6 ms·

It's ironic that LEDs themselves last for 30,000 hours but bulbs created with LEDs can wear out much quicker than incandescents because of crappy power supply d

It's ironic that LEDs themselves last for 30,000 hours but bulbs created with LEDs can wear out much quicker than incandescents because of crappy power supply design. I can't help but think manufacturers must have initially worried that LEDs would kill their continuing revenue streams. When they finally figured out they could design the power supplies to fail quickly, they must have been dancing in the streets.

jml7c5 7y ago
I would consider market forces a more reasonable explanation: most people are going to pick the cheapest option. The success of cheap, flickering bulbs attests to that, I think. It doesn't help that the old Edison screw is terrible for cooling.
- stubish 7y ago
  There is no sane option but to pick the cheapest option. You go to the shop here and see 3 or 4 brands, and looking at the details they all seem identical. You choose your voltage, colour warmth, and if you want to pay a premium for the only brand name you recognize.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    You can do 3-5 minutes of research before picking a brand.
    - Inityx 7y ago
      People don't.
      - nine_k 7y ago
        That's their problem, not necessarily yours.
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        Incorrect: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Okay. But it's still a perfectly good counter to "no sane option".
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        Really, it's not. Unless there's some regulatorially-mandated set of minimum standards, given the thin information channel of price ("what will I have to pay out of pocket right now for Product X, with no other indicator of quality, longevity, or potential risks"), the market will pursue low costs with an iron determination, over all other factors. Consider that a corrolary of Gresham's Law, which in its essence says that given a nominal currency value, currency of lower determinable quality (lower specie metal content) will tend to drive higher-quality currency from the market. "But wait, Dred," you say, "You just said that there was no other indicator of value. Why is low specie currency driving out high specie?" Because that's not the relevant value, and it actually is apparent (or at least sufficiently so to a certain number of traders in coin). It's the nominal value that's the determinant for circulation. In the case of coin, it's face value which determines market exchange. Put another way: in a world of copper-painted zinc lozenges circulating as pennies, a diamond-encrusted gold penny will still only net you $0.01 in exchange value as currency. You're better off holding on to it or trading it for its specie / gem value. With bulbs or electronics, the logic shifts around a bit, but the result is similar. Price becomes exchange value, product quality factors (colour registration, colour range, flicker rate, dimmer compatibility and performance, heat dissipation, any electronics buzz or hum, diffusion pattern, and most of all, that one factor you cannot determine in 3-5 minutes at a store: product life (or more properly: product-quality-life, the period of time it functions adequately before driving you bananas, even if it doesn't fully fail). You're standing in a store aisle, or staring at an utterly uninformative webpage of quite probably counterfeit and fake-reviewed Amazon LED bulbs as well as whatever LED-bulb-adjacent search results Amazon's Alexa Search Engine has decided it needs to distract you with today, and you see two things: - LED bulb. - Price. And "you" is the typical shopper. Which is to say, one who's not read this particular screed. What are you going to do? You're going to pick the lowest-cost bulb you see and offer a prayer to His Noodliness. This is, incidentally, a chief reason why pure market solutions tend toward abysmal product offerings in the absence of some external regulatory, ratings, or similar systems. There's an alternative, and some retailers follow this. Marks & Spencer in the UK long made a tradition of carrying only one exemplar of a brand, generally represented as "the best there is". That is, M&S undertake the research and quality determination costs for its customers. Your research problem is reduced to "shop M&S". In the US there are retailers who follow a similar strategy, though emphasizing the price-quality relationship. Costco is among these, where typically only a small range of products within a category is offered (Trader Joe's operates similarly, though only in food). Friends purchased a convection toaster-oven from Costco recently -- not the cheapest model out there, but one which performs quite admirably, will handle a frozen pizza and most meals for 2-3 quite well, and (whilst slightly tricked out on controls) is fairly simple and straightforward to operate. On balance, "shop Costco" has been justified in this case. The pure-pricing model typically works best (if at all) for nondifferentiable commodities of minimum complexity. Foodstuffs, bulk construction materials such as sand and gravel, coal, oil, etc. And yet even within each of these in developed economies you'll find grading and quality control, some imposed by government mandates, some self-adopted by industry. And outside of bulk commodities -- in services, in wages, in rents, in interest and risk markets, in public goods -- pure market-based pricing absent various corrections, breaks down entirely or leads inevitably to pathological conditions. See "Iron Law of Wages" and "Law of Rent" -- the twin prods of numerous revolutions. The problem with your "sane option" is that at mass market scale, say, the 100 million or so households in the US, or the 300 millions or so in China, it simply does not scale. Information and expertise implies some level of clustering and trust relations. Commodity pricing doesn't provide for this.
    - foxyv 7y ago
      But little do you know, the brand was bought out by a different company so they could sell cheap junk using the reputation of the brand you chose and the review is now out of date.
  - IgorPartola 7y ago
    Record those bulbs with slow motion mode on your phone. Some of them flicker a lot more than others.
    - vonseel 7y ago
      Good idea. I have never noticed flicker on any of my lightbulbs. I wonder if some of us are unable to see (most) flicker, even though we may otherwise have great uncorrected vision?
  - nine_k 7y ago
    You can pick the cheapest within a range, but not the cheapest overall. E.g. I get relatively good bulbs by requiring CRI > 90. Or just requiring no flicker, as a feature. When the producer has more than one parameter to optimize, they seem to come up with more well-rounded designs. To say nothing of the useful features I mentioned. Yes, I likely pay 2-4 times more for these bulbs. But they perform, and they stay for years of intense use. The cheapest overall bulbs are designed for other purposes.
- glenngillen 7y ago
  And yet, that industry segment has prior form here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
- IanSanders 7y ago
  While cheapest options are likely to be among least reliable, I doubt more expensive options are always going to be more reliable.
- foxyv 7y ago
  Except when you go to buy the bulb that is more expensive, hoping it works better, it just ends up dying FASTER. There seems to be no correlation between price and quality anymore.
homero 7y ago
They make good ones but i pay $15 for a Philips with a metal heatsink and proper power supply
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Ironically, two of the most recent failures I've had (and I've only had a half dozen over the last few years) were heavy Philips bulbs that felt like they were solid metal.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    The only LED failure I've had so far was a first gen Hue. Even then it's "just" a noisy power supply. All of my LEDs are either Hue (1st gen color changing or newer white-only ones), Ikea (dumb and smart), or some T8 drop in replacements that Home Depot had. The Ikea ones are, IMO, the best value out there. They turn on quickly, are cheap, and seem to be fairly long lived.
- jvzr 7y ago
  Just a heads up, the makers of Hue lights are now Signify. They license the name Philips from the health company Philips. Given my recent customer experience, I now believe Signify operates very differently from Philips Ligthing. Philips is selling its small domestic appliances business and hoping to strike a similar deal regarding the licensed use of the name Philips. They are centering solely around the Health business now.
  - poloniculmov 7y ago
    Signify is the new name of Philips Lighting, it was renamed, not actually a different company.
    - jvzr 7y ago
      Yes, though it has absolutely no link with Philips apart from the name licensing, contrary to before the renaming. This isn't crystal clear to consumers, I think. And it only submerges when there are talks of selling the rest of the consumer business. Or when contacting the Signify support, which is insanely worse than usual Philips support. (And that is to say nothing of the online buying / shipping experience which is awful.)
derekp7 7y ago
The problem is that the heat from the power supply needs some place to go. So installing the bulb upside down traps heat, and putting them in an enclosure also traps heat. Probably 90% of installations is one of these two. I've put in some "filament" style LEDs, these look like they will last longer as there doesn't appear to be a power supply taking up half the bulb (although there are electronics down in the screw part).
- Retric 7y ago
  At a given efficiency, LED heat and light output are directly related. Human vision is not linear at normal brightness levels. So, less bright bulbs last longer, use less energy, while putting significant amounts of light. Also, I see many people getting extremely bright bulbs and putting a large fully opaque light shade over them. That’s rather counter productive.
yourapostasy 7y ago
I found a supplier for access lights of commercial/high-end buildings [1] that mentioned 200,000+ hour L70 ratings. There apparently are 200,000 hour L70 fixtures [2], but I haven't found any 250K, 300K, 400K, or 500K hour units. If we ignored form for pure functionality to get the full-rated life of the bulbs, I wonder what the design/specs would look like. The longest DC power supply I could quickly find a mention of is an Antec line, so I wonder what a really long-lived (50-100 year) DC power supply design would look like. [1] https://www.accessfixtures.com/led-lifetime-l70/ https://www.accessfixtures.com/led-lifetime-l70/ [2] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=200000+hour+led+l70&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=200000+...

jml7c5 7y ago

I would consider market forces a more reasonable explanation: most people are going to pick the cheapest option. The success of cheap, flickering bulbs attests to that, I think. It doesn't help that the old Edison screw is terrible for cooling.

stubish 7y ago
There is no sane option but to pick the cheapest option. You go to the shop here and see 3 or 4 brands, and looking at the details they all seem identical. You choose your voltage, colour warmth, and if you want to pay a premium for the only brand name you recognize.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  You can do 3-5 minutes of research before picking a brand.
  - Inityx 7y ago
    People don't.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      That's their problem, not necessarily yours.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Incorrect: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Okay. But it's still a perfectly good counter to "no sane option".
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Really, it's not. Unless there's some regulatorially-mandated set of minimum standards, given the thin information channel of price ("what will I have to pay out of pocket right now for Product X, with no other indicator of quality, longevity, or potential risks"), the market will pursue low costs with an iron determination, over all other factors. Consider that a corrolary of Gresham's Law, which in its essence says that given a nominal currency value, currency of lower determinable quality (lower specie metal content) will tend to drive higher-quality currency from the market. "But wait, Dred," you say, "You just said that there was no other indicator of value. Why is low specie currency driving out high specie?" Because that's not the relevant value, and it actually is apparent (or at least sufficiently so to a certain number of traders in coin). It's the nominal value that's the determinant for circulation. In the case of coin, it's face value which determines market exchange. Put another way: in a world of copper-painted zinc lozenges circulating as pennies, a diamond-encrusted gold penny will still only net you $0.01 in exchange value as currency. You're better off holding on to it or trading it for its specie / gem value. With bulbs or electronics, the logic shifts around a bit, but the result is similar. Price becomes exchange value, product quality factors (colour registration, colour range, flicker rate, dimmer compatibility and performance, heat dissipation, any electronics buzz or hum, diffusion pattern, and most of all, that one factor you cannot determine in 3-5 minutes at a store: product life (or more properly: product-quality-life, the period of time it functions adequately before driving you bananas, even if it doesn't fully fail). You're standing in a store aisle, or staring at an utterly uninformative webpage of quite probably counterfeit and fake-reviewed Amazon LED bulbs as well as whatever LED-bulb-adjacent search results Amazon's Alexa Search Engine has decided it needs to distract you with today, and you see two things: - LED bulb. - Price. And "you" is the typical shopper. Which is to say, one who's not read this particular screed. What are you going to do? You're going to pick the lowest-cost bulb you see and offer a prayer to His Noodliness. This is, incidentally, a chief reason why pure market solutions tend toward abysmal product offerings in the absence of some external regulatory, ratings, or similar systems. There's an alternative, and some retailers follow this. Marks & Spencer in the UK long made a tradition of carrying only one exemplar of a brand, generally represented as "the best there is". That is, M&S undertake the research and quality determination costs for its customers. Your research problem is reduced to "shop M&S". In the US there are retailers who follow a similar strategy, though emphasizing the price-quality relationship. Costco is among these, where typically only a small range of products within a category is offered (Trader Joe's operates similarly, though only in food). Friends purchased a convection toaster-oven from Costco recently -- not the cheapest model out there, but one which performs quite admirably, will handle a frozen pizza and most meals for 2-3 quite well, and (whilst slightly tricked out on controls) is fairly simple and straightforward to operate. On balance, "shop Costco" has been justified in this case. The pure-pricing model typically works best (if at all) for nondifferentiable commodities of minimum complexity. Foodstuffs, bulk construction materials such as sand and gravel, coal, oil, etc. And yet even within each of these in developed economies you'll find grading and quality control, some imposed by government mandates, some self-adopted by industry. And outside of bulk commodities -- in services, in wages, in rents, in interest and risk markets, in public goods -- pure market-based pricing absent various corrections, breaks down entirely or leads inevitably to pathological conditions. See "Iron Law of Wages" and "Law of Rent" -- the twin prods of numerous revolutions. The problem with your "sane option" is that at mass market scale, say, the 100 million or so households in the US, or the 300 millions or so in China, it simply does not scale. Information and expertise implies some level of clustering and trust relations. Commodity pricing doesn't provide for this.
  - foxyv 7y ago
    But little do you know, the brand was bought out by a different company so they could sell cheap junk using the reputation of the brand you chose and the review is now out of date.
- IgorPartola 7y ago
  Record those bulbs with slow motion mode on your phone. Some of them flicker a lot more than others.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Good idea. I have never noticed flicker on any of my lightbulbs. I wonder if some of us are unable to see (most) flicker, even though we may otherwise have great uncorrected vision?
- nine_k 7y ago
  You can pick the cheapest within a range, but not the cheapest overall. E.g. I get relatively good bulbs by requiring CRI > 90. Or just requiring no flicker, as a feature. When the producer has more than one parameter to optimize, they seem to come up with more well-rounded designs. To say nothing of the useful features I mentioned. Yes, I likely pay 2-4 times more for these bulbs. But they perform, and they stay for years of intense use. The cheapest overall bulbs are designed for other purposes.
glenngillen 7y ago
And yet, that industry segment has prior form here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
IanSanders 7y ago
While cheapest options are likely to be among least reliable, I doubt more expensive options are always going to be more reliable.
foxyv 7y ago
Except when you go to buy the bulb that is more expensive, hoping it works better, it just ends up dying FASTER. There seems to be no correlation between price and quality anymore.

homero 7y ago

They make good ones but i pay $15 for a Philips with a metal heatsink and proper power supply

rootusrootus 7y ago
Ironically, two of the most recent failures I've had (and I've only had a half dozen over the last few years) were heavy Philips bulbs that felt like they were solid metal.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  The only LED failure I've had so far was a first gen Hue. Even then it's "just" a noisy power supply. All of my LEDs are either Hue (1st gen color changing or newer white-only ones), Ikea (dumb and smart), or some T8 drop in replacements that Home Depot had. The Ikea ones are, IMO, the best value out there. They turn on quickly, are cheap, and seem to be fairly long lived.
jvzr 7y ago
Just a heads up, the makers of Hue lights are now Signify. They license the name Philips from the health company Philips. Given my recent customer experience, I now believe Signify operates very differently from Philips Ligthing. Philips is selling its small domestic appliances business and hoping to strike a similar deal regarding the licensed use of the name Philips. They are centering solely around the Health business now.
- poloniculmov 7y ago
  Signify is the new name of Philips Lighting, it was renamed, not actually a different company.
  - jvzr 7y ago
    Yes, though it has absolutely no link with Philips apart from the name licensing, contrary to before the renaming. This isn't crystal clear to consumers, I think. And it only submerges when there are talks of selling the rest of the consumer business. Or when contacting the Signify support, which is insanely worse than usual Philips support. (And that is to say nothing of the online buying / shipping experience which is awful.)

derekp7 7y ago

The problem is that the heat from the power supply needs some place to go. So installing the bulb upside down traps heat, and putting them in an enclosure also traps heat. Probably 90% of installations is one of these two. I've put in some "filament" style LEDs, these look like they will last longer as there doesn't appear to be a power supply taking up half the bulb (although there are electronics down in the screw part).

Retric 7y ago
At a given efficiency, LED heat and light output are directly related. Human vision is not linear at normal brightness levels. So, less bright bulbs last longer, use less energy, while putting significant amounts of light. Also, I see many people getting extremely bright bulbs and putting a large fully opaque light shade over them. That’s rather counter productive.

yourapostasy 7y ago

I found a supplier for access lights of commercial/high-end buildings [1] that mentioned 200,000+ hour L70 ratings. There apparently are 200,000 hour L70 fixtures [2], but I haven't found any 250K, 300K, 400K, or 500K hour units. If we ignored form for pure functionality to get the full-rated life of the bulbs, I wonder what the design/specs would look like. The longest DC power supply I could quickly find a mention of is an Antec line, so I wonder what a really long-lived (50-100 year) DC power supply design would look like. [1] https://www.accessfixtures.com/led-lifetime-l70/ https://www.accessfixtures.com/led-lifetime-l70/ [2] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=200000+hour+led+l70&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=200000+...