91–100 of 202 posts
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.
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.
I bought all new Philip hue bulbs going on 7 or 8 years ago now and not a single one has gone bad. Maybe you're just buying cheap poor quality bulbs? A 100 out of 100 success rate after 8 years.
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…
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 lightbulb
Here 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.
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.
Can't say my experience matches at all!
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.
Lighting color is cultural. Go to Asia and you'll find many places, commercial and residential, lit with 5500K, traditionally fluorescents. I've heard a theory that it has to do with genetics and lower eye sensitivity.
Might be.
But I expect that -as you said- it's cultural, rather than biological. One's sense of color is amazingly adaptable [0], but when I do a side-by-side comparison, I find that I strongly prefer the "noontime sun" color to the "incandescent bulb orange" color. As a bonus, the "noontime sun" whitepoint is pretty close to the whitepoint of my monitors, so white things on the screen are very nearly the same color as white things on my desk.
[0] Go play the game "Return of the Obra Dinn" for like an hour straight, and then be amazed at how off your understanding of what black is has become.
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.
Half the bulbs were carried over from a previous house, so some are ~14 years old. Admittedly these were early ones, so the original batch had metal bodies etc. the replacement was a Phillips one. This is in the UK though, with pendant fittings, so less heat issues.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Randomly, my Philips Hue E27 bulbs last far longer than any of the China Zigbee clones I've bought, but like all mass produced goods, there are outliers that fail. The cheap China stuff tend to fail in a few months , while I've only had two Hue bulbs in my collection fail ever , so Philips seems to be doing something right.
I agree, my Philips hue bulbs have been going strong for about 7 to 8 years now I'm not a single issue. I think people are just buying cheap bulbs then getting upset that they bought cheap bulbs.
What is a 'cheap' bulb though? We paid a few bucks for a bulb for generations. Suddenly we're paying 10x that for a Phillips Hue and anything lesser is 'cheap'.
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.
To the contrary, isn’t the phrase the orange site used as a derogatory sense here? I have seen it used when authors think HN audience just criticize everything without substance.
Seems likely, yeah.
> To the contrary...
Why are you -er- proposing the contrary or whatever? From my ~sixteen years of experience with HN commentary, the preemption seems totally fair and reasonable... as does getting some joy from seeing an author publish it.