The only place I now use an incandescent bulb is in my oven. It went out the other day and I was looking for a replacement. I am using LED all over these days but realized it may not be possible to use LEDs in a heated environment like an oven. Is that the case, or are there LED bulbs for that now also?
10
-
27Bear in mind that if you've got an electric oven, the amount of power the bulb is using is effectively zero compared to what the oven is using for cooking. Switching from incandescent to LED will provide such a negligible savings in electricity or cash that you'll likely never notice.– FreeManCommented Apr 14, 2021 at 13:36
-
3From Ye Darke Ages of 2020: Can LED Bulbs Be Used In Ovens?– HABOCommented Apr 14, 2021 at 15:29
-
7@HABO "Without a light in the oven, opening and closing the oven door to check if the food is done will ruin your dish. Apart from being completely unable to see how brown the top of your cheese casserole has become..." Site looses all credibility with that statement. My oven doesn't have a window in the door. The only way to check on the food is to open the door, and trust me, after 28 years, we've never ruined dinner by checking on it. Occasionally by forgetting to check on it, but never by opening the door. LEDLightingInfo.com should stick to light bulbs and leave the cooking advice alone– FreeManCommented Apr 14, 2021 at 16:39
-
2Yeah, that blog is awful. So many inaccurate/half-truth statements. "self care" - is this an oven (self-clean) or talking about someone learning to brush their teeth? Don't get me started...oops, too late.– manassehkatz-Moving 2 CodidactCommented Apr 14, 2021 at 19:16
-
22@FreeMan in an electric oven, it's actually zero - the waste heat ends up in the oven helping to cook the food (leaving the light on is sometimes used to provide a warm place for proving dough. In a gas oven, some tiny fraction of the energy consumption is shifted from gas to electricity– Chris HCommented Apr 15, 2021 at 10:05
|
Show 5 more comments
5 Answers
As already stated, LEDs can't take the heat. In addition:
Many ovens use halogen bulbs instead of "ordinary" incandescent bulbs. These are a type of incandescent light with two key differences: size and heat.
The size is irrelevant for most ordinary lamps but great for an oven, where you want something small so that it won't take away from valuable interior cooking space.
The heat is a huge problem for ordinary lamps, to the extent that there were major recalls/design changes many years ago because of halogen lamps setting curtains and other stuff on fire, resulting in metal grid covers for those lamps and eventually they disappeared altogether in favor of much more efficient CFL and then LED lamps. But heat is perfectly fine in an oven, where you have a high-but-regulated temperature. If you have the light on while cooking and it puts a few extra watts of heat into the oven, the element will turn off a few seconds earlier and the net energy usage is a big fat 0.
In general with any lighting system, the efficiency is a balance between light and heat. All the energy not turned into light becomes heat. In an oven that is perfectly fine and useful instead of wasteful. For an extreme example of this, where the light bulb is the heating element, see the Easy Bake Oven. In fact, for a conventional electric oven, heat generated from a light bulb is essentially the same efficiency as heat generated from heating elements. Where energy usage is a bit different is with microwave ovens and gas ovens.
answered Apr 14, 2021 at 18:19
manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidactmanassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact
131k13 gold badges139 silver badges363 bronze badges
-
1They solved the heat problem of halogens by putting the halogen capsule inside of a standard glass bulb -- most (all?) of the "energy efficient" incandescent bulbs (i.e. 100W equivalent using 72W of energy) are halogen bulbs inside of a standard size bulb, with the same (well, a bit less) bulb temperature as the regular incandescent would have had.– JohnnyCommented Apr 14, 2021 at 22:10
-
@Johnny that's partly about the heat but largely about the UV. Small halogen bulbs use a quartz envelope that's transparaent to UV, unlike normal glass, and the hotter halogen lamps produce more UV than normal incandescent bulbs– Chris HCommented Apr 15, 2021 at 10:06
-
13This captures the key point that it's absolutely irrelevant whether it's possible or not because it's not even a problem that requires solving - no heat is wasted because you want the oven to be hot anyway. If you remove the lightbulb, the elements will just work a bit harder to make up the difference.– J...Commented Apr 15, 2021 at 10:52
-
7The heat of an incandescent bulb is not just OK in an oven, it's even a feature. Sometimes when the kitchen is just a little cold, the oven light is all it takes to make the oven a good place to proof dough. Commented Apr 15, 2021 at 20:30
-
1An incandescent light bulb is just a heating element that's been put in a vacuum so it can reach the same temperature as the surface as the sun, and thus emit light is the same general spectrum as the sun. Commented Apr 17, 2021 at 15:12
Not gonna happen. Can't take the heat.
Those consumer products one calls an "LED light bulb" is a built consumer product made of components - case, heat sink, electronics and an array of LED emitters. The latter are purchasable as components by electronics supply houses such as mouser.com, with over 100,000 types listed. Every one has a data sheet.
You (the builder) merge the LED with a heat sink (probably of your own design). To guide heat sink design, the data sheet calls out thermal limits at the point where the LED meets the heat sink. You can't let the LED get any hotter than that.
Those limits are typically 85C, or in rare instances, 115C. This isn't even 250F. That's not gonna work in an oven.
So that's the end of that. CFLs have similar problems, more owing to the survivability of their electronic ballast.
Incandescent bulbs love heat, so it's not a problem.
Incandescent bulbs require heat to function, and if it isn't already in the environment, they have to make it. They self-regulate and don't need a driver/ballast. So they run very happily in hot places.
It's a match made in heaven, and there's no reason other than OCD/aesthetics to want to reinvent that wheel. (and if you really, really, really wanted to, then "light pipes").
Keeping in mind that oven lights are only on when the oven door is open (and often, when the oven is turned on). So the energy use is trivial, and one would be hard-pressed to save a penny's worth of electricity over the life of an oven. Any effort to "greenify" or "increase efficiency" would be better spent anywhere else. Anywhere. Honestly.
answered Apr 14, 2021 at 17:47
Harper - Reinstate MonicaHarper - Reinstate Monica
310k27 gold badges294 silver badges761 bronze badges
-
7"oven lights are only on when the oven door is open" This is only true for ovens without windows. Every house I've lived in has had an oven with a window and the light was controlled by a switch, not by the oven door. Commented Apr 14, 2021 at 21:45
-
Actually in my oven (Kitchenaid), the lights are controlled both by a switch and by the door - i.e., you can lights when you open the door or all the time, your choice. Except the little halogen bulbs burn out too quickly and so I haven't bothered to replace them in years. The other good aspect of LED bulbs - longevity - would be wonderful in an oven, but the LEDs really can't take the heat. Commented Apr 14, 2021 at 21:53
-
1Every oven I've ever owned has a light that is permanently on, when the oven is switched on.– SiHaCommented Apr 15, 2021 at 16:16
-
2In UK/European models the light is always on, but I haven't seen an oven of recent design without glass on the door. The thermostat on many models has a position that leaves the light on but the element off - that's handy for proving dough, or as a visual reminder when using carryover heat to finish cooking. Making the user let the heat out to illuminate the contents would be pretty dumb if there's a window - a major reason for having a light at all is to look inside with the door shut.– Chris HCommented Apr 16, 2021 at 12:06
I think it's unlikely that this is possible.
The environment in the oven in quite mild compared with an incandescent lamp, but LEDs, being semiconductor devices generally don't function well above about 100C.
Some vendors seem to be making newer ovens with insulated or otherwise thermally isolated lamp compartments so that they can install LED lighting but generally replacing a standard incandescent bulb in an oven with an LED one will not work.
-
2I agree with electronics and heat are not a good mix. I looked and find some oven rated lamps but they were only rated to 300 degrees so that’s not very useful in my opinion.– Ed BealCommented Apr 14, 2021 at 13:31
-
4
-
1@EdBeal unless your oven has a "burn-cleaning" functionality, it will very likely be fine as I've never had my oven above 275 degree, and that exclusively for Pizza. Also: those ratings are just what the manufacturer gives the guarantee for / has tested it. Chances are good that it'll take 350 degrees as well– HobbamokCommented Apr 15, 2021 at 11:59
-
1@EdBeal oh, I assumed Celsius, because when you're already at 300 C, its not a regular lamp and should be fine. But if that's Fahrenheit it's just about 150 Celsius, which sounds like a "generously resistant consumer light bulb"– HobbamokCommented Apr 15, 2021 at 13:48
-
1Also: there is 0 reason for efficiency when lighting an oven. Optimizing for it is just plain wasted money, so that is probably the one area where they'll stick with incandescent for a looong time– HobbamokCommented Apr 15, 2021 at 13:50
Even if you could, I wouldn't trust that the plastics, solder and semiconductors of an LED lamp wouldn't leach unfriendly chemicals out into the oven's air, and then into the food. There's a reason they tell hobbyists to not use food ovens for "re-flowing" (building or fixing) electronic circuit boards.
-
Tin/silver solder melts in the 420-430 F range and lead-based solder at ~360 F, so it definitely wouldn't end well in an oven. Even if you avoided the fumes, the whole thing would just melt apart.– btaCommented Apr 17, 2021 at 3:33
-
And I seriously wonder about the "greenness" of LED bulbs, anyway. Incandescent bulbs are made of metal and glass, that's it--arguably natural materials. There are so many laborious steps and (sometimes poisonous) chemicals that go into making everything involved in an electronic circuit like an LED bulb. Does their total energy use, pollution creation and expense beat that of incandescents? Everyone assumes, no one knows. Commented Apr 17, 2021 at 16:25
-
The main reason for not using a food oven for soldering is the flux, which you don't want to ingest either through your lungs or digestive tract, or skin, for that matter. Over on Electronics.SE: Are solder fumes bad for me? Commented Apr 17, 2021 at 19:23
-
If you want to save energy, you may start from reconsidering the oven itself. It's most likely electric, so basically a huge light bulb, 1000 times greater than the small one you are trying to replace.
And yes, such a replacement is possible. Not with an LED, but there are (gas discharge) lamps with similar efficiency and high operation temperature. They also work much longer (like 10 times).
