5 ms·

Funny how that is always used as a counter-argument when nobody gave a shit about light-bulb efficiency until three decades ago. Like, I'm sure it's technically

Funny how that is always used as a counter-argument when nobody gave a shit about light-bulb efficiency until three decades ago. Like, I'm sure it's technically true. I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them. There is a difference between a conspiracy theory and a well-documented conspiracy. The things the Phoebus Cartel did falls squarely into the latter, including the planned obsolescence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

iso1210 5y ago
You'd care if you were plugging up 1kW lightbulbs instead of 100W bulbs.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Those are called space heaters :) In fact a company in Germany tried to circumvent the EU ban on lightbulbs by calling then heatballs. Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.
  - samatman 5y ago
    There also are (or were) a lot of consumer products which used ordinary incandescents for heat. The familiar example to Americans of a certain age is the EZ-Bake Oven, but there was a long tail of others, because if you wanted an off-the-shelf source for ~40-150W of heat, and the light is either a plus or neutral, it was tough to beat an Edison bulb and socket.
    - BeefWellington 5y ago
      Another example of this: Bird sanctuaries are harmed by the ban in some ways (though in the meantime they've no doubt found alternatives) because incandescent bulbs make great heaters.[1] [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-leaves-bird-care-centre-with-dim-hope-1.2492890 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-...
  - mlyle 5y ago
    > Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient. Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
    - pooper 5y ago
      > Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. My personal concept of resistive heat is effective comes from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections. The argument is that almost all of the energy taken in by an electric resistive heater is given out as heat so it is pretty close to 100% efficiency. I understand that a heat pump is practically a better alternative for almost all use cases though. Similarly, speaking of electric light bulbs, my understanding is there is no reason why an LED light bulb shouldn't last over ten years of continuous use. At least that is my impression from this reddit comment (please correct me if I am wrong) https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why_are_my_led_light_bulbs_burning_out_so_fast/gmi6c1v/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why... > There are many poorly manufactured LED lights out there. The LED itself is typically fine, but the driver electronics in the base tend to fail on poor quality products. > I was having lots of failures for a while, but much less lately as I've tried to look for more brand name products.
      - blihp 5y ago
        And yet I've had two (name brand) LED bulbs die in the past year with <3 years of operational life. The drivers in most of these bulbs are garbage.
        terr-dav 5y ago
        It's a shame that they can advertise the life of the diode itself with no regard for the rest of the electronics.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        The second problem with LEDs is heat. LEDs produce a lot less heat than incandescents, but they also deal much worse with getting hot. Thus you need large (for surface area) and/or expensive (due to more expensive materials with high conductivity) heat sinks. Cheaper bulbs will tend to cheap out on this aspect, but there are also fundamental constraints especially in bulbs designed to fit traditional fittings.
  - skocznymroczny 5y ago
    It's still a thing in Poland. They are either sold as heatballs or workshop light (doesn't have strobe effect which could be potentially dangerous around saws). That was mostly when fluorescent lightbulbs were the only alternative. These days people go for LED lightbulbs instead.
  - shagie 5y ago
    One trick of cold rooms and frozen pipes - put a light bulb in there. In the (old) house that I'm in, there's a room that is for all practical purposes, under the garage. It is very poorly insulated and for some reason, some water pipes ran through it. On a cold winter, the pipes can freeze. So, there's a lightbulb in there that for several years kept the pipes from freezing. The pipes have since been rerouted. The next step up from just a lightbulb is to put a Y connector with two lightbulbs on it and screw a dusk to dawn sensor into one of the branches and then another lightbulb into that. This way, if the primary lightbulb burns out, the other one will turn on.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    Nowadays space heaters are for bitcoin/ethereum production. I keep wondering when ASIC+5G "electric heaters" will be nearly given away to people.
runnerup 5y ago
It’s not just efficiency. Super long lasting incandescent are also very dim and very red. Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature Then why did they need a secret agreement and fines to enforce it?
  - jasonm23 5y ago
    Because it was a technical trade-off/s
rob74 5y ago
Errr... let me quote from the Wikipedia article you linked: > Some engineers deemed 1,000 hours a reasonable figure to balance the various operational aspects of an incandescent bulb, since longer lifespan means reduced efficacy (lumens per watt): a longer-life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and therefore proportionally more heat) than a shorter-life bulb of the same wattage. Nevertheless, long-life incandescent bulbs were and are available with lifespan ratings up to 2,500 hours, and these do in fact produce less light per watt. What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that while there was a cartel which did reduce the lifetime of commonly-used light bulbs, they didn't do it solely to increase their profits - there was an actual technical tradeoff involved, and they chose a figure which provided (in their opinion) a good balance of all the involved parameters. That's what always gets forgotten when this story is mentioned.
- quxpar 5y ago
  The collusion between massive companies to keep out smaller competitors is the thrust of the matter, not what levers they pulled.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > they didn't do it solely to increase their profits But they also did pretty obviously do it in part to increase their profits. The cartel was formed in part as a response to the volatility of the lightbulb market (there was so much competition it was difficult for any company to stay dominant or to maintain stable/predictable profits), and was followed by a large increase of sales for the cartel's members. Short of long-term environmental costs (which nobody was seriously worrying about in the early 1900s), there's very little reason to standardize the light output, efficiency, and lifespan of a bulb, which could instead be determined by consumer choice in a free market. If the Pheobes Cartel was simply setting labeling standards, maybe it would be debatable whether or not there was any bad intention. But it remains a good example of planned obsolescence in part because of the excuses engineers used at the time, which were pretty clearly not the entire reason for cartel's formation, but were used to dismiss criticism of reduced competition. It's a good lesson for people to learn: planned obsolescence is usually accompanied by a couple of engineering reasons for the tradeoffs, and sometimes those tradeoffs are justifiable in a vacuum. But planned obsolescence removes the ability for the consumer to choose their own tradeoffs and to optimize for their own needs, and instead it prioritizes making specific technical tradeoffs that just coincidentally happen to benefit the company's bottom line.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Personally, I think the color and higher luminosity per light bulb (both very desired features at the times of incandescent lighting) were what made those bulbs successful. Even though those companies made an effort to push the bulbs (and were very happy with the result), and they were overall cheaper for the customer than the long-lived ones, I don't think any of those factors is impactful enough to explain the change on the entire market. Notice that those companies didn't own the entire market at the time, just a huge fraction of it. If people wanted the yellower bulbs, they could get them.
mywittyname 5y ago
> I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them. There are still examples of these early light bulbs in museums and such. They are very, very dim, producing light akin to that of a hair dryer. A modern person would be pretty shocked at just how little light these things put out. It's the reason gas street lamps stuck around into the 40s and 50s; nearly outlasting the Phoebus Cartel.
- danShumway 5y ago
  None of which is evidence that a cartel was necessary to enforce different standards; consumer preference would have solved that problem on its own. Power efficiency problems only require cooperation to solve in instances where the downsides aren't immediately visible to the consumer (ie, long-term decreased power costs, labeling, environmental costs). But people definitely weren't worried about environmental efficiency of light bulbs when the Phoebus Cartel started up. For consumer-visible deficiencies (as in literally how much visible light a lightbulb produces), you don't need collusion to convince consumers to make the switch to a clearly (pun intended) better product. It's worth noting just how janky and circuitous these standards were as a way of increasing efficiency, given that Phoebus Cartel had perfectly good measures for efficiency that they could have targeted instead. There were not rules for minimum lumens, or max wattage, or minimum efficiency; there were only rules on maximum lifespan. In fact, for their "class B" category of lamps, not only did the Phoebus Cartel not impose minimum efficiency measures, they actually included an upper bound on how efficient Class B lamps were allowed to be. I think it's extremely unlikely that the Phoebus Cartel was primarily worried about the environmental costs of inefficient light bulbs, and I think it's extremely unlikely that in the absence of a cartel consumers would have been unable to tell the difference between a dim lightbulb and a bright one when making purchasing decisions. The most likely explanation of their behavior is the simplest one; they set constraints designed to maximize profits and decrease the risk of large competitors out-innovating each other, and then designed engineering optimizations and standards to fit into those constraints, not the other way around.
throwawayboise 5y ago
People cared, that's why large office buildings were using flourescent lights in the 1960s. Homeowners didn't care, because incandescent lights had a more pleasing color spectrum and the cost of running them was insignficant in the overall household budget, even with their inefficiency.

iso1210 5y ago

You'd care if you were plugging up 1kW lightbulbs instead of 100W bulbs.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Those are called space heaters :) In fact a company in Germany tried to circumvent the EU ban on lightbulbs by calling then heatballs. Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.
- samatman 5y ago
  There also are (or were) a lot of consumer products which used ordinary incandescents for heat. The familiar example to Americans of a certain age is the EZ-Bake Oven, but there was a long tail of others, because if you wanted an off-the-shelf source for ~40-150W of heat, and the light is either a plus or neutral, it was tough to beat an Edison bulb and socket.
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    Another example of this: Bird sanctuaries are harmed by the ban in some ways (though in the meantime they've no doubt found alternatives) because incandescent bulbs make great heaters.[1] [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-leaves-bird-care-centre-with-dim-hope-1.2492890 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-...
- mlyle 5y ago
  > Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient. Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
  - pooper 5y ago
    > Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. My personal concept of resistive heat is effective comes from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections. The argument is that almost all of the energy taken in by an electric resistive heater is given out as heat so it is pretty close to 100% efficiency. I understand that a heat pump is practically a better alternative for almost all use cases though. Similarly, speaking of electric light bulbs, my understanding is there is no reason why an LED light bulb shouldn't last over ten years of continuous use. At least that is my impression from this reddit comment (please correct me if I am wrong) https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why_are_my_led_light_bulbs_burning_out_so_fast/gmi6c1v/ https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why... > There are many poorly manufactured LED lights out there. The LED itself is typically fine, but the driver electronics in the base tend to fail on poor quality products. > I was having lots of failures for a while, but much less lately as I've tried to look for more brand name products.
    - blihp 5y ago
      And yet I've had two (name brand) LED bulbs die in the past year with <3 years of operational life. The drivers in most of these bulbs are garbage.
      - terr-dav 5y ago
        It's a shame that they can advertise the life of the diode itself with no regard for the rest of the electronics.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      The second problem with LEDs is heat. LEDs produce a lot less heat than incandescents, but they also deal much worse with getting hot. Thus you need large (for surface area) and/or expensive (due to more expensive materials with high conductivity) heat sinks. Cheaper bulbs will tend to cheap out on this aspect, but there are also fundamental constraints especially in bulbs designed to fit traditional fittings.
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  It's still a thing in Poland. They are either sold as heatballs or workshop light (doesn't have strobe effect which could be potentially dangerous around saws). That was mostly when fluorescent lightbulbs were the only alternative. These days people go for LED lightbulbs instead.
- shagie 5y ago
  One trick of cold rooms and frozen pipes - put a light bulb in there. In the (old) house that I'm in, there's a room that is for all practical purposes, under the garage. It is very poorly insulated and for some reason, some water pipes ran through it. On a cold winter, the pipes can freeze. So, there's a lightbulb in there that for several years kept the pipes from freezing. The pipes have since been rerouted. The next step up from just a lightbulb is to put a Y connector with two lightbulbs on it and screw a dusk to dawn sensor into one of the branches and then another lightbulb into that. This way, if the primary lightbulb burns out, the other one will turn on.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Nowadays space heaters are for bitcoin/ethereum production. I keep wondering when ASIC+5G "electric heaters" will be nearly given away to people.

runnerup 5y ago

It’s not just efficiency. Super long lasting incandescent are also very dim and very red. Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature Then why did they need a secret agreement and fines to enforce it?
- jasonm23 5y ago
  Because it was a technical trade-off/s

rob74 5y ago

Errr... let me quote from the Wikipedia article you linked: > Some engineers deemed 1,000 hours a reasonable figure to balance the various operational aspects of an incandescent bulb, since longer lifespan means reduced efficacy (lumens per watt): a longer-life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and therefore proportionally more heat) than a shorter-life bulb of the same wattage. Nevertheless, long-life incandescent bulbs were and are available with lifespan ratings up to 2,500 hours, and these do in fact produce less light per watt. What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that while there was a cartel which did reduce the lifetime of commonly-used light bulbs, they didn't do it solely to increase their profits - there was an actual technical tradeoff involved, and they chose a figure which provided (in their opinion) a good balance of all the involved parameters. That's what always gets forgotten when this story is mentioned.

quxpar 5y ago
The collusion between massive companies to keep out smaller competitors is the thrust of the matter, not what levers they pulled.
danShumway 5y ago
> they didn't do it solely to increase their profits But they also did pretty obviously do it in part to increase their profits. The cartel was formed in part as a response to the volatility of the lightbulb market (there was so much competition it was difficult for any company to stay dominant or to maintain stable/predictable profits), and was followed by a large increase of sales for the cartel's members. Short of long-term environmental costs (which nobody was seriously worrying about in the early 1900s), there's very little reason to standardize the light output, efficiency, and lifespan of a bulb, which could instead be determined by consumer choice in a free market. If the Pheobes Cartel was simply setting labeling standards, maybe it would be debatable whether or not there was any bad intention. But it remains a good example of planned obsolescence in part because of the excuses engineers used at the time, which were pretty clearly not the entire reason for cartel's formation, but were used to dismiss criticism of reduced competition. It's a good lesson for people to learn: planned obsolescence is usually accompanied by a couple of engineering reasons for the tradeoffs, and sometimes those tradeoffs are justifiable in a vacuum. But planned obsolescence removes the ability for the consumer to choose their own tradeoffs and to optimize for their own needs, and instead it prioritizes making specific technical tradeoffs that just coincidentally happen to benefit the company's bottom line.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Personally, I think the color and higher luminosity per light bulb (both very desired features at the times of incandescent lighting) were what made those bulbs successful. Even though those companies made an effort to push the bulbs (and were very happy with the result), and they were overall cheaper for the customer than the long-lived ones, I don't think any of those factors is impactful enough to explain the change on the entire market. Notice that those companies didn't own the entire market at the time, just a huge fraction of it. If people wanted the yellower bulbs, they could get them.

mywittyname 5y ago

> I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them. There are still examples of these early light bulbs in museums and such. They are very, very dim, producing light akin to that of a hair dryer. A modern person would be pretty shocked at just how little light these things put out. It's the reason gas street lamps stuck around into the 40s and 50s; nearly outlasting the Phoebus Cartel.

danShumway 5y ago
None of which is evidence that a cartel was necessary to enforce different standards; consumer preference would have solved that problem on its own. Power efficiency problems only require cooperation to solve in instances where the downsides aren't immediately visible to the consumer (ie, long-term decreased power costs, labeling, environmental costs). But people definitely weren't worried about environmental efficiency of light bulbs when the Phoebus Cartel started up. For consumer-visible deficiencies (as in literally how much visible light a lightbulb produces), you don't need collusion to convince consumers to make the switch to a clearly (pun intended) better product. It's worth noting just how janky and circuitous these standards were as a way of increasing efficiency, given that Phoebus Cartel had perfectly good measures for efficiency that they could have targeted instead. There were not rules for minimum lumens, or max wattage, or minimum efficiency; there were only rules on maximum lifespan. In fact, for their "class B" category of lamps, not only did the Phoebus Cartel not impose minimum efficiency measures, they actually included an upper bound on how efficient Class B lamps were allowed to be. I think it's extremely unlikely that the Phoebus Cartel was primarily worried about the environmental costs of inefficient light bulbs, and I think it's extremely unlikely that in the absence of a cartel consumers would have been unable to tell the difference between a dim lightbulb and a bright one when making purchasing decisions. The most likely explanation of their behavior is the simplest one; they set constraints designed to maximize profits and decrease the risk of large competitors out-innovating each other, and then designed engineering optimizations and standards to fit into those constraints, not the other way around.

throwawayboise 5y ago

People cared, that's why large office buildings were using flourescent lights in the 1960s. Homeowners didn't care, because incandescent lights had a more pleasing color spectrum and the cost of running them was insignficant in the overall household budget, even with their inefficiency.