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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

I remember when there were tons of subsidies for LED lighting in order to make them competitive with the extremely low prices of incandescent/halogens and their simple low part designs. Then the incandescent/halogen ban went through the the prices of LED light bulbs went through the roof and never came back down. All while LEDs never achieved anything close to the early claims of 100k hours and ended up only be comparable to incandescent in lifetime due to skimping on parts cost in the driver boards.

I hope we don't see that play out again with heat pumps. That said, I'm glad there is funding for the design of heat pumps in north american markets. Existing heat pump designs don't really work for continental climate severe cold.

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>All while LEDs never achieved anything close to the early claims of 100k hours and ended up only be comparable to incandescent in lifetime due to skimping on parts cost in the driver boards.

I don't know what bulbs you're using but I don't find this to be the case.

As an alternative example, the effect of subsidies on the solar panel industry has led to rapid improvements in cost and efficiency.

Phillips, Cree, and all sorts of generics. If you have good electrical power you won't notice, but if your power is dirty, a loose neutral exists, etc, the driver boards do not last long. Whereas the simple no-circuitry halogens do. And this is especially true in enclosures.

It's another situation where the well off remain well off but for the poor the situation gets worse.

Planned obsolescence?

Big Clive of YouTube fame has shown many times over that modest changes to the driver board of commercial LED lights will allow them to last indefinitely. You have to wonder if the manufacturers don't know this.

Anecdotally, I've replaced more halogens than any other kind of bulb. I'm assuming it was the fixture that was causing it. They were cheap but they guzzled power.

>prices of LED light bulbs went through the roof and never came back down

Maybe I'm buying cheap bulbs but the latest ones I've bought have been very reasonably priced and most definitely are lasting longer than incandescent / halogen. I recently replaced some that had been operating for at least 8 years and likely longer.

The fact that LED's run cooler than incandescent bulbs makes a palpable difference in the summer.

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