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GE switches off light bulb business after almost 130 years
- microcolonel 6y agoLink is broken, actual link is https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/ge-switches-off-light-bulb-business-after-almost-130-years/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/ge-sw...
- floatingatoll 6y agoI emailed the mods about this using the contact link in the footer.
- dang 6y agoSo you did. Thanks!
- dang 6y agoFixed. Thanks!
- downerending 6y agoWas expecting this to have something to do with the shift away from incandescent bulbs, but apparently not. (Is it just me, or do the newer, environmentally friendly bulbs seem not to last nearly as long?)
- ubercore 6y agoMy LED bulbs last forever. As in, I've never had one fail since I started using them.
- colejohnson66 6y agoDoesn’t that also depend on the quality of components and assembly? Cheap LED bulbs usually skimp on smoothing the output of the AC/DC converter, on LED quality, or heat sinking (I’ve seen teardowns of bulbs with no thermal compound, or even no heatsink at all).
- twic 6y agoI think so. I buy Opus LED bulbs for a few pounds in each. Over five years, i think about a quarter of them have failed. Not a great lifespan! But they're cheap enough that it doesn't really matter. I would be happy to spend much more on high-quality bulbs, but only if they were exactly what i wanted, and i have yet to find anything which ticks all the boxes. Specifically, i want >= 800 lumens, daylight / cool white, very good colour rendering, in an ES27 screw fitting, and dimmable. There have been a few candidates, but i haven't actually been able to buy them - they're out of stock, or not available in the UK, etc.
- snuxoll 6y ago> very good colour rendering The one area where everything but good old fashioned incandescent lights fail. Makes me wonder if anyone is working on applying quantum dots to LED lamps.
- ksec 6y agoThere are plenty of LED that is CRI 95+. Is that not enough?
- snuxoll 6y agoCRI is a pretty worthless measurement, it only reflects the rendering of color in a specific CCT. It’s fairly easy to make a high CRI warm bulb because it can suck at reproducing the lower end of the spectrum (blue and green), or a cool one where it sucks at the high end, but a neutral temperature isn’t feasible due to the spiky nature of light emitted by white LEDs.
- Exmoor 6y agoWhat kind of bulbs are you using? I've had a similar experience the OP with LED bulbs using the Feit ones sold at Costco. At some point I read about a design issue where manufacturers are using cheap components which die much faster than the actual LED's wear out, so even though the LED's are rated for 50,000 hours, the bulb itself will stop working after 10,000 hours (made up numbers). I would will to spend a bit more if I could be confident that I was going to get a bulb that actually lasted the lifespan of the LEDs.
- nfiedel 6y agoWe moved about three years ago and replaced 50+ bulbs with 2 1/2 brands of LEDs. Phillips - around 40 regular socket, BR30 recessed, and 4x hue bulbs. Not a single failure or flicker. Am particularly a fan of the warm glow for nicer dimming at night. Hyperikon. They were the only brand with the smaller PAR16 bulbs at the time, at least in warmer color-temp. They look absolutely fantastic as down-wash lights on walls. However, 2/8 are out or intermittent after just 3 years of low usage (they were in a low traffic area). Random brands from promos / utility give-aways. Used three of these in the garage, and 2/3 already burned out. TLDR: Quality matters, and high quality bulbs definitely last IME.
- Marsymars 6y agoAlso a fan of warm glow bulbs for any LEDs that get dimmed. FYI Ikea also has non-smart bulbs with warmer colour temperature as they dim.
- ubercore 6y agoPhilips Hue, and the original warm-light bulbs that Philips had a long time ago (the ones with the yellow plastic). Also a few cheap-o ones from the electric company (CREE I think?). None have failed
- mjcl 6y agoYeah, I have about 15 of the old yellow/silver Phillips LED lights and they've been fantastic. The only one that has died overheated because it was in a globe fixture without enough airflow to cool the bulb.
- Karunamon 6y agoI've had a grand total of two failures in 5 years. One was a cheap $5 on sale special from the hardware store, the other was a Phillips Hue (!)
- ascagnel_ 6y agoI find LED bulbs last forever, with the caveat that instead of a notable failure (eg a bulb burning out with a loud pop), the bulb will start to fall off from its maximum brightness once you start getting past the 5-year mark. I've also noticed that bulbs kept well below their max brightness (50-80%) can maintain that level longer.
- hinkley 6y agoWhat kind of fixtures are you using? LEDs - or compact fluorescent before that - in a torchière? Last forever. Recessed lighting, enclosed or narrow lamps? Maybe a couple times as long as an incandescent.
- jjeaff 6y agoI've had my flat panel LEDs go out after a few years on a pretty regular basis, but it was the power/dimmer unit. Which can be replaced. But I ended up buying higher quality Japanese capacitors and replacing the cheapo ones and haven't had a failure since.
- entangledqubit 6y agoI bought about a dozen GE LED bulbs a couple of years ago due to the quality of their light. Sadly, in that short amount of time about 75% of them have either outright failed or developed some other condition that made me question their safety.
- TwoBit 6y agoLED lights will fail if they overheat, if they aren't well vented or sinked. Not sure if that was your problem.
- ryanobjc 6y agoMy LED bulbs last until they break. And depending on who made them, they break a lot. All my philips hue bulbs still work. Even the ones that are like 8 years old. But every bulb from ikea has broken.
- econcon 6y agoQuality of grid has huge influence on life of LED. Basically, the drive circuit needs to be of pretty robust to guard against voltage fluctuations and surges which kill led. Not sure if there is something user can do to protect their house from grid quality issues.
- tialaramex 6y agoIt's often possible to choose DC for the final metres to the lamp itself, whereupon you've reduced the problem to ensuring you deliver a nice clean DC feed or nothing. As a side benefit to the extent you're successful you also eliminate flicker, which some people find extremely annoying in LEDs. You may find that your retail options for DC lamps are more limited depending on where you shop, and it will likely require a more extensive change than just unscrewing a "bulb" and putting a new one in but it's an option. Certainly worth considering if you're remodelling for example.
- blackguardx 6y agoLED flicker usually has nothing to do with AC power. They LED is being purposely driven pulsed to maximize power efficiency. Incidentally, incandescent bulbs flicker at 120 Hz (in the US) but it is imperceptible because the light output doesn’t go to zero and it is beyond the flicker fusion threshold (~60 Hz)
- mrob 6y agoMany cheap LEDs flicker at at double line frequency (100Hz or 120Hz depending on the country), because they're driven by rectified AC power with inadequate filtering. Pulsing LEDs only increases efficiency at low brightness, e.g. 7-segment displays, not room lighting. See: http://donklipstein.com/ledp.html http://donklipstein.com/ledp.html The flicker fusion threshold for many people is above 60Hz. Remember 60Hz CRTs? 85Hz is a more reliable threshold. And in any case, flicker fusion threshold is only relevant when your eyes are stationary. On eye movement you get phantom array effect. People vary greatly in how sensitive they are to this, and depending on how strong your saccadic masking is, it can be annoying at frequencies well into the kilohertz.
- genocidicbunny 6y agoAre you putting your LED bulbs in enclosed spaces? The cheaper ones tend to be very prone to overheat if they're not adequately ventilated, which really reduces their life (and can change their color a bit too.) Make sure that if you're putting LED bulbs in enclosed spaces, that they're designed to handle that.
- agumonkey 6y agoI knew about LED heat dissipation issues but I'd be surprised if at equivalent light output the incandescent would heat less..
- downerending 6y agoAs far as that goes, I suspect most incandescent bulbs can take a lot of heat. (The one in your oven, for example, which I suspect is a pretty vanilla bulb.)
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThey put out much less heat, but they're also much more sensitive to heat. (Incandescent bulbs, meanwhile, are heat, and mostly don't mind.)
- dv_dt 6y agoThe leds are generally ok as components, but badly designed power electronics are the failing portion. However, strand LEDs designed for bulbs w/ no power electronics are on a completely different reliability basis.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoSometimes it's not even that; I've had bulbs where the glue holding the frosted glass part came off the base, because of the heat.
- pwg 6y agoCombine this fact with the fact that most enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs are insulated (at least on the mounting side) to keep the heat from the bulb inside the fixture (fire prevention reasons) and even the low heat level output by an LED bulb can eventually warm the interior above the temperature that the driver electronics can tolerate.
- pkaye 6y agoProbably because even LEDs have become a low margin business. I've a bunch of the Chinese brand LED bulbs from Amazon and they last for years and there is so much variety. In terms of LED bulb longevity, I think a big part is heat dissipation so the heatsink size and fixture design are critical.
- WalterBright 6y agoLED bulbs don't last if they are in an enclosed fixture, because the heat buildup fries them. Most incandescent fixtures are enclosed.
- twblalock 6y agoThere are some that are rated for enclosed fixtures. I've been using a few for several years now, 100W incandescent equivalent, and I haven't had a problem.
- Scoundreller 6y agoName and unshame!
- twblalock 6y agoYou need to go to one of the online bulb retailers, like bulbs.com or 1000bulbs.com. They have the commercial/wholesale products that you can't find at most stores, e.g. dozens of LED bulb models from Philips that are not listed on their consumer website. I recently bought some 100w-equivalent bulbs rated for enclosures (TCP brand, and also Philips) and some Philips LED replacements for fluorescent tubes that are actually as bright as the fluorescents -- 2600 lumens each.
- WalterBright 6y agoThe fluorescents are 3360 lumens. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Daylight-Ballast-Equivalent-Dual-End/dp/B07MQZ8KY9/ https://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Daylight-Ballast-Equivale...
- karatestomp 6y agoIt's not just you, though my LEDs do on average last longer than incandescents, it's just that quite a damn few die in under 6 months. Not like CFLs, which gave off terrible light and failed very fast— I was very unhappy when it seemed like those would be what replaced incandescents. Now I just need LEDs to drop to 1/3 their current price for the nicer-quality (might outlast an incandescent) bulbs and I won't feel like I'm getting ripped off in this whole deal. If I buy the ones that are a mere 60% the price of nice bulbs then they go back to the CFL behavior of dying constantly and quickly. (I've used LED bulbs across three houses with build ages between 20 and 0 years at move-in, so I don't think it's something wrong with my house, and incandescents have done about as well as they ever do in all three)
- tzs 6y agoAround the end of 2016, I replaced almost every incandescent in my house with Great Value LEDs from Walmart, when they had some sort of arrangement for an automatic at-the-register rebate from my power company that made them $0.17 each. The only one that has failed since then was one that I dropped from about 8 feet up onto the concrete floor of my garage. I gave to a curious coworker who took it apart. There was some component (an inductor I think, but don't remember for sure) that was attached to the PCB only by a couple thin wires, and one of those wires had broke. I measured the output of all of them with a lux meter. A few months ago, I measured again and they are all about the same as they were when new. In particular, I didn't see any definite difference between ones that I've used for hours every day for 3.5 years, and ones that have seen maybe 5 minutes use in that same time.
- wenc 6y agoI'm surprised GE stuck around in a commodity business for so long. Lighting is something we'll always need but the prices are so low these days that I wonder what their margins are. Also, not sure what's next after LEDs.
- knodi123 6y agoCloud-based lighting? All you need is a hole in your roof. I can't figure out a pricing structure, though.
- jotm 6y agoFree for 8 hours/day, then you have to pay.
- phkahler 6y agoFiber to the home.
- knodi123 6y agopfft. whoever heard of sending light over a fiber?
- CyberDildonics 6y agoTime to reify your lightbulbs with serverless cloud smart lights using AI and the Deepest Machine Learning Neural Networks so you can finally stop buying $1 lights at the dollar store. We'll call them green lights (but not because they are good for the environment).
- Kihashi 6y agoMost of Consumer Lighting had already been sold off. They were working on services like lightgrid management for cities. But even 30 years ago, Lighting was one of the smallest parts of GE.
- wenc 6y ago
- pstrateman 6y agoThat's sad the GE bulbs were high quality.
- kjaftaedi 6y agoI think you might have missed their ridiculous 'smart' bulbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo
- gundmc 6y agoI have to do this every month or two to reset my bricked lights. This video made me involuntarily twitch. Awful, awful experience.
- terracatta 6y agoGE is literally selling the metaphor for innovation and ideas for $250 million. It's also the last Edison original business. Curious what others think, but I think they undervalue the brand value they are eroding by divesting from all of these low growth business that were the building blocks of their once great brand?
- mlinhares 6y agoI don't think there's many people out there other than Boomers that look at GE as an important brand name. I definitely don't have anything from them nor do I plan to buy anything any time soon.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jjeaff 6y agoI would think it might carry some weight in the trades though. If I have some electrical component and it says GE on it, I am going to trust it a lot more than a "happy smile electronics" part. Whether that trust is misplaced or not is a different conversation, though.
- kube-system 6y agoFWIW, Forbes ranks them #16 https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank
- nucleardog 6y agoI think they're probably fine without your dollars or mindshare. I suspect part of the reason they're getting out of a lot of this commodity (or borderline commodity) businesses is because they make much more money on building power plants and wind turbines, jet engines, medical equipment (MRI/CT/PET/etc machines and more), etc. Some quick digging, and it looks like their lighting and industrial controls division made all of $300m in profit. Their aviation products alone profited over $28b. If I were them, I wouldn't care either.
- 6y ago
- unnouinceput 6y ago250M USD only for an entire division? That's pocket change. I wonder why such a low price.
- Kihashi 6y agoMost of GE's consumer lighting business had already been sold off. Also, Lighting was never a super large part of GE by revenue or profit.
- someonehere 6y agoDoes this mean they’re ending the C by GE bulb line? They’re the IoT connected bulbs.
- ihuman 6y agoDoes anyone here use their zigbee or z-wave switches? I was considering getting them, but if they're leaving the lighting business then I might not.
- dnr 6y agoIf you look at reviews of Z-Wave dimmers and switches, as I did recently, GE seems to be not very well regarded, and on the expensive side. Some of the newer brands like Zooz and Inovelli have a lot more features and are cheaper too. I narrowed it down to those two and then recently replaced a bunch of switches with Zooz products. Happy so far. (Can't speak for zigbee.)
- vulcan01 6y agoMy parents bought them for our whole house. 4 years and they still work well :)
- jmb12686 6y agoI have over a dozen in wall GE z-wave switches and dimmers in my home. They have been working great for years.
- tonyb 6y agoThe GE switches are made by Jasco. I have a few different brands of zwave switches and the GE/jesco ones are my favorite. The newest version is much more compact and they auto sense line and load so they are much easier to fit in the existing boxes.
- emmelaich 6y agoVisiting the USA, I was surprised at how much advertising there was for GEICO. Multiple ads per hour on various channels. GE has been a finance and insurance company for some time.
- brianwawok 6y agoDidn’t geico get sold to buffet?
- akeck 6y agoYes.
- dennyabraham 6y agoThough they have similar names, GEICO and GE are unrelated businesses. The former is an acronymn for Government Employees Insurance Company, the latter stands for General Electric
- nogabebop23 6y agoIf you remember 30 Rock, It's just "G" now - they sold the "E" to "Samesung"
- emmelaich 6y agooh, I'm corrected, thanks.
- kstrauser 6y agoTo the best of my knowledge, GE and the Government Employees Insurance Company are unrelated.
- heartbreak 6y agoGE does have a major finance arm, but as other commenters have said, it isn’t GEICO. It’s called GE Capital. It’s also much smaller than it used to be, because they spun off the consumer credit line of the business as Synchrony Bank several years ago.
- coliveira 6y agoGE is practically a bankrupt company. They are planning to survive by selling assets and using the practically guaranteed bonds provided by the Fed. Nobody knows how long this will work out for them.
- Gibbon1 6y agoHow long did it take Motorola to sell off the farm?
- nogabebop23 6y agoThey have almost 300 billion in assets, including 35+ billion in cash. They've cut debt in 1/2 in the past 5 years. Not exactly "practically bankrupt" but hey, random internet comment...
- coliveira 6y agoThat's not the issue. GE has a lot of liabilities in the future, not only loans, but also including billions they will need to cover for their failed insurance business. They under insured long term care and now these costs are skyrocketing. In the past they promised to sell business units to pay these future liabilities, however it seems that their businesses are shrinking, not increasing. If they cannot turn around and improve their business, they won't have enough to sell to cover the growing liabilities. Insurance liabilities were valued at $38Bi in 2018, and these costs are only going up: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-insurance/exclusive-ge-seeking-to-shed-troubled-insurance-business-sources-idUSKCN1IN2NA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-insurance/exclusive-ge...
- MintelIE 6y agoI use incandescents at my home because the alternatives are very RF-noisy. GE's incandescents are (were?) among the worst for life. Thankfully there are American companies making quality incandescents right here at home now.
- jjeaff 6y agoInteresting. Are you trying to reduce rf noise because it interferes with something? How do you measure the RF noise? I have several high quality Bluetooth devices and keep getting occasionally spotty service. I'm thinking it is rf interference.
- MintelIE 6y agoI listen to short wave radio, and my radio itself is an excellent RFI detector. I just wandered around the house with it holding it up to things until I identified the problem. The only things really emitting lots of RF were LED and CFI bulbs, and a couple cheap power supplies for Netgear info-appliances.
- ryanobjc 6y agoThere are LED bulb requirements in California, and people have mocked them, but as I understand it they are supposed to help address this issue, as well as color quality and audible noise issues. In other words, California says no to cheap shitty bulbs.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI’ve heard garage door openers can be very sensitive. Incandescents make the plastic go yellow, so people have searched long and hard for a light that doesn’t heat up but still lets you open and close your door.
- Animats 6y agoLED bulbs with FCC part 15 certification should be RF-quiet.[1] If we're going to have anti-China tariffs, a useful thing to do would be to require FCC and UL approval. Power supplies would cost a little more but would not catch fire, and few things would blither all over the RF spectrum. [1]https://apps.fcc.gov/kdb/GetAttachment.html?id=K0pZdRE7biF3aqgO4XZ8cw%3D%3D&desc=640677%20D01%20RF%20LED%20LIGHTING%20v01&tracking_number=20518 https://apps.fcc.gov/kdb/GetAttachment.html?id=K0pZdRE7biF3a...
- chiefalchemist 6y agoI recently finished reading "Imagine It Forward" by Beth Comstock. It was story-based lessons from her time at GE and NBC. She discusses the perils of this division. Evidently, per the book, this was been a long time coming. As a side note, the book is good. I don't want to oversell it but it reminded me of "Creativity, Inc." And while the context is corporate/enterprise, there were plenty of valuable takeaways for any company where people matter and change is a given.
- viknod 6y agoGE lighting(for consumers) died a slow death starting with the elimination incandescent bulbs. The twisty florescent were made in China on non-exclusive contract, Walmart and whoever else wanted, bought the exact same bulb. What it did achieve was elimination of a US workforce that was a growing financial burden with retirement and medical benefits. Make no mistake, they architected legislation to eliminate the incandescent. The price of the 60w equivalent CF was four times it's incandescent counterpart, and bulbs that still failed on a regular basis due to power supply design. This was the transformation to a marketing/design company, similar to most companies that put their mark on products today. With no differentiation, or passionate brand loyalty(for light bulbs!?), it's a race to the bottom..
- xkapastel 6y agoI'm a little confused, because I'm typing this underneath a GE incandescent bulb, which is also the only type of bulb I use. Has this "elimination" not happened yet?
- SisypheanLife 6y agoSee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_lighting_energy_policy#Energy_Independence_and_Security_Act_of_2007 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_lighting_energ... The phaseout was defunded.
- awakeasleep 6y agoDon't forget the CF bulbs are a low tier of hazardous waste because of the mercury within.
- kylek 6y agoThat should have been impossible. It was protected. I thought they made it protected. I'm looking ... Can they save it? Keep all the pieces together, maybe they can save it. There's nothing to save. Look for yourself. It's just ... gone. There's nothing left.
- analognoise 6y agohttps://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/livermore-california https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/livermore-californ... ...what the fuck is this?
- ckozlowski 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776 Just found this now myself. Amazing what you come across in an HN discussion. Fascinating!
- iancmceachern 6y agoSo GE doesn't make light bulbs, HP doesn't make test equipment, IBM doesn't make computers, and AT&T doesn't have any phone lines. What a strange new world we find ourselves inhabiting.
- Aeolun 6y agoBut look at all that shareholder value!
- dbuder 6y agoCorporate finance spends too much time sitting around thinking about how they can cash in on goodwill. So many brands you could rely on are meaningless stickers now. This move by GE isn't really a big deal on it's own (at this stage) but just a continuation of an economy wide process.
- madengr 6y agoBack in high school, in 1989, we got a tour of a GE light bulb factory (closed now since 2010 when they outsourced to China). It was interesting as the machinery looked to be early 20th century, but retrofitted as needed with modern PLC. They had 18 parallel lines cranking out bulbs. The automated warehouse was neat. Robotic pallet fetchers controlled by a VAX.
- Simulacra 6y agoAfter crushing the Incandescent bulb to prop up Theke nascent fluorescent/LED bulb market, Like a Walmart in a small town, they leave and let the rest of us pickup the pieces.