Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.
Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.
Nobody’s talking about the real casualty of this shift. What’s going to happen to all the jokes about “how many (insert category of person here) does it take to change a light bulb?” now that people don’t have to regularly change light bulbs anymore?
No single LED lightbulb I’ve ever purchased lasts as long as they claim. infact, many have been outlasted by existing incandescent bulbs in my house. your joke fodder is safe.
I don’t know what kind of shit LEDs you’ve been buying but I’ve yet to ever have to replace one. Been using them for many years already.
Same experience here. Every single LED lightbulb i’ve bought, since the time I started using them, has outlasted basically everything else I’ve purchased before. It draws less energy and doesn’t produce basically any heat too, which is excellent
You have to give the industry some time to circle the wagons and enshittify led bulbs so that they only last 10,000 hours
You’re going to want to replace them when they stop getting security updates…
I started switching to LEDs 8 years ago. Every single one of them is still working. It used to be that bulbs should be changed every year or two.
I’ve had one or two LED bulbs die, which is why I switched to buying “energy star” rated bulbs. As part of the accreditation process, they need to certify the lifespan
My mom buys these cheap LED bulbs from Amazon and about half burn out quickly (probably 10% are DOA).
We have 100% LEDs throughout our fifth wheel (about 30 of them), and they are all still going strong (all installed in 2015, and used daily since then).
I think there’s a serious difference in quality available and it certainly shows.
Honestly as somebody who’s been watching big clive’s channel I would never recommend anybody to buy those cheap LEDs from Amazon because there’s a non-insignificant risk that they may burn your house down.
That’s really dependent on local regulation, and wether or not you bought products licensed to be sold where you live or random imports from AliExpress.
My smart LED lights were bought in 2017, they are still working perfectly and have zero signs of issues - same brightness, same connection strength, same white point. The only exception was precisely the cheapo desk lamp one I bought from an online reseller, that one lasted a year and the control board fried itself.
I buy all my stuff at Target, Walmart, or Home Depot. I have to replace my LED bulbs just as much if not more than I ever had to with Incandescents. In my last house I had incandescents that lasted the entire 8 years I was there, while I replaced other leds multiple times.
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I can tell you from having looked into becoming an importer of those things maybe a decade ago that the very EU rules for the CE mark (a requirement for them to be allowed to be imported for sale into the EU) cover things like failure rates (max 5% in the first year), minimum hours without failure (10,000 and models must actually be tested on it in order to be certified), loss of brightness with age, minimum CRI and so on.
So yeah, buy them from chinese sellers on Amazon or Aliexpress and you’re importing them yourself for personal use in which case no such rules need apply (if doing that I recommend purchasing only from those sellers that mention their product has a CE mark).
In the US, were “consumer right” tend to be this wierd thing that only wimpy eutopean worry about, I suspect there are nowhere the same level of rules (probably the bare minimum for mains wired devices which is pretty much “won’t just randomly kill users”), which would mean the stuff carried by the local sellers is China-quality-at-American-prices, so basically the Aliexpress quality but with extra cost to pay the fat bonus of the CEO of the large retail surface.
PS: As a side note to anybody interested in using the CE mark as the minimum standard for their own LED light bulb purchases, look at the packaging: there are very specific rules for the packaging itself, so for example it has to list the brightness (in lumen) with more proeminence than the wattage and also has the energy rating (including a standard design with a graph of horizontal bars) so these things are pretty easy to spot from the packaging of the light bulb.
I’ve been using LED bulbs for a good number of years, I’ve only had one or two die on me. The longevity alone makes them much better than incandescent, but then they use a tenth the power.
My favorite is the A15 Edison style. That’s the appliance size, smaller than the standard A19. The A15 fits in everything so I only need to stock one size.
I still have some I bought 15 years ago at Ikea, still working. Most I exchanged because of the rapid technical development in the one and a half decade not because they stopped working.
Just fucking yesterday out of 12 Nisko high CRI bulbs around the house one just stopped working. All of them are mere one year old.
And those high cri ones are the most expensive ones. Lets see how much time the others survive… ill keep you posted.
My LED bulbs have hilariously short lives. I suspect the wiring in my apartment is just not that great because lights do flicker from time to time. But that didn’t seem to hurt incandescent bulbs. I’m lucky if my LEDs last even one year, never mind the 10 or 20 some of them claim.
What am I supposed to do, but my overhead light fixtures on a UPS?!
The only LED bulbs I’ve bought that haven’t blown within a year are my Philips hue bulbs. They are expensive but they are all I’ll buy now, and my girlfriend and I love setting them to relaxing colors in the evening while we relax together on the couch
I have a bunch I bought in 2016 that are still going strong. Only stopped using them because we wanted cooler lighting and they’re all pretty warm. We’ve had like 4 or 5 out of the original 50 or so that stopped working though.
I don’t remember the last time I changed a light bulb at home
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I’ve also had very different results, depending on brand. Definitely avoid the cheap stuff
Now I have the opposite problem: brands and styles change too much. What do you do when one bulb of a multi-bulb fixture burns out, but they’ve all outlasted the brand or style? I do already have a drawer full of LED bulbs that I replaced so the fixture would match, and can’t always find a fixture with fewer bulbs
Don’t worry, many have shitty drivers that will fail and poor cooling that will kill the diodes.
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There’s a tradeoff with CFL bulbs between longevity and instant action. The normal expectation for a light bulb is to have it at full brightness the moment you flip the switch, but the first CFL bulbs to market often took minutes to reach peak output. Longer if they were cold.
So to meet consumer expectations, manufacturers began designing bulbs that would, on ignition, damage themselves in order to reach peak output faster.
It’s no wonder the CFL bulb failed as a product, you would either get a bulb that would never be bright enough when you needed it, or you got a bulb that would burn itself out just as quickly as any incandescent for twice the price.
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In 2008(ish) we rewired our house (built in the '20s) and replaced every fixture. We probably had 25 CFL bulbs (most in ceiling fans), and had no losses for the several years that we owned the house after that. But I remember paying way more for bulbs in years before that and having them all fail fairly quickly.
As someone living in the EU where incandescent bulbs have been banned for over a decade, I can assure you that changing lightbulbs is still a thing. Not as frequently, but it happens, especially if you buy cheaper brands LED bulbs. They definitely does not have the longevity that they advertise.