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The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy
HughPickens.com writes: Markus Krajewski reports that today, with many countries phasing out incandescent lighting in favor of more-efficient and pricier LEDs, it's worth revisiting the history of the Phoebus cartel — not simply as a quirky anecdote from the annals of technology, but as a cautionary tale about the strange and unexpected pitfalls that can arise when a new technology vanquishes an old one. Prior to the Phoebus cartel's formation in 1924, household light bulbs typically burned for a total of 1,500 to 2,500 hours; cartel members agreed to shorten that life span to a standard 1,000 hours.
Each factory regularly sent lightbulb samples to the cartel's central laboratory in Switzerland for verification. If any factory submitted bulbs lasting longer or shorter than the regulated life span for its type, the factory was obliged to pay a fine. Though long gone, the Phoebus cartel still casts a shadow today because it reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost twenty years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs. Will history repeat itself as the lighting industry is now going through its most tumultuous period of technological change since the invention of the incandescent bulb?
"Consumers are expected to pay more money for bulbs that are up to 10 times as efficient and that are touted to last a fantastically long time—up to 50,000 hours in the case of LED lights. In normal usage, these lamps will last so long that their owners will probably sell the house they're in before having to change the bulbs," writes Krajewski. "Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate." There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes are reached. "Such incidents may well have resulted from nothing more sinister than careless manufacturing. But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects.""
Each factory regularly sent lightbulb samples to the cartel's central laboratory in Switzerland for verification. If any factory submitted bulbs lasting longer or shorter than the regulated life span for its type, the factory was obliged to pay a fine. Though long gone, the Phoebus cartel still casts a shadow today because it reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost twenty years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs. Will history repeat itself as the lighting industry is now going through its most tumultuous period of technological change since the invention of the incandescent bulb?
"Consumers are expected to pay more money for bulbs that are up to 10 times as efficient and that are touted to last a fantastically long time—up to 50,000 hours in the case of LED lights. In normal usage, these lamps will last so long that their owners will probably sell the house they're in before having to change the bulbs," writes Krajewski. "Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate." There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes are reached. "Such incidents may well have resulted from nothing more sinister than careless manufacturing. But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects.""
the CFL/LEDs last forever... but most don't operate off of 120/240 volts. So there are transformers in the base that ramp the voltage up. The transformers do NOT last 50k hours. That's what burns out.
I refuse to get any any more LED light bulbs... every one that I've purchased - from multiple companies - has burned out prematurely. NOT WORTH THE COST. And CF are dangerous. (If one breaks, you need to open the windows and leave the room for 1/2 hr.) Further - no viable light bulb replacements will work with dimmer switches (Which my house has many).
So at the end of this whole pointless post you get to your thesis: "there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects."
Thefuck? Cheap shit, made in countries with little to no regard to quality standards, is going to break down faster than you want it to. Not faster than it should, just faster than you want it to. Buy your bulbs from someone who knows what ISO means and you might have better luck. There is no conspiracy here, fluorescent bulbs have been used for decades in the commercial lighting business, and LEDs have been used for over a decade, with no ill effect. Pay what it's worth for a decent lamp and you will get the appropriate longevity. Pay .99 for a sealed fluorescent coil, electronic balllast, and enclosure or 3.99 for a 10W power supply, LED array, heatsink, and enclosure and you will get shitty performance.
So, the "return" process is iffy. I didn't have my receipt when one died and I took it back to Lowe's for an exchange of the same model (Phillips).. they said they couldn't be sure it was under warranty, I told them it was supposed to last 10 years, and they had only been selling them for a few months. They begrudgingly swapped it out.
Anyway, the other 2 bulbs, I decided to pull them apart. I dug out the silicone potting, and found the failure was in a large capacitor, visibly bulging. I haven't had time to replace the bit - but I'm pretty sure that's all that blew on it. Tested the individual LEDs and they are fine.
So both failures were due to purchasing the cheapest possible components, specifically a "largish" (like 0.3uF 200v) capacitor. My guess is that there was a larger cap that would handle the load, but they needed to reduce the size. Initiating the failure was probably one or more line spikes.
meh
Nobody would have profited from longer lasting lightbulbs.
In 1000 hours, a 100W lightbulb costs an order of magnitude more electricity than the puchase price. You can easily increase the lifetime of such a bulb to 10k hours, simply be reducing the operation temperature by 20% or so.
Of course, this halves lumens/W, to to get the same brightness, you need 200W of power - which means you pay twice as much over those 10k hours as if you have bought 10 100W bulbs to last that time.
High power lamps, for example in flashlight, used to be specified to operation times below 100h, because this allowed them to almost double the battery runtime...
While this may be an intellectually interesting story, I hardly think we need to consider a 100 year old defunct cartel. I'm far more worried about modern cartels, consider those in the title and there are many other besides - investment banks, teacher federations, De Beers... We need only glance outside our own personal bubbles to recognize massive manipulation starting with advantageous legislation perpetuating inefficient business models and see consumers are exploited from all directions by cartels.
I write the date on all my bulbs. Failed bulbs are never replaced with the same brand. The theory goes that short life bulbs will be circulated out of service and long life bulbs will remain.
Note to manufactures, to get on my bad boy list, have high premature deaths. To get on my recommended list, be the last man standing in my testing.
Failures fall in two modes. Lumen maintenance and failure. Most LED's dim over their lifetime. I bought a 3 pack of lower wattage "candelaubra lamps and used them in bathrooms as nightlights. I noticed they were quite dim after about 7 months. Used the 3rd bulb as a comparison as I used only two at the time. I photographed the result with a digital camera on manual settings so all exposures were taken with the same setting and posted the result online. You don't want your short life bulbs mentioned by name in a poor review.
My general observations are older bulbs had higher failure rates than the current line as the technology improved. LED's are an absolute must in locations with occasional use such as bathrooms, but often leave much to be desired where they are on 24/7 or 8-12 hours a day. A CFL in a seldom switched location will often have better lumen maintenance than an LED.
Note on the package on LED's, they are most often rated for only 3 Hours a day. For now use them in hallways, the garrage,storage areas, and bathrooms, I am having some great performance on some newer bulbs in the living room, but it is too early to call, but it is looking promising.
The truth shall set you free!
If cheap parts are used, the lamp life can be really short.
That being said, some of the stories are a tad apocryphal. I've replaced all my tungsten bulbs with CFL's, and I had one failure over maybe ten years. And that was started by a faulty lamp base.
I haven't had any of the RFI problems reported by some either. If the power supply is not designed properly, it can emit RF, which can interfere with radio reception.
But all of these seemingly horrid issues are mostly via the internet, and everyone I know who uses them hasn't had the issues. So i suspect a lot of this is apocryphal internet stories, so I put them in the same category as solar panels self destruct the moment their warranty goes out, and The Tesla is going to burst into flames, so buy a gasoline powered vehicle which won't, nonsense. Now what I would really really like is a separate line for my LED lamps that will not require the little power supply. Then the lighting would last just about forever, and I could take that off my bucket list of maintenance items.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't know why Americans don't have a dual flush system on their toilets like all of Europe does.
Because most americans would always use the "big flush" anyways. Water is too cheap in the USA and water saving devices are
worthless in this context. If you need to save water, the best way to actually save water is to make the consumer actually want to
save water. Many places in the USA, water saving is a joke as there is plenty of water. In the places where there actually is a
water shortage problem then they need to ration it per person and charge higher and higher tiers for people that use more than the
average. Basically, there needs to be a luxury tax on excess water consumption. In most place toilets aren't the problem but
rather it's all the swimming pools, lawn sprinklers, and industrial uses.
I've got an LED bulb that's been burning since 2007. I'm pretty sure that's more than 50,000 hours.
And, I've got LEDs on dimmers.
I'm sorry that your bad experience with LED lighting has caused you to go back to gas lamps, but really, they save a lot of energy and work really well. And I love not having to get up on the step stool several times a year to replace recessed bulbs in the ceiling.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Toilet flushing at my house happens generally between four to eight times a day. The amount of water that we spend on the landscaping dramatically exceeds that. The amount of money I'd spend on new commodes would probably exceed a decades' water savings, and the current commodes use very inexpensive, easy to source parts for what little repair they need, which to date has been a new chain and a new flapper valve. These toilets were manufactured in the late seventies and will probably continue to work for another 30+ years.
And that's not even accounting for the one in the basement, that deposits into a sewage lift pump, which needs a certain amount of liquid before it pumps the blackwater from the basement out to the municipal sewer. I'd have to flush a toilet two or three times to engage the lift pump, which wouldn't save anything.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
LMAO "wasted energy", they use 10x less energy than incandescent for the same rated lumen output.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Joking aside, I'd argue that it did the opposite. By removing the durability as one aspect of differentiability, the cartel commoditized the light bulb. Not being able to compete on quality or features generally leaves the manufacturers no choice but to compete on price. Another aspect of the bulb lifetime is that it's easy to make a bulb last longer: You just dim it a little. But by doing that, you reduce the already bad efficiency. For a bulb which consumes many times its item cost in electricity, increasing the lifetime by lowering the efficiency drives up the total cost. That's unless there's a significant cost associated with changing the light bulb, then longer lasting bulbs can make economic sense, and - surprise - you can buy longer lasting (slightly dimmer) bulbs, but the regular bulbs still last 1000 hours.
Regarding the durability of CFLs and LED bulbs: These types of light sources have embedded electronics that age faster at high temperatures, unlike incandescent light bulbs. To get the rated lifetime out of these modern lights, use them in well ventilated fixtures which keep the heat away from the socket. In my experience, the lifetime of CFLs follows the usual bathtub curve: Some duds die in the first weeks or months, almost none die between a year and well beyond the rated lifetime, and then at some point the failure rate goes up again. None of the LEDs in this house have failed so far (after close to three years since installation), so I have no reason to expect that they won't last the rated lifetime. All CFLs and LEDs have by far recovered the investment cost in saved electricity.
I was looking at LED replacement bulbs at the hardware store the other day ($20 each). I am suspect as to their efficiency.
Get a Kill-A-Watt meter and test the power consumption of LEDs youself. All the ones I've checked have used just about exactly what it says on the package.
They have large heat sinks on the which get very hot. That is wasted energy.
They have heat sinks because the LEDs need to stay very cool to work properly. Incandecent bulbs don't use heat sinks because they need to heat up to thousands of degrees just to get a small fraction of the photons they emit into the visible range. Now which do you think is wasting more energy?
There is no way to pack an efficient transformer into such a small space.
I doubt that any CFL or LED on the market is using a plain 60Hz transformer. They're using switching power supplies, which can be very efficient. That's becuase they crank the frequency up to a range where a small transformer *is* efficient.
Houses need wired seperately with a lower voltage appropriate for powering LED lights.
You'd still need a switching power supply to match the low voltage to the exact needs and wiring pattern of the particular LEDs. That's why most every PC have a separate power supply on the motherboard just inches away from the main power supply to convert 5VDC to whatever the processor needs.
Not to mention the power loss of low-voltage wires. If you put 100W of LED lights (about 6 bulbs) in a room at the end of a 50-foot run at 5V, you'd be pulling 20 amps. If you used 14AWG wire, at 0.25 ohms for the 100 foot round trip, you'd have a 5V voltage drop just from the resistance of the wire. You would also be violating code, which would require you to install a dedicated 12AWG circuit just to power 100W. That's obviously completely unworkable.
In summary, all of your uninformed "gut feel" opinions on these technical issues are unsurprisingly wrong.
Let's do it again. The last set of CFLs I bought cost 50p each (the ones before that were 30p, but that was a special offer). According to my electricity bill, I pay a tiny fraction of a penny under 15p/kWh. That means that the bulb costs slightly more than 3kWh of electricity. It's a 15W bulb replacing a 60W one, so that's a 45W saving. Assuming that the incandescent is free, then it takes 75 hours of operation for it to save money. At 3 hours a day, that's 25 days. When I first did the arithmetic, the CFLs were 3-4 times more expensive, so it worked out at 3 months.
This is why I find the resistance to CFLs so hard to understand. It's saved me quite a bit of money over the last decade.
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This is crazy. Just because the service tech told you something doesn't make it true.
Your rebuttal to a service tech, whose sole job is to know every detail about HE washers and driers, is to bring up a single instance of anecdotal evidence that is not even about the same brand. Talk about crazy.
Innumeracy and a reflexive resistance to "the government telling me what to do".
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem