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Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S. (www.digitaljournal.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.

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[–] 60 points 3 years ago (16 children)

No single LED lightbulb I've ever purchased lasts as long as they claim. infact, many have been outlasted by existing incandescent bulbs in my house. your joke fodder is safe.

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  • [–] 67 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I don’t know what kind of shit LEDs you’ve been buying but I’ve yet to ever have to replace one. Been using them for many years already.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    LED's produce a lot of heat at higher "wattages". IE: the 75w+ equivalents can throw out some heat. And if its recessed in a can or upside down on a chandelier but with a decorative covering, they will often go out due to heat. Hell I have seen some with giant heatsinks on them to try and compensate.

    I had a series of 150w LED's i was burning through. Eventually I moved to just replace the bulb and fixture with a ceiling light like this

    LED's are also sensitive to dirty power, probably more-so than Incandescents. I have run through some because of surges and brownouts as well.

    I generally use Phillips brand LED bulbs if it helps, but do have some others.

    Finally, the lower wattage bulbs (ie: 10-15w equivalent) will sometimes have a "pulse" to it. Dimmer LED's also tend to do this, and you often have to tune the dimmer switch to a higher brightness for "low" to compensate.

    All that said, they are still leaps and bounds better.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I have 9W LEDs which are about 80-90W equivalent. They are barely warmer than room temperature after hours of working.

    I have a DIY LED light for my herbs running at 45W (400W equivalent?) and it's like 40° after 12 hours. I run it 12 hours 365 days a year with zero issues.

    There can only be two reasons for overheating: issues with your power supply or your LED bulbs have electrical issues from the factory.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Quite literally the less heat they emit per unit of power they consume the more efficient they are, so this is very much an area were getting the more efficient LED light bulbs (which in the consumer space are the filament ones) will both reduce heat waste AND save you power per unit of light emitted.

    (In fact you should select these things on light emited - i.e. lumens - rather than on wattage and even for the same lumens aim for the fewer watts as possible since that means they consume less for the same results, which, as pointed above, also mean heat emission as that's literally power being wasted)

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Funny you mention Phillips because that’s the brand I like, too. Just recommended it to someone here in fact.

    I’m not sure what wattage my ceiling fixtures are; I’ll check.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago*

    Yeah. they are generally my favorite as well.

    These were the ones I was running through like crazy in my kitchen. Storms often meant they would fail. I edited my original comment and posted a pic of the design i moved to since the can they sat in didnt evacuate heat well at all.

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08667M3BR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1

    Frankly i tend to stick with one brand in general because it provides a consisten light color (ie: 5000k or 3500k warm yellow etc). Rando brands say 5000k daylight but are slightly off and it drives me nuts.

    I have some in warm yellow on certain fixtures and others in daylight for other fixtures. The warm yellow ones we will use at night. (i have a large number of light fixtures in my house for some reason to, which makes this easier)

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Same experience here. Every single LED lightbulb i've bought, since the time I started using them, has outlasted basically everything else I've purchased before. It draws less energy and doesn't produce basically any heat too, which is excellent

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    My mom buys these cheap LED bulbs from Amazon and about half burn out quickly (probably 10% are DOA).

    We have 100% LEDs throughout our fifth wheel (about 30 of them), and they are all still going strong (all installed in 2015, and used daily since then).

    I think there's a serious difference in quality available and it certainly shows.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Honestly as somebody who's been watching big clive's channel I would never recommend anybody to buy those cheap LEDs from Amazon because there's a non-insignificant risk that they may burn your house down.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Don't just buy cheap shit. And get your wire/vakuum/kitchen appliance checked for spikes.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    And here I am imagining walking down the street one day and there’s a crazy hobo wandering around waving a vacuum cleaner in everyone’s face screaming “CAN YOU SEE THE SPIKES? ARE THEY THERE?”

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    That's really dependent on local regulation, and wether or not you bought products licensed to be sold where you live or random imports from AliExpress.

    My smart LED lights were bought in 2017, they are still working perfectly and have zero signs of issues - same brightness, same connection strength, same white point. The only exception was precisely the cheapo desk lamp one I bought from an online reseller, that one lasted a year and the control board fried itself.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I buy all my stuff at Target, Walmart, or Home Depot. I have to replace my LED bulbs just as much if not more than I ever had to with Incandescents. In my last house I had incandescents that lasted the entire 8 years I was there, while I replaced other leds multiple times.

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  • [+] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    I can tell you from having looked into becoming an importer of those things maybe a decade ago that the very EU rules for the CE mark (a requirement for them to be allowed to be imported for sale into the EU) cover things like failure rates (max 5% in the first year), minimum hours without failure (10,000 and models must actually be tested on it in order to be certified), loss of brightness with age, minimum CRI and so on.

    So yeah, buy them from chinese sellers on Amazon or Aliexpress and you're importing them yourself for personal use in which case no such rules need apply (if doing that I recommend purchasing only from those sellers that mention their product has a CE mark).

    In the US, were "consumer right" tend to be this wierd thing that only wimpy eutopean worry about, I suspect there are nowhere the same level of rules (probably the bare minimum for mains wired devices which is pretty much "won't just randomly kill users"), which would mean the stuff carried by the local sellers is China-quality-at-American-prices, so basically the Aliexpress quality but with extra cost to pay the fat bonus of the CEO of the large retail surface.

    PS: As a side note to anybody interested in using the CE mark as the minimum standard for their own LED light bulb purchases, look at the packaging: there are very specific rules for the packaging itself, so for example it has to list the brightness (in lumen) with more proeminence than the wattage and also has the energy rating (including a standard design with a graph of horizontal bars) so these things are pretty easy to spot from the packaging of the light bulb.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    I've been using LED bulbs for a good number of years, I've only had one or two die on me. The longevity alone makes them much better than incandescent, but then they use a tenth the power.

    My favorite is the A15 Edison style. That's the appliance size, smaller than the standard A19. The A15 fits in everything so I only need to stock one size.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago*

    Just fucking yesterday out of 12 Nisko high CRI bulbs around the house one just stopped working. All of them are mere one year old.

    And those high cri ones are the most expensive ones. Lets see how much time the others survive… ill keep you posted.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    I still have some I bought 15 years ago at Ikea, still working. Most I exchanged because of the rapid technical development in the one and a half decade not because they stopped working.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    My LED bulbs have hilariously short lives. I suspect the wiring in my apartment is just not that great because lights do flicker from time to time. But that didn't seem to hurt incandescent bulbs. I'm lucky if my LEDs last even one year, never mind the 10 or 20 some of them claim.

    What am I supposed to do, but my overhead light fixtures on a UPS?!

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    You are right that local electricity might be in play. I've lived in the same house for 6 years and I've not had a single light fail. We replaced most bulbs when we moved in because they were mostly CFLs. It's been great. But I wouldn't put it past LED manufacturers, even name brand ones, from cheaping out on the bad power protections.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I have a bunch I bought in 2016 that are still going strong. Only stopped using them because we wanted cooler lighting and they're all pretty warm. We've had like 4 or 5 out of the original 50 or so that stopped working though.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I’ve also had very different results, depending on brand. Definitely avoid the cheap stuff

    Now I have the opposite problem: brands and styles change too much. What do you do when one bulb of a multi-bulb fixture burns out, but they’ve all outlasted the brand or style? I do already have a drawer full of LED bulbs that I replaced so the fixture would match, and can’t always find a fixture with fewer bulbs

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    The only LED bulbs I've bought that haven't blown within a year are my Philips hue bulbs. They are expensive but they are all I'll buy now, and my girlfriend and I love setting them to relaxing colors in the evening while we relax together on the couch

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