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Comment by fzzt | Hacker News Reader

Many LED lightbulbs make claims about their expected lifetime. Except these numbers are often a fantasy. The LED itself may last almost forever, but the capacitors commonly go bad in a year or so.

I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.

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They also severely overdrive the LEDs to get more brightness, at the cost of both reduced efficiency and lifetime.

At least the Phoebus Cartel had an ostensible explanation (efficiency) for what they did. Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed.

Some of the indicator LEDs on some of my electronics are many decades old, yet they are still functioning like when they were new. Clearly LEDs can last a long time, but there wouldn't be any profit in that.

Here's some interesting discussion about the "Dubai Lamp", an attempt at going the opposite direction and actually making LEDs last significantly longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793

Extremely relevant article from Hackaday - https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

So when I buy a 600 lumen LED bulb that burns 7 W, I'm not only getting hosed because they're overdriving the LEDs but I'm also using over twice as much electricity as I could be?

Not really. The "overdriving" (really just choosing a higher point on the current/output curve) is part of how they deliver that 600 lumen. If you put half as much electricity through those same LEDs they would in theory last longer. You could deliver 600 lumens for under 7w (but not as low as half) using a more expensive array of LEDs driven less hard and still get the longer lifetime, but it's not easy to be really sure whether the upfront cost and embedded energy would always be justified.

> Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed.

How does it help the corporation make more money?

by forcing customers to buy new ones more often?

Wouldn't this sort of be a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation? The cartel hinges on every producer being complicit, if they are they get all long term small advantage, if they aren't, they and they alone get a huge short term advantage to the detriment of everyone else.

If a single one of them doesn't play ball and start selling "forever lamps" that last a hundred years (slap some patents on running LEDs at their rating, why not), they'll effectively salt the earth for the entire market.

And new competitors can enter the market, and existing producers know that.

That only works if there's something like brand loyalty or similar mechanism to make customers come back to the same manufacturer.

If my gadget just failed long before I was promised, I am quite likely to shop around.

No, it also works when non-optimal designs are very common in the market. (Not helped with the fact that especially in electronics many brands have decreased in (perceived) quality, so even if something performed well people don't necessarily trust that newer versions are too, which makes actually good brands also less sticky)

I don't understand.

Bad brands aren't sticky in this situation, are there. (I don't know whether good brands are sticky here.) So there's no extra incentives for planned obsolescence, because the next purchase is more than likely to go to a competitor.

Or what do you mean?

They’re saying all brands use planned obsolescence to force consumers to buy lightbulbs (from any brand) more often, increasing sales for the whole industry, not one specific brand.

This is how the Phoebus Cartel worked for incandescent bulbs. Every brand was in on it, it wasn’t about improving market share for specific brands.

That requires a lot of coordination. Any single company could break ranks?

There's a mechanism: if people want their bulbs to match, they might pick the same brand/model as a replacement

I'm surprised so many people's experience of LED bulbs is short lifetime. Most of the LED bulbs I ever bought have lasted many, many years. I only had one type ever fail and those looked clearly inferior in build to all the other types. ("free" with some light fittings, not my choice). Took one of those apart, no capacitors in the design any more but dodgy wire connections that creep with the hot-cold on-off cycle in an under-ventilated fitting. So am I a statistical outlier, or are most people getting the very worst dreg-quality bulbs, or are there a lot of very enclosed fittings out there cooking the lamps?

I've got a lot of different brands of LED light bulbs and I think maybe one has "burned out" over the years. I have to wonder if maybe the power in their house is less "clean" than it should be, or if their area has a lot of power spikes or brownouts and they just don't realize it.

That's an interesting possibility I hadn't considered. I don't really have a handle on how robust these things innately are but I'm sure there is no room in the average bulb's bill of materials for any special handling for rough power.

Recessed lighting fixtures are a common cause of problems with LEDs due to poor heat dissipation. But a lot of newer homes have recessed lighting, and in at least some parts of California, the fixtures are now required to be sealed (I guess for overall house energy efficiency).

My friend had about ten led potlights installed (by an electrician) two years ago, must've had a bad batch as one died and another is dim.

Same for me. Using random cheap leds, most of them 5 years old and zero failures.

Pretty much any number you see on Amazon is a lie except from a very limited number if sellers.

Which ones are credible?

In the category of flashlights, Anker seems credible. Several others are lying by a factor of 100.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_0wxzClkg

The answer to this question should probably come from a government or non-profit agency that will end being a adversarial to Amazon.

I always return these LEDs because in Germany we do have 2 years of warranty by default.

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