Nothing groundbreaking – this has been a common claim for a century – but it’s good to see an actual study.
Interesting that the baseline for “white” is a 3000K LED.
I’ve been using a convoy 21700 light with an osram amber LED and a simple diffuser as an outdoor lantern for a while, and felt that it attracted less bugs. Underrated general-purpose LED, in my opinion, even if CRI is in the 50s.
Here in USA the Sodium street lights are being replaced with cool white LEDs… so, a lot more blue light, not good for humans melatonin levels at night.
As far as the OP, it looks like Red light, and other colors such as Amber and CCT below 2500K, that lack blue light, attract the least bugs.
This is the other extreme. At least the CCT for LED is not as crazy here in EU… I think, 3500 to 4000 K is good for humans, but not as good as for insects.
I can not find the specifications for color temperature of LED lights installed by the city. What I do see is that after removing the Sodium street lamp across the street from my house, the new LED light is Much cooler, and unshielded, so it now shines in my bedroom window at night (forcing me to close the blinds, which was not required with the sodium lamps).
This is similar to what I have here, but in opposite way: before the sodium lamp shined directly into my bedroom, now with changed fixture it is shielded and much darker now in my room. These are used in my city, made in Germany. I think the reduced light in my room is due to changed mounting angle.
Oh ok, maybe you have also on your new home some LED lights around
I just saw on the Siteco website, that these lights I linked earlier are also available nowadays in 1800 K config.
This is quite interesting since 1800 K is unlike these narrow-band spectrum sodium lights, but more like ‘white light’ with really warm CCT. The blue is reduced but it is still possible to distinguish colors, like in the beamshots I shown in my 1800 K HL2X test earlier. According to Sitecos datasheet they have > 70 CRI. Some years ago Siteco used Osram SSL80 LEDs for the 4000 K config.
One interesting bit I got from this paper was that Culicidae family which interests me deeply (i.e. bloody mosquitos) were attracted much less to the ‘amber’ light with had just slightly less green content than what the authors call the ‘yellow’ light, which was almost as ‘bad’ as their ‘white’ light (bad as in attracting mozzies, and white as in low CCT ~equivalent to some 3000K to begin with). The yellow and amber were not too different in most other categories.
So it looks like a little bit of green makes all the difference to mosquitos, at least based on this study. I don’t know how to exploit it practically when camping though - use only 2000K LEDs (even if they exist)? Does anybody know how mosquitos like the red light?
As far as I can tell mosquitos don’t give a hoot about light of any kind.
They do seem to like the mosquitos attractant stuff if it’s fresh.
An old fashioned yellow colored incan bulb really draws moths and assorted other critters.
Seems you can’t buy a bug zapper that doesn’t have a UV bulb in it.
Mine has that and does attract moths.
Those pesky fruit flies only seem to go to the zapper if I put a small hunk of - you know - fruit in it. I use a small banana peel remnant.
Speaking of zappers. The other night something huge hit it. It was loud enough enough the Mrs. Jeff and I had time to look at it and see a bright orange spark/flame on the grid that also traveled down the grid crackling and sparking the whole way.
Whatever it was got blasted apart. Never did figure out what it was.
Mothera?
All the Best, Jeff
Once saw a massive fly (bluebottle type) get zapped, fall to the floor of the zapper, then all the maggots burst out of the dead fly and started crawling around
Exactly right. They track carbon dioxide, not light. Not many animals that mosquitos feed on emit light, but they all breathe, so it makes total sense.
The effect of light may be offset by other factors… CO2, scent, etc, but that’s beyond the scope of the study.
“Among captured insect families known to contain important vectors of pathogens, bacteria or parasites (Diptera: Calliphoridae, Ceratopogonidae, Chloropidae, Culicidae, Muscidae, Psychodidae, Sarcophagidae, Tabanidae; Hemiptera: Reduviidae), 45% of all individuals were captured at white lamps, 41% at yellow lamps and just 13% were found in amber lamp traps.”
I recall an old post which showed the attraction of bugs to two thrower lights, one having a warm LED and the other a cold LED. There were a lot more bugs flying around the cool beam, as noted by the author.
Amber seems like a good way to go for outdoor LED lighting. Cool white LEDs are straight up light pollution.
Ledil offers amber optics which eliminate the blue spike of standard LEDs. Optical efficiency seems to be around 74%.
Convoy makes lights with the osram amber LED. No filter. Color rendition is a bit worse than the worst bluish white LED you’ve seen (which is fine). Works great as a micro lantern. The color rendition is way better than a sodium lamp, even. Note the blue pen, where amber falls flat.
The “MA” bin of the Osram KY CSLNM1.FY makes ~67 L/W at 1 amp drive current, or 3W. At max rated power, 10W, it has an efficacy of around 39 L/W.
An LED like XPG4 operating at 180 L/W would produce 133 L/W behind an amber optic with ~74% transmission. Operating at ~115 L/W at max rated power, it would put out 85 L/W behind an amber optic.
Looks like amber optics with standard LEDs are the way to go unless or until there are highly efficient amber LEDs.
I wonder how that percentage is measured. No question cree know what they are doing, but phosphor being 50% worse than just throwing away the unwanted wavelengths seems like a pretty big disappointment.
I’d guess that there is still a significant difference between the spectrum of a white light through an amber optic and the spectrum from an amber LED. In order to simulate the spectrum of an amber LED, the entire left half of a white spectrum needs to be removed, which should lose much more than 26% of the lumens.
