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Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

tonyg

Comments (174)

  • xg15
    > "Therefore, this was done so that people would always need to buy more light bulbs."This is wrong, but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact checkJust as a general point: I haven't seen a product decision that wasn't sold with some official explanation why it's "really for the good of everyone". Google's Manifest v3 was about reducing performance bottlenecks, FIFA's hydration breaks were about player health and relentless tracking is about "being able to provide better experiences".The question is if those explanations hold up to scrutiny or turn out to be bullshit, not whether or not they exist in the first place.
  • cge
    While the author mentions that they are not trying to defend the Phoebus cartel, I think they may inadvertently be somewhat misleading in their explanation. What they are saying is, from an engineering standpoint, true. But my understanding of the argument against the Phoebus cartel is that it was using legitimate engineering points as the official justification for profiteering business collusion: that the points were real, but were not the actual reasons for their decisions, or reasonable justification for the particular choices of values they enforced.In doing so, the article perhaps obscures the point that business collusion, I expect, is more often built around legitimate reasoning taken to illegitimate extents and conclusions, than around outright fabrications.
  • freediddy
    I've never had LED lights last anywhere near the purported 5-7 year timeframe. The worst ones are the small decorative ones with the tinier screw part that my house seems to have an inordinate number of. Those last maybe 6 months and then they start getting dimmer and then all the lights in the circuit get worse at once. I like LED lights immensely but the idea they last even 2 years is a lie in my opinion.
  • wolfgangK
    BTW, I don't understand why having the driver converting AC to DC inside the LED spots is the default. For a new house, it seems to make sense to me to have at least one external driver for a ceiling of spots, if not one per floor (not one for the whole house because pf the drop in voltage). But 24V led spots seem much less common and I cannot find many reviews. Any idea why it's not more common ? It seems efficiency and thermals would be much easier to optimize without the size constraint, plus economy of scale with components. Any specific 24V led spots / bulbs to recommend ?
  • mreome
    For an even deeper dive into this topic...Technology Connections: Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicatedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
  • SCLeo
    As many have pointed out, I think the cartel is just using the engineering perspective for justification. If avoiding racing to the bottom is the goal, the rule could be that "no one can advertise a lifetime longer than 1000 hrs" as opposed to actually limiting the lifetime.
  • anon
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  • Aardwolf
    > In order to put the emission peak in the visible spectrum, the filament would need to run at ~5700 °C (...) No metal can survive these conditions: Tungsten melts at "only" 3422 °C.Hmm, can we possibly find something that does survive at 5700 °C to use as a light source? Perhaps molten metal confined in a magnetic field...
  • dybovalex
    Tungsten will burn in an oxygen atmosphere, therefore standard light bulbs actually use an inert gas (like argon). The gas pressure slows down tungsten evaporation and prevents oxidation. The main reason for short living of the bulbs is that the filament gradually evaporating over time until it thins out and snaps.
  • xg15
    I was with the article until this point:> If long lived light bulbs are worse products, why would they need a cartel to enforce a the thousand hour limit? Well, it's because people think long lasting bulbs are a good product:Lifespan is something everyone can understand, and has a direct effect on when you will have to go back to the store: if you saw two 60 W bulbs in a store, one claiming to last 400 hours and the other 2,000 hours, you'd probably get the longer lasting one without thinking about it.This makes no sense to me. The article's whole point was that longer-lived bulbs produce worse lighting: Less brightness, more "orange glow" instead of "daylight", etc.But light quality is the one thing that a buyer would immediately notice once they actually tried out the bulb. If they bought the amazing 100.000 hours bulb but found out it's a nightlight, they'll probably not buy that bulb again even despite the lifetime. If fact, they'd probably go back to the store really quickly to get a "real" light.So I don't see why we'd need some industry cartel here to decide what's good for the customers if the customers would perfectly well decide themselves.
  • comrade1234
    There are varying levels of quality for the same bulb. I don't know what the difference is in the bulb but they make a difference in the order of years.I'm in Switzerland where we can no longer buy halogen bulbs. Every bulb in our apartment is led except 7 bulbs under the cabinets in our kitchen. I used to buy bulbs from a hardware store but they would only last about a year. When they banned halogen bulbs I found that I could buy them from a photography supplier for more money. The product number was different but it had the right specs. They've been going for three years and no burn outs.
  • WarmWash
    That top paragraph is a masterclass in modern media standards. Tell the truth will hiding facts so your readers can be reassured that they are in fact smart and correct, while you never have to tell a lie.
  • BGizzle
    You have been misled about spelling misled
  • montag
    Misled
  • jsLavaGoat
    5700 is a terrible temperature for lighting unless that matches the daylight. Soft white and even reddish is much better at night. Presumably, most artificial light it used at night. 2700 is more like it.My LED lightbulbs change temperature based on the time of day and are dull red at night so you both don't wake up and you don't stub your toe. Show me a non-LED that can do that.
  • m463
    Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very very brightly, Roy - Bladerunner (1982)also, I enjoyed the last lines of the article:Also, to preempt the orange site, I'm not saying that planned obsolescence doesn't exist.
  • petethomas
    The Story Behind the Story Behind “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy” Thomas Pynchon didn't invent the Phoebus cartel: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-story-behind-the-story-behind-...
  • anon
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  • LearnYouALisp
    wOrSE in EvERy WAY(Is such an outrageous claim true? Click to generate ad revenue and maybe find out!)
  • shevy-java
    The author critisizes one incorrect claim, but also makes claims that are in turn incorrect.For instance:> In truth, increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way... but people think they want a long lasting lightbulbHere the author writes "people think they want a long lasting xyz".Well, people do not merely THINK they want a long lasting xyz. They really WANT it.Why are projects not infinite in durability?Of course, creating products with an infinite life time is not possible if only due to entropy alone; but also wear-and-tear damage. Nonetheless, the intrinsic quality and production process SHOULD CREATE PRODUCTS with a maximum life time. Some companies try that. Others deliberately avoid that in order to force customers to spend more on products they need to buy again and again and again. So the author is incorrect in the assumption; people WOULD ideally want a product that lasts as long as possible. Nothing wrong with that.> Going off modern day prices, electricity costs around 0.10 [$/kW*h], so a 60 W lamp will consume 6$ of electricity over a 1,000 hour lifespan. Considering that such a lamp only costs around 3$, installing one that lasts longer but uses more power would be silly.Here he is doing another mistake. First, those flat prices are not correct in general; instead, you must take in the opportunity costs. For instance, when I order new LED devices ("lamps"), I do not want to just order one. I want to order several, so that I have backup, and also so I don't have to go to purchase them several times. It is easier to do buy in some quantities, say, 8-10 or so. This lasts quite a long time for my use cases.Ideally this would last a long time, because if not then I have to do more purchases, which in turn takes away time I could spend doing other things. So the cost comparison is different here. The ideal situation would be to never ever have to replace anything here. Or even capture in solar power and use that for the lamps.> Instead of "making bulbs last longer", manufacturers spent huge amounts of time and money developing entirely new technology: fluorescent and LED lamps.Well ... the EU forbade the old technology. While I understand this partially, I don't understand why a dictatorship forces me into having to use new technology. I have nothing against new technology at all, but the prices increased a LOT, so those technocrats ultimately forced me (and force me) to increase expenditure. I absolutely hate that. It is even more annoying with the current inflation. Why do a few people constantly try to abuse the huge majority? Perhaps LED lamps is not the real problem, but this tendency exists throughout society. I feel that both democracies and dictatorships abuse people, just in different amount of quality. We see this with the current trend to force age sniffing onto people. This is even clearer abuse.
  • crypttales
    [dead]
  • JTbane
    You ever hear of Dubai lamps? Apparently underdriving LEDs makes them last much longer.
  • eimrine
    Hey friends, why you do not pull off that second resistor in order to make your LED bulb to emit 30% of power but to have endless lifespawn? Your TV has a matrix of LED with endless lifespawn. Just don't be a blind consumer, also you can glue off the cap which blurs the light winning 10% of light, also you can drill the radiator for helping to cool the debuffed bulb even more.
  • 1970-01-01
    I don't understand this one. Yes, I want the long-life lightbulb. No, that doesn't somehow make it worse in every other way. The point is so obvious, I couldn't follow the logic in this argument. Nobody is buying or selling 120 Watt short-life bulbs to brag about their tremendous brightness. Long Life (LL) bulbs are not some kind of marketing ploy. We buy them understanding that we're going to minimize the hidden costs of making light, i.e. changing that bulb.