121–130 of 966 posts
As we continue to shift our primary motivation for creating products away from what is best for the consumer towards what is best for an artificially determined goal we will increasingly see the compounding secondary effects of those choices.
I have heard that newer LED Bulbs now have some kind of built in obsolescence. This is from someone I know who is an engineer working for the US military. I told him I had bought some LEDs (started moving over 2 years ago) and that is when he mentioned that. I guess I will find out, so far so good. I did stock up on 100 watt incandescent years ago and have a many left just in case. I found LEDs cause me eye strain, b…
“The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours (down from 2,500 hours)..”
Cheap LED bulbs generate the worst light I’ve ever experienced. But after some research I found that there are options that make a nice warm light with no perceptible flickering. Personally I prefer the phillips warm glow dimmable bulbs
I have begun to use grow lights everywhere as regular lights. They emit a pleasant looking spectrum, have good heat sinks for longevity, have high-quality ballasts, built-in dimmers and do not flicker. They also blow out any alternative out of the water when it comes to pure brightness for precision work (soldering, painting minis, etc.) They are also fairly cheap (can find some lights as low as 50c/watt on sale) Oh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you don't want to become an expert, which is something that wouldn't scale for every piece of tech and equipment? (Maybe you enjoy tweaking with lights, but what about chairs, tabletop materials, woods, wall paints, and yes -- electronic gadgets?). With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"?
>With LEDs, what's the "I don't want to deal with this, I just want something that will work as intended and not introduce weird artifacts"? That sounds like an ideal situation the free market should be fixing -- so why isn't it?
I have begun to use grow lights everywhere as regular lights. They emit a pleasant looking spectrum, have good heat sinks for longevity, have high-quality ballasts, built-in dimmers and do not flicker. They also blow out any alternative out of the water when it comes to pure brightness for precision work (soldering, painting minis, etc.) They are also fairly cheap (can find some lights as low as 50c/watt on sale) Oh…
Don't many grow lamps emit UV? I would be slightly concerned about potential eye and skin damage over time.
Also, you never look at the light directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LED emitters driven hard for cost reasons > Power supplies driven hard for cost reasons Can you elaborate? What does "hard" mean here, I don't understand.
At the limits of their ratings. They could make LED bulbs last many orders of magnitude longer and be more efficient, but they don't (unless forced to[1]) because they prefer planned obsolescence. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
We wire our homes with a whole bunch of AC circuits. These are basically busses, right? Why not add more kinds of busses? Why not a DC bus? Every light in my home is an LED, and most appliances (by count) are DC. I understand that moving DC long distances can be problematic. But is 100-300 feet too long? Am I completely off on this? This feels like a legacy inefficiency issue.
The irony of this article is that the author is suffering from “too much choice”. LEDs have so much more capability than fluorescent and halogen bulbs that the burden has fallen on the consumer to sort out what dimmability, temperature, and lumens they need. It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it. Anyone who works in stage lighting or art knows that light is complicated. We sh…
It used to be that you only had one option so you didn’t have to think about it. But, that single option was at least "good enough". I never bought a normal incandescent bulb only to have the color rendering/brightness/etc be downright awful. LEDs come packaged as "daylight" or "bright white" or whatever else. I want one that's labelled "just like your normal 60W incandescent".