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Longest-lasting incandescent light bulbs
- rex_lupi 3y agoThis is an interesting bit: > 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
- memefrog 3y agoThat's really not written in Wikipedia's tone.
- 0xEF 3y agoThis 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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
- eru 3y agoCompare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37046713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37046713
- magicalhippo 3y agoI 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.
- ekaryotic 3y agoI'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.
- rocqua 3y agoI 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) I got my soft-starter from amazon for €10.
- deepspace 3y agoA 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.
- Ekaros 3y agoWhat 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.
- magicalhippo 3y agoThis was incandescent bulbs. 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.
- pfdietz 3y agoI don't believe that theory. Instead, I think incandescent bulb lifespan is limited by sublimation of tungsten.
- Timon3 3y agoDo you have a basis for not believing it aside from you having a different theory?
- pfdietz 3y agoYou will note that incandescent bulbs gradually get dimmer as they age, due to deposition of tungsten on the glass. Also: http://donklipstein.com/bulb1.html 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.
- rcxdude 3y agoBoth 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).
- mechhacker 3y agoThis is true for a lot of mechanical devices. 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).
- Workaccount2 3y agoI 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.
- m0rissette 3y agoWell at least I learned something new today!
- audunw 3y agoTechnology Connections talked a lot about this and the supposed planned obsolescence of light bulbs https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY 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.
- memefrog 3y agoMore energy efficient, brighter and whiter.
- trompetenaccoun 3y agoIs 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.
- formerly_proven 3y agoNo, this has never been researched.
- rcxdude 3y agoThe 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).
- trompetenaccoun 3y agoMore 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.
- rcxdude 3y ago
- lloydatkinson 3y agoVery weird article. Doesn’t follow the same writing style as the rest of Wikipedia and almost every bulb story has citation needed on it.
- wunderland 3y agoAnd the cartel of incandescent lightbulb manufacturers that prevented longer-lasting bulbs from eroding profits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
- pserwylo 3y agoThe 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. [0] - https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
- serf 3y agoI read that after seeing the link in your comment. 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.
- jareklupinski 3y agowhat the heck is going on in that page the text just started growing as soon as it loaded is that a new anti-adblock thing
- laurent123456 3y agoThe world's longest-lasting light bulb website is also from another time: https://www.centennialbulb.org/ https://www.centennialbulb.org/ Unfortunately it looks like they took down the webcam, which is what I was looking for
- chandlerswift 3y agoLooks like it's still around! https://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm https://www.centennialbulb.org/cam.htm 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!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 3y agoRelated: The Dubai Lamp: The “World’s Most Efficient” LED Light Bulb https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25808959
- tzs 3y agoOT: 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.
- mikestew 3y agoVery 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). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-vapor_lamp
- BoxOfRain 3y agoOn 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.
- Workaccount2 3y ago> 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! 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)
- interestica 3y agoTo 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nickdothutton 3y agoI 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.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoMercury vapor streetlights are also good vintage lights if you can get your hands on them.
- interestica 3y agoThe 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.
- ralferoo 3y agoA great example of why you shouldn't manually number lists: > 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.