a power source and whatnot, but that's entry-level hobby electronics, and hopefully "warm white" will be a good search term for off-the-shelf products like what you're looking for, too.
posted by Alterscape at 8:28 PM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]