> While it might seem astonishing that so many longest-lasting light bulbs have been so infrequently turned off, this is the precise reason for their longevity. Most of the wear and tear that leads to burnouts in incandescent light bulbs is caused by turning them on and off, not by burning them. Each time the bulb is turned on and off, the filament is heated and cooled. This causes the material of the filament to expand and contract, in turn causing micro stress cracks to develop. The more the light is turned on and off, the larger these cracks grow, until eventually the filament breaks at some point, in non-spectacular fashion, thus causing the light to burn out.
I knew running filament bulbs on low voltage is the key to their longevity, but this is another important aspect
This idea is in direct cobtradiction to the claims that the Phoebus Cartel gathered to lower the lifespan of light bulbs due to declining sales in a market saturated with long-lasting bulbs. This is cited by some as the birth of Planned Obsolescence.
I personally have not be clear on which side of this argument holds more accuracy, but given today's anti-consumer leanings in manufactiring (particulatly in the US), I have my misgivings about it all.
I noticed this early on when I noticed how often I changed the light bulb in the bathroom compared to the hallway where it was always on. Once I thought about it, I assumed it was due to thermal stress.
I'm sure it would be possible to extend bulb life by ramping up the voltage slowly to reduce the thermal stress. not worth it in most environments, but in a bathroom, why not. I understand there are soft start mechanisms used in certain electric motors, i know of an anglegrinder that used one. maybe i could do a transplant some day.
I recently retro-fitted my portable table-saw with a soft-start.
The process is quite easy, though the soft-starter you use has to be picked for a certain power-draw. And they might be specific to the type of load (i.e. specific to a universal AC motor)
A few years ago, I retrofitted my entire house with Lutron Caseta switches, for home automation purposes.
The Casetas allow me to soft-start each bulb, and to run lights at less than full brightness most of the time.
It would have been interesting to see the effect on incandescent bulb life, but I also took the opportunity to replace all light bulbs with dimmable LCD, so the question is moot.
What type of bulbs are we talking about? I could see leds and CFL being affected by moisture in bathroom. Also bathroom could be slightly hotter and worse ventilated than hallway.
For LEDs the issue is the driver boards, they get crammed into the tiny socket and live a very, very hot life. Doesn't matter that the LED has 100000 hour lifespan or whatever they write on the box when the driver dies after 5000 hours.
"Due to the high temperature that a tungsten filament is operated at, some of the tungsten evaporates during use. Furthermore, since no light bulb is perfect, the filament does not evaporate evenly. Some spots will suffer greater evaporation and become thinner than the rest of the filament.
These thin spots cause problems. Their electrical resistance is greater than that of average parts of the filament. Since the current is equal in all parts of the filament, more heat is generated where the filament is thinner. The thin parts also have less surface area to radiate heat away with. This "double whammy" causes the thin spots to have a higher temperature. Now that the thin spots are hotter, they evaporate more quickly.
It becomes apparent that as soon as a part of the filament becomes significantly thinner than the rest of it, this situation compounds itself at increasing speed until a thin part of the filament either melts or becomes weak and breaks."
Halogen bulbs last longer because the sublimated tungsten is converted to volatile halides, which then preferentially decompose back to elemental tungsten at the hot spots, healing them.
Both are relevant, and can feed into each other. A incandescent lightbulb that has been on for a long time is more likely to fail after a power cycle, as the cycling adds additional stress (anyone who's used them can attest to this: the most common experience with one failing is going to turn it on, only to get a brief flash of light before it fails).
It seems to be relevant to lifetime, though not the dominant factor in most cases. There is an annoying shortage of actual data on this online though (the best actual experiment I can find is mythbusters where a 2-minute on-off cycle caused a failure in two weeks, which is obviously extreme but shows how rapid cycling can affect lifespan).
Sublimation will thin out the wire, which weakens it. But the final failure mode is the fillament breaking. This can happen due to the wire getting so thin it melts. But the thermal stress of power cycling can also cause the thinned out wire to break. Perhaps the micro-cracks also increase wire resistance, causing more sublimation.
Yes, that's right. And it gives the illusion that on/off cycling is aging the bulb. That's like looking at someone who dropped dead from a heart attack during exercise and concluding exercise causes aging.
For example, turning engines on and off heavily thermally cycles them. It can get worse when they are rapidly cooled or rapidly heated. Jet engines running at constant speed have high cycle fatigue to worry about, but steady temperatures don't pose a thermal stress issue.
But shutting the engine off in cold air and letting them go from very hot to very cold suddenly will cause the thicker parts to cool slower than the thin parts, stressing them near the change in thickness. That results in low cycle fatigue (where you can count the cycles to failure in the dozens/hundreds/thousands vs. millions/billions for high cycle fatigue).
I had some recessed lights in my ceiling that I installed in 2000.
They worked daily for 20 years before I swapped them out for LED lights. Never had one fail.
I attribute it to the fact that the dimmer switch they were on could only do soft turn ons and turn offs. Always took about 3 seconds to turn on and off.
TL;DW: (if I rember correctly) Bulbs with shorter lifespans are generally more energy efficient. There was good reasons to not making bulb that last forever.
Is there evidence for a real correlation beyond the obvious spurious one: Newer bulbs are more efficient and at the same time have a shorter lifespan due to planned obsolescence.
The arguments from the basic physics of the problem makes sense: hotter bulbs means more light relative to heat output, but also shorter lifetime. It seems quite hard to get out from under that tradeoff even with improvements in the underlying tech (materials, manufacturing, etc).
More efficient bulbs would be less hot, not more. The more energy gets converted to visible light instead of heat radiation, the more efficient the bulb is. So this argument only makes it more questionable, according to what you're saying modern bulbs should be lasting even longer than those old ones.
Not if you're using incandescence (LEDs and fluorescence use different mechanisms where this tradeoff doesn't exist in the same way). Incandescence is black-body radiation and the thing about black-body radiation is that as the temperature increases both the total energy given off and the proportion of higher energy radiation (useful visible light) to lower energy radiation (waste infrared) increase. So a hotter incandescent lightblub is more efficient than a cooler one (at least up until the point that it's so hot it starts giving off too much ultraviolet light, but that corresponds to a temperature at which no material is solid), though still pretty shockingly inefficient. Note that heat output and temperature can change seperately: a bulb running at a higher temperature (what I mean by hotter) can either have more light output for the same heat output, or less heat output for the same light output (for example, if the filament is shorter).
The hotter an incandescent element is, the more efficiently it converts heat to light. Think about how something metal and hot glows dull red, while something metal and really hot glows orange-white. Reaching white-hot is a trade-off, in balance with the limit of the material for how hot you can run the filament, before it boils away.
IIRC, it's not exactly "more energy efficient", but rather "brighter light bulbs mean shorter lifespan" so you use the energy better but it's not inherently using less energy, it's using the same energy to produce more light. It also explains why the light bulbs from TFA last so long, they're all pretty dim.
Cooler bulbs seem to generate a larger fraction of their energy in the infrared. Hotter bulbs generate not only more light, but a greater fraction of that light is visible.
This is easier to think about, if you consider the extremes. A very low power bulb generates no visible light, but still consumes energy. This is super inefficient. At higher temperature the peak shifts to longer wavelengths (i.e. visible). You can compare the black body radiation at different temperatures using Planck's law.[1]
Not obviously so. The embodied energy of an incendescent lightbulb could easily be dwarfed by the energy used in its lifetime. The relative cost of the bulb and the energy used to run it would certainly point to this being the case.
If one "forever bulb" can only output 10 lumens @10 watts but you need 100 lumens, and a "one year" bulb can create 100 lumens @60 watts, the disposable bulb wins.
"The Phoebus cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs in much of Europe and North America between 1925–1939. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which falsely claimed to raise their efficiency and output."
"As regards life standards, before the Phoebus Agreement and to this day the general service filament lamp was and is designed to have, on average, a minimum life of 1,000 hours. It has often been alleged—though not in evidence to us—that the Phoebus organisation artificially made the life of a lamp short with the object of increasing the number of lamps sold. As we have explained in Chapter 9, there can be no absolutely right life for the many varying circumstances to be found among the consumers in any given country, so that any standard life must always represent a compromise between conflicting factors. B.S.I, has always adopted a single life standard for general service filament lamps, and the representatives of both B.S.I, and B.E.A., as well as most lamp manufacturers, have told us in evidence that they regard 1,000 hours as the best compromise possible at the present time, nor has any evidence been offered to us to the contrary. Accordingly we must dismiss as misconceived the allegation referred to above."
This is also what Alex explains in the Technology Connection video, and a lot more, with actual examples using actual lightbulbs and some surface explanations of the physics.
The statement by UK Monopoly and Restrictive Practices Commission seems to be inaccurate as the objective was an average lifespan of 1,000 hours, not "on average a minimum life of 1,000 hours" as bulbs that exceeded 1,000 hours were fined, as well as those lasting less.[1] That bulbs lasting longer than 1,000 hours were fined, regardless of their wattage used to lumens produced seems explainable only by a desire to restrict lifespans, and contrary to efficiency or minimum lifespans being the goal.
From [1], quoting Anton Phillips discussing members building higher voltage and longer lived bulbs,
“This, you will agree with me, is a very dangerous practice and is having a most detrimental influence on the total turnover of the Phoebus Parties…. After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by paying no attention to voltages and supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life.”
The citation for that sentence does back up the assertion: there's a quote from someone in the source saying that the cartel didn't meaningfully increase efficiency but did shorten lifespans. Whether you trust a media studies professor who has 'studied the cartel's documents' is another question though.
This seems to have been reverted only moments ago. Perhaps a disgruntled person from HN trying to force learned false history on Wikipedia?
Please watch the video from Technology Connections linked above to understand why a) Phoebus was indeed a cartel but b) which did not have as nefarious purposes as has been later claimed by e.g. populist TV documentaries such as "The Light Bulb Conspiracy".
I believe you that the efficiency argument played a role when they decided to reduce the life expectancy of the light bulbs. The cartel doing 'cartel-things' aside, the 1000h-limit probably was a good decision even though I think that they ultimately did not do it for the consumer.
Is this assertion that the claim of efficiency is false actually backed up by anything, though? The cited article has a quote from a media studies professor who has apparently read the cartel's records.
The video cited above explicitly claims that the thinner wires (that last less long) are indeed more efficient. He backs it up with real experiments, and addresses the common claims that the Phoebus only did this to sell more products.
Specifically, the life-time of a bulb has to do with filament thickness (the filament sublimates until it is too thin, melts from resistance and breaks).
At the same time, thinner fillaments will get hotter, and therefore be brighter at the same power level. (specifically, more of the heat energy is radiated away in the visible spectrum).
This means bulb life-time and efficiency an inherent trade-off.
Has there been a similar shortening of the lifetime of commonly-advertised LED bulbs?
We bought a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs around 2015 or 2016. They were expensive bulbs, but every single one is still running fine. The downside for Philips is that once I replaced all my bulbs, I stopped needing to buy lightbulbs.
The Hue bulbs are still available, but a lot of the newer LED bulbs I see claim much shorter lifetimes.
It's usually the electronics that dies (specifically: electrolytic capacitors, if included).
Life of the LEDs themselves depends a lot on operating temperature. Running hot (like in the cramped innards of a bulb), their output gradually decreases or they burn out @ some point. This is the fate of many cheap bulbs with poor thermal design.
Separate electronics (read: and their waste heat) from the LEDs, cool them well (and/or run at reduced power), and the LEDs can last practically infinite. Just like standby LEDs on appliances don't burn out. And -potentially- failed LEDs or driver electronics can be replaced independently.
But this does require a purpose designed fixture. Chip-on-Board (CoB) LED is the keyword here.
I am there with you, but with regular Philips LED bulbs from 2012. When I moved in 2013, I took those bulbs with me and they have been going strong 10 years now. All other LED bulbs in the house have been replaced a couple of times.
I imagine this is at least partly due to being more realistic. LED bulbs from the past few years were rated for around 25,000 hours but anecdotal reports seem to say they rarely reached that lifetime.
That was one of the first videos were i disagreed with him completely... Looks like he let his personal politics get in the way.
"yes they screwed over the consumer with their anti-competitive cartel but hey they were saving the planet so it is all forgiven" was is his basic take
The ends justify the means.
it was not up to the Phoebus cartel to choose what was a
"better bulb"
> yes they screwed over the consumer with their anti-competitive cartel but hey they were saving the planet so it is all forgiven
That's a misrepresentation of his take. He does not say that the cartel should be forgiven for their anti-competitive practices.
He just said that what is often referred to as planned obsolescence, may simply have been an early form of product standardization and wasn't necessarily intended to be anti-competitive.
Did you watch the video or hear what you wanted to hear?
His point was about the consumer’s end costs. It was cheaper to replace the lightbulbs than to be energy inefficient. He provided pretty solid evidence for that too.
I think you totally misunderstood the video, that wasn’t his point at all.
Because of the increased efficiency, you saved much more on the energy bill, even offsetting the extra cost for more light bulbs which were cheap even back then.
Even if you don’t give a fuck about the planet, most people care about their wallet.
I understood, it was a "consumers are too dumb to pick correctly so the experts must choose for them" argument.
I reject that mentality, it is a path to lots of unintended consequences not to mention government over reach when the "experts" we are forced to follow also have the power of government authority
The inefficient bulbs were also available as stated in the video but these bulbs only made sense for hard to reach/service locations. So people could pick according to their need.
Seems to me you let your politics, prejudice and personal hangups totally cloud and warp what was actually said in the video.
The cartel dissolved many years ago, and there wasn't a flood of _better_ longer bulbs because there physically can't be.
Longer bulbs have existed for a long time, but they are much dimmer in addition to using more power. As such they are not desirable to people.
Even beyond the cartel, power plants wanted the higher efficiency lightbulbs to reduce strain.
Those points are far better.
In any case, the cartel's goal definitely wasn't saving the planet. Can you even imagine a evil shadow organization with that goal? Their goal was profit, and to get profit they wanted standards.
Standards make it so a consumer can get various different products that work predictably. The world would be a much worse place without agreed upon standards.
>>The world would be a much worse place without agreed upon standards.
Yes "Standards" where they big player dictates to everyone else how they must do things.. Of course they hide it in a "standards organization" like how W3C is functionally a decision of Google at the point, but we do have "web standards" which are what ever google says
Or how Microsoft more or less forced out OpenXML with Open Office XML which is anything but open...
Planned obsolescence in the modern day is a real problem rather than a meme of course. There is no insurmountable physics at play when a phone stops receiving security updates.
I wonder if anyone has actually looked into what the real first instance of planned obsolescence was.
> There is no insurmountable physics at play when a phone stops receiving security updates.
There is the “insurmountable physics” problem of needing to spend money on something perceived as having no ROI worth speaking about (if it’s even positive).
This is what most “planned obsolescence in the modern day” is about, not spending money you don’t absolutely have to. The precision of modern manufacturing and the progress of material science similarly allows very low tolerances, because you don’t need to account for anywhere near as much manufacturing variance. Therefore you can hew much closer to what you need to provide, and lower your costs as a result.
An other factor is the market cycling, why would you design a phone to last for 10 years when pretty much none of your target market will keep the phone 3, and it will net you no brand loyalty whatsoever?
Finally there’s time to market, pretty much all foldable phones seem to suffer from cracking or delamination, because it’s a super popular idea which commands a huge premium, so as soon as that was an option manufacturers started releasing device with limited real-world durability testing.
You've perfectly summarized why the only way we'll reduce e-waste is by introducing legislation that requires our electronic products last longer. This is exactly why the issue of planned obsolescence can't be left up to the market: making short-lifespan products presents a better ROI.
Some may argue that this would stifle innovation and we would likely not have foldable phones today if such requirements were in place. But in my opinion if such innovations can't be made durable, then the world would be better off without them.
You've perfectly summarized why the only way we'll reduce e-waste is by introducing legislation that requires our electronic products last longer.
Well, that would be one way to reduce e-waste: make phones so expensive that a lot fewer people buy them. Because whereas before that test matrix had five phones, but legislation increased that to seven, including two that can't run the latest OS so we have to back port the fixes to the previous OS. None of that is free, in fact, it's quite expensive.
Beside, how many people do you know that base their phone buying decisions on whether or not their current one is still supported? Of the folks I know, no one does that (granted, I live in Redmond, WA, which has some techy types living in the area). They just buy a new one when they are tired of their old one, or they have New Phone Fever.
Even in the modern day, it is (often, but not always) a meme. The reason your phone stops getting security updates isn't physics but the economics of selling phones. People buy new phones, not old phones, and OEMs allocate their labor to work on those phones. There is no conspiracy to force you to upgrade. If you could somehow release an HTC Hero today with Android 13.0.0_r66 on it, it wouldn't be a viable business. People don't make purchasing decisions based on security updates.
> I wonder if anyone has actually looked into what the real first instance of planned obsolescence was.
I would love to see a short comic about a smith who creates swords out of gallium for cheap, only for them to literally melt in your hand shortly after walking away.
Just because the phoebe cartel did not limit bulb lifetime (purely) as planned obsolescence, does not mean that there is no planned obsolescence in the world currently. It just means the concept is not as old as some people think.
The Centennial Light mentioned in this article also features in a later chapter of the wonderfully written 17776 [0]. It will take a while to get through it, but very much worth the time.
On the subject of obsolete ways of making light, I really miss the aesthetic of the yellow low-pressure sodium lights we used to use outdoors in the UK that ate the colours out of everything. They were actually about as efficient as LEDs in terms of turning electricity into visible light but didn't last as long and eventually the last European company making them packed it in so we've more or less switched over entirely at this point. I don't really like how a lot of modern lighting tries to make night look like day, I prefer the night to look like night!
There's no reason you couldn't have monochromatic LEDs in the same colour, part of me wishes we went for that instead of white ones which are usually pretty cold and harsh though they've got a lot better on that front with the really warm white ones being quite nice.
To build on my previous comment, the problem also appears to be a lensing issue: rather than providing diffused ambient light, new LED models direct it straight down so that a street scape will now be predominantly dark with weird cold-white “spotlights”. It’s not a pleasant experience when walking and constantly adapting to bright and then dark. At least something on the red end of the spectrum is easier for the adaptation.
OT: I'm curious about a long lasting bulb I have. Nothing like any of those, of course...it is just that it has way more hours on it than I'd expect based on average lifetimes of various types of bulb.
It's an outdoor security light over my garage. I don't know what technology it uses because the bulb is screwed in too tight for me to unscrew it with one of those things you put on the end of a pole to change out of reach bulbs, and I'm not agile enough on a ladder to be willing to get up on the garage roof to do it by hand.
The bulb is clear so it is not fluorescent. I think it is some kind of gas discharge lamp. When it turns on it takes a minute or so to reach full brightness.
It's been there since I bought this house 16 years ago. It's on a sensor that turns it on sometime during twilight and turns it off sometime during dawn. So figure maybe 10 hours a night average. That's over 58000 hours of on time.
But 58000 hours is over twice the average lifetime of all the likely technologies for this kind of security light except LED and it is definitely not LED. So I'm curious what technology my bulb actually uses.
Very possibly a mercury vapor[0], or low-pressure sodium lamp. Mercury vapor lamps have effectively been banned in the U. S., but that was around 2008 and your lamp would still be within that range. And, yeah, my experience says that mercury lights last effectively forever. I don't remember ever changing an existing bulb (not that my experience with mercury lights is all that extensive).
I have several carbon filament bulbs in a large ornamental chandelier. They glow gently and while I have replaced every other bulb in the property (some of them many times) in just the last decade… these vintage examples just keep on running. Output light per unit of electricity is very low, but that’s not really why I chose them.
The street near my parents home has replaced all the sodium vapour street lamps with LED equivalents. Now, there is less ambient light (the new lights tend to point straight down) and the colour isn’t necessarily a better option (that bluish not-quite-white from a cold temp light). I truly miss the orange distributed ambient glow of days (nights) past.
96 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] thread> While it might seem astonishing that so many longest-lasting light bulbs have been so infrequently turned off, this is the precise reason for their longevity. Most of the wear and tear that leads to burnouts in incandescent light bulbs is caused by turning them on and off, not by burning them. Each time the bulb is turned on and off, the filament is heated and cooled. This causes the material of the filament to expand and contract, in turn causing micro stress cracks to develop. The more the light is turned on and off, the larger these cracks grow, until eventually the filament breaks at some point, in non-spectacular fashion, thus causing the light to burn out.
I knew running filament bulbs on low voltage is the key to their longevity, but this is another important aspect
I personally have not be clear on which side of this argument holds more accuracy, but given today's anti-consumer leanings in manufactiring (particulatly in the US), I have my misgivings about it all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
I got my soft-starter from amazon for €10.
The Casetas allow me to soft-start each bulb, and to run lights at less than full brightness most of the time.
It would have been interesting to see the effect on incandescent bulb life, but I also took the opportunity to replace all light bulbs with dimmable LCD, so the question is moot.
For LEDs the issue is the driver boards, they get crammed into the tiny socket and live a very, very hot life. Doesn't matter that the LED has 100000 hour lifespan or whatever they write on the box when the driver dies after 5000 hours.
Also:
http://donklipstein.com/bulb1.html
"Due to the high temperature that a tungsten filament is operated at, some of the tungsten evaporates during use. Furthermore, since no light bulb is perfect, the filament does not evaporate evenly. Some spots will suffer greater evaporation and become thinner than the rest of the filament. These thin spots cause problems. Their electrical resistance is greater than that of average parts of the filament. Since the current is equal in all parts of the filament, more heat is generated where the filament is thinner. The thin parts also have less surface area to radiate heat away with. This "double whammy" causes the thin spots to have a higher temperature. Now that the thin spots are hotter, they evaporate more quickly. It becomes apparent that as soon as a part of the filament becomes significantly thinner than the rest of it, this situation compounds itself at increasing speed until a thin part of the filament either melts or becomes weak and breaks."
Halogen bulbs last longer because the sublimated tungsten is converted to volatile halides, which then preferentially decompose back to elemental tungsten at the hot spots, healing them.
The two mechanisms can easily interact.
For example, turning engines on and off heavily thermally cycles them. It can get worse when they are rapidly cooled or rapidly heated. Jet engines running at constant speed have high cycle fatigue to worry about, but steady temperatures don't pose a thermal stress issue.
But shutting the engine off in cold air and letting them go from very hot to very cold suddenly will cause the thicker parts to cool slower than the thin parts, stressing them near the change in thickness. That results in low cycle fatigue (where you can count the cycles to failure in the dozens/hundreds/thousands vs. millions/billions for high cycle fatigue).
They worked daily for 20 years before I swapped them out for LED lights. Never had one fail.
I attribute it to the fact that the dimmer switch they were on could only do soft turn ons and turn offs. Always took about 3 seconds to turn on and off.
https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
TL;DW: (if I rember correctly) Bulbs with shorter lifespans are generally more energy efficient. There was good reasons to not making bulb that last forever.
Cooler bulbs seem to generate a larger fraction of their energy in the infrared. Hotter bulbs generate not only more light, but a greater fraction of that light is visible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law#/media/File:Bla...
Shorter, not longer.
That is, by definition, more energy efficient.
In the technology connections video he does the math to show that long life bulbs are just an all around loss.
If one "forever bulb" can only output 10 lumens @10 watts but you need 100 lumens, and a "one year" bulb can create 100 lumens @60 watts, the disposable bulb wins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
"As regards life standards, before the Phoebus Agreement and to this day the general service filament lamp was and is designed to have, on average, a minimum life of 1,000 hours. It has often been alleged—though not in evidence to us—that the Phoebus organisation artificially made the life of a lamp short with the object of increasing the number of lamps sold. As we have explained in Chapter 9, there can be no absolutely right life for the many varying circumstances to be found among the consumers in any given country, so that any standard life must always represent a compromise between conflicting factors. B.S.I, has always adopted a single life standard for general service filament lamps, and the representatives of both B.S.I, and B.E.A., as well as most lamp manufacturers, have told us in evidence that they regard 1,000 hours as the best compromise possible at the present time, nor has any evidence been offered to us to the contrary. Accordingly we must dismiss as misconceived the allegation referred to above."
From [1], quoting Anton Phillips discussing members building higher voltage and longer lived bulbs,
“This, you will agree with me, is a very dangerous practice and is having a most detrimental influence on the total turnover of the Phoebus Parties…. After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by paying no attention to voltages and supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life.”
[1]https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
> [...] lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which raised their efficiency [...]
to
> [...] lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which falsely claimed to raise their efficiency [...]
emphasis mine. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&di...
Please watch the video from Technology Connections linked above to understand why a) Phoebus was indeed a cartel but b) which did not have as nefarious purposes as has been later claimed by e.g. populist TV documentaries such as "The Light Bulb Conspiracy".
Specifically, the life-time of a bulb has to do with filament thickness (the filament sublimates until it is too thin, melts from resistance and breaks). At the same time, thinner fillaments will get hotter, and therefore be brighter at the same power level. (specifically, more of the heat energy is radiated away in the visible spectrum). This means bulb life-time and efficiency an inherent trade-off.
We bought a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs around 2015 or 2016. They were expensive bulbs, but every single one is still running fine. The downside for Philips is that once I replaced all my bulbs, I stopped needing to buy lightbulbs.
The Hue bulbs are still available, but a lot of the newer LED bulbs I see claim much shorter lifetimes.
It's usually the electronics that dies (specifically: electrolytic capacitors, if included).
Life of the LEDs themselves depends a lot on operating temperature. Running hot (like in the cramped innards of a bulb), their output gradually decreases or they burn out @ some point. This is the fate of many cheap bulbs with poor thermal design.
Separate electronics (read: and their waste heat) from the LEDs, cool them well (and/or run at reduced power), and the LEDs can last practically infinite. Just like standby LEDs on appliances don't burn out. And -potentially- failed LEDs or driver electronics can be replaced independently.
But this does require a purpose designed fixture. Chip-on-Board (CoB) LED is the keyword here.
Meaning that the best 2000 hours incandescent lightbulb is either less luminous or less efficient (or both) than a well built 1000 lightbulb.
Wether the cartel was nefarious is slightly beyond the point and primarily of historical interest.
As a "proof" the centennial lightbulb is about as luminous as a candle, that is useless in almost every case.
It is impossible to build a new centennial lightbulb that anyone would want to buy outside of niche industrial or artistic applications.
"yes they screwed over the consumer with their anti-competitive cartel but hey they were saving the planet so it is all forgiven" was is his basic take
The ends justify the means.
it was not up to the Phoebus cartel to choose what was a "better bulb"
That's a misrepresentation of his take. He does not say that the cartel should be forgiven for their anti-competitive practices.
He just said that what is often referred to as planned obsolescence, may simply have been an early form of product standardization and wasn't necessarily intended to be anti-competitive.
His point was about the consumer’s end costs. It was cheaper to replace the lightbulbs than to be energy inefficient. He provided pretty solid evidence for that too.
It wasn’t about “saving the planet”.
Because of the increased efficiency, you saved much more on the energy bill, even offsetting the extra cost for more light bulbs which were cheap even back then.
Even if you don’t give a fuck about the planet, most people care about their wallet.
I reject that mentality, it is a path to lots of unintended consequences not to mention government over reach when the "experts" we are forced to follow also have the power of government authority
Seems to me you let your politics, prejudice and personal hangups totally cloud and warp what was actually said in the video.
The cartel dissolved many years ago, and there wasn't a flood of _better_ longer bulbs because there physically can't be.
Longer bulbs have existed for a long time, but they are much dimmer in addition to using more power. As such they are not desirable to people.
Even beyond the cartel, power plants wanted the higher efficiency lightbulbs to reduce strain.
Those points are far better.
In any case, the cartel's goal definitely wasn't saving the planet. Can you even imagine a evil shadow organization with that goal? Their goal was profit, and to get profit they wanted standards.
Standards make it so a consumer can get various different products that work predictably. The world would be a much worse place without agreed upon standards.
Yes "Standards" where they big player dictates to everyone else how they must do things.. Of course they hide it in a "standards organization" like how W3C is functionally a decision of Google at the point, but we do have "web standards" which are what ever google says
Or how Microsoft more or less forced out OpenXML with Open Office XML which is anything but open...
I could list 100's of examples
Also https://xkcd.com/927/
Yes you can make a bulb that lasts "forever", but it is very dim and consumes a lot of energy
I wonder if anyone has actually looked into what the real first instance of planned obsolescence was.
There is the “insurmountable physics” problem of needing to spend money on something perceived as having no ROI worth speaking about (if it’s even positive).
This is what most “planned obsolescence in the modern day” is about, not spending money you don’t absolutely have to. The precision of modern manufacturing and the progress of material science similarly allows very low tolerances, because you don’t need to account for anywhere near as much manufacturing variance. Therefore you can hew much closer to what you need to provide, and lower your costs as a result.
An other factor is the market cycling, why would you design a phone to last for 10 years when pretty much none of your target market will keep the phone 3, and it will net you no brand loyalty whatsoever?
Finally there’s time to market, pretty much all foldable phones seem to suffer from cracking or delamination, because it’s a super popular idea which commands a huge premium, so as soon as that was an option manufacturers started releasing device with limited real-world durability testing.
Some may argue that this would stifle innovation and we would likely not have foldable phones today if such requirements were in place. But in my opinion if such innovations can't be made durable, then the world would be better off without them.
Well, that would be one way to reduce e-waste: make phones so expensive that a lot fewer people buy them. Because whereas before that test matrix had five phones, but legislation increased that to seven, including two that can't run the latest OS so we have to back port the fixes to the previous OS. None of that is free, in fact, it's quite expensive.
Beside, how many people do you know that base their phone buying decisions on whether or not their current one is still supported? Of the folks I know, no one does that (granted, I live in Redmond, WA, which has some techy types living in the area). They just buy a new one when they are tired of their old one, or they have New Phone Fever.
I would love to see a short comic about a smith who creates swords out of gallium for cheap, only for them to literally melt in your hand shortly after walking away.
[0] - https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
I didn't care for the conclusions drawn in the story, but I liked the story itself and the multimedia aspects of it were engaging and fun.
thanks for the good read.
the text just started growing as soon as it loaded
is that a new anti-adblock thing
Unfortunately it looks like they took down the webcam, which is what I was looking for
On the home page:
> Click the "Home of the Worlds Longest Burning Light Bulb!" image above to see the Bulb-Cam in action
Which...wasn't the most intuitive, admittedly!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808959
There's no reason you couldn't have monochromatic LEDs in the same colour, part of me wishes we went for that instead of white ones which are usually pretty cold and harsh though they've got a lot better on that front with the really warm white ones being quite nice.
The animals and insects hate it too. It's brain damaged people who like sterilization white illuminating every space!
(No offense if you prefer cool white, but kind of)
It's an outdoor security light over my garage. I don't know what technology it uses because the bulb is screwed in too tight for me to unscrew it with one of those things you put on the end of a pole to change out of reach bulbs, and I'm not agile enough on a ladder to be willing to get up on the garage roof to do it by hand.
The bulb is clear so it is not fluorescent. I think it is some kind of gas discharge lamp. When it turns on it takes a minute or so to reach full brightness.
It's been there since I bought this house 16 years ago. It's on a sensor that turns it on sometime during twilight and turns it off sometime during dawn. So figure maybe 10 hours a night average. That's over 58000 hours of on time.
But 58000 hours is over twice the average lifetime of all the likely technologies for this kind of security light except LED and it is definitely not LED. So I'm curious what technology my bulb actually uses.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp
> The second-longest-lasting light bulb is ... and was installed ... on September 21, 1908
> Another working light bulb dating from 1908 ...
And in the next section:
> The third longest lasting light bulb began operation in 1929-30
Clearly the text from the third section onward all contain an off-by-one error, assuming there aren't any more yet-to-be-listed entries.