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LED Household Bulb Longevity
- Thread starter Martin
- Start date
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Re: wow gold6
A friend from Poland told me a little story: He was friends with the manager of a light-bulb factory, which produced excellent incandescent bulbs. After the fall of communism, an American consultant was brought in, who suggested many changes to the manufacturing process, including those which would decrease bulb longevity, thus ensuring more sales of replacements. At first, they rejected the changes that would degrade the quality of the light bulbs, but eventually the factory was acquired by another company which made those changes. The sheep have become accustomed to being fleeced.
I suspect you have a vested interest in the lighting industry.I once came across a Wikipedia page that said "This page deleted, thereby greatly increasing its accuracy". The same would apply to this post.
There is absolutely nothing that is factual in what you wrote. Literally nothing.
A friend from Poland told me a little story: He was friends with the manager of a light-bulb factory, which produced excellent incandescent bulbs. After the fall of communism, an American consultant was brought in, who suggested many changes to the manufacturing process, including those which would decrease bulb longevity, thus ensuring more sales of replacements. At first, they rejected the changes that would degrade the quality of the light bulbs, but eventually the factory was acquired by another company which made those changes. The sheep have become accustomed to being fleeced.
Lightdoctor
Enlightened
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2010
- Messages
- 389
Re: wow gold6
HalfMan is a troll. Plain and simple. He's the semi self appointed guru of this board, who thinks he knows everything about all types of lighting and wants everyone else to bow down at his feet and learn from him. I for one will not bow down.
As to your story of the Polish lamp factory, I remember 25+ years ago seeing lamps from Poland that were pretty rugged, and they would last forever.
I suspect you have a vested interest in the lighting industry.
A friend from Poland told me a little story: He was friends with the manager of a light-bulb factory, which produced excellent incandescent bulbs. After the fall of communism, an American consultant was brought in, who suggested many changes to the manufacturing process, including those which would decrease bulb longevity, thus ensuring more sales of replacements. At first, they rejected the changes that would degrade the quality of the light bulbs, but eventually the factory was acquired by another company which made those changes. The sheep have become accustomed to being fleeced.
HalfMan is a troll. Plain and simple. He's the semi self appointed guru of this board, who thinks he knows everything about all types of lighting and wants everyone else to bow down at his feet and learn from him. I for one will not bow down.
As to your story of the Polish lamp factory, I remember 25+ years ago seeing lamps from Poland that were pretty rugged, and they would last forever.
Re: wow gold6
Let's ignore the fact that this is completely anecdotal story, with zero references or proof for a moment.
Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, the bulb designs in Poland sucked just like every other communist-designed consumer product? The question you are not asking through all of this is "What was the brightness of these supposed long-life bulbs?" Because there is no way that you are going to make a long-life incandescent bulb without sacrificing efficiency/brightness. It's physically impossible.
Here are some long-life incandescents (>10,000 hours). Take a look at the lumen output. It's a full 40% lower in brightness than a normal 1000 hour incandescent, and its efficiency is much lower. If I have a lamp that I can easily change (i.e. it's not in a difficult to reach location), why would I buy this? I can get more brightness and better efficiency and the only drawback is that I have to change the bulb a bit more often. BFD.
I'll also point out that the fact these are freely available on sites like amazon also means that some "lighting industry conspiracy" is total bullshit. Also, why wouldn't CFLs be made with the same 1000 hour lifetime if there were a conspiracy? Why make them last longer when there isn't any reason to?
And since you neglected to answer any of my questions before calling people sheep, I've reproduced them below:
The sheep have become accustomed to being fleeced.
Let's ignore the fact that this is completely anecdotal story, with zero references or proof for a moment.
Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, the bulb designs in Poland sucked just like every other communist-designed consumer product? The question you are not asking through all of this is "What was the brightness of these supposed long-life bulbs?" Because there is no way that you are going to make a long-life incandescent bulb without sacrificing efficiency/brightness. It's physically impossible.
Here are some long-life incandescents (>10,000 hours). Take a look at the lumen output. It's a full 40% lower in brightness than a normal 1000 hour incandescent, and its efficiency is much lower. If I have a lamp that I can easily change (i.e. it's not in a difficult to reach location), why would I buy this? I can get more brightness and better efficiency and the only drawback is that I have to change the bulb a bit more often. BFD.
I'll also point out that the fact these are freely available on sites like amazon also means that some "lighting industry conspiracy" is total bullshit. Also, why wouldn't CFLs be made with the same 1000 hour lifetime if there were a conspiracy? Why make them last longer when there isn't any reason to?
And since you neglected to answer any of my questions before calling people sheep, I've reproduced them below:
If all of these bulbs from 80-90 years ago regularly lasted so long, we should be seeing them everywhere in old buildings. Where are they?
Do you have any proof of this? [in relation to fluorescent lifetime decreasing with time] I can easily find fluorescent tubes with 75,000 hour average lifetimes. What tubes from the 50s/60s/70s had average lifetimes longer than this?
Lightdoctor
Enlightened
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2010
- Messages
- 389
Re: wow gold6
Those lamps from Poland were not efficient that's for sure. Lumen output was awful, but they were incredibly rugged when compared to standard life lamps.
Those lamps from Poland were not efficient that's for sure. Lumen output was awful, but they were incredibly rugged when compared to standard life lamps.
Lightdoctor
Enlightened
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2010
- Messages
- 389
Yes, I bought some of those Polish light bulbs, and they far outlasted any other bulb I ever had. Too bad they were forced out of business by hostile takeovers.
They would've been put out of business simply by the advent of CFL's, let alone LED's.
Last edited by a moderator:
Bullzeyebill
Flashaholic
I reinstated the thread title to the last post. It never should have been changed. I am not sure if the title changer did so to bait members, but the content of the post might indicate that, and certainly members were baited. I think that enough has been said re that members post. Lets move on.
Bill
Bill
Re: wow gold6
Greta, my apologies in advance, but I will not tolerate LightDoctor's attitude.
LightDoctor, I have likely forgot more about lighting in the last week than you will ever know and unlike you, I don't give myself a sycophant title like LightDoctor to try to garner attention for myself when you have, being objectively based on your posts, little real knowledge about Lighting.
It is one thing to disagree with postings, but when one willingly posts and defends what is erroneous information, that is trolling and to that end, as CoveAxe has pointed out, GregP507 has posted grossly inaccurate information which he (and you) are defending. Keep in mind that Greg opened up a 6 year old thread to make his assertions.
So, I will attack the post, not the poster (but CoveAxe has already covered this pretty well) .....
" I think one of the greatest engineering challenges in recent years has been how to shorten the life of an LED emitter. Normally, they are expected to last for decades, but as a business model, longevity is a money-loser for a manufacturer. At the outset of a new technology, the high price and steady adoption-rate can provide a healthy revenue-stream, but as competition cuts in, and the consumer saturation-point comes nearer, those revenue-streams begin to dry up."
- That you think this is fine, but it is completely wrong and there is nothing to support your claim. Lumileds, Cree, and Nichia have consistently pushed up their power end lumen density AND at the same time pushed the maximum temperature for lumen maintenance WHILE also improving the color stability of their products. When mid-power packages came out such as 5630, you would be hard pressed to get to 50,000 hours at 75C junction and 65mA. Now Nichia, Samsung, LG and others will support 125+ mA, at 85C solder point temperature and hit 75-100K+ hours
" When the incandescent light-bulb was introduced by Thomas Edison, the vacuum-tube design was nearly fool-proof. Nearly everyone has heard of the electric light bulb that has been burning in a California firehouse for over a century, and in fact, the same technology used in radio vacuum tubes means that quite often those tubes are still working perfectly after 80-90 years."
- And there are electric heaters (which is what a bulb is when ran at low power) that have lasted that long as well. It is well known and proven that incandescent bulb life is proportional to the 12th power of the voltage applied. What that means is that if you take a bulb designed for 230V and use it at 120V, that if designed for a 1000H life, that it will last about 300 years. There is no magic or amazing design, just using the bulb as a heater ... not really a bulb. Sure it puts out light, but it is pretty ineffective as a lighting appliance. Now if you know nothing about incandescent bulbs, this may appear as some sort of magic and you may buy easily into conspiracy theories, but if you do know about them, you know this is just basic physics.
- The same would go for your Polish bulbs. It has never been difficult to make an incandescent bulb last, just making one that lasts that is also efficient. As the consumer mind-set was for a certain lumen output for a given bulb outside the Iron Curtain, no doubt that is the direction the factory was pushed. Given under the Iron Curtain that retail supply chain was very flaky, you would have wanted something that lasted, even if it was wasteful as getting replacements was difficult. Then when you add the instability of the electrical grid, you would certainly want a more rugged service bulb. However, if you wanted to sell them to "Westerners", you needed to hit a certain lumens/watt for mass-market, otherwise you were a nice rough service bulb ..... which are less efficient ... which is primarily how they achieve long life. The additional filament supports are for vibration tolerance.
" Fluorescent-tube technology is nearly as old, and these as well, have seen their longevity decrease substantially as well. I'm not sure exactly how this planned-obsolescence was achieved, but I suspect it has something to do with allowing the slow infusion of oxygen through the base of the bulb. "
- Again, a ridiculously inaccurate statement. Fluorescent tubes used to last 10,000 hours (if you were lucky), and experience somewhat significant lumen depreciation over their life. Sure some lasted longer, but on average, they were useless pretty close to 10,000 hours.
- A pretty standard T8 lasts 20,000 hours and achieved 90-95% lumen maintenance over that time.
- 40000, 60000 and now even 80,000 hour tubes are available and they keep to that same 90-95% lumen maintenance over life. In addition to that, they have excellent color stability and efficiency has been maintained or improved
"Since LED lighting is a robust solid-state technology, I suspect the weak-points will have to be engineered in the driver circuitry, which in itself is quite robust. Possible weak-points are electrolytic capacitors and thermal heat dissipation. If the capacitors are allowed to degrade, and/or the temperature of the circuit is high, it may lead to earlier failure. i suspect it won't be long before we see LED lighting with a service-life similar to that of incandescent or CFL bulbs."
- Actually for cheap bulbs and lights, the trend is to pretty much eliminate the driver completely and the inherent failure point which pretty much throws your planned obsolescence argument out
- As well, most recent bulb designs like the slim-style and 4Flow almost completely decouple the heat of the LEDs from the driver increasing driver life. However, yes some suppliers have reduced warranties (and the associated carrying costs) because frankly at the price points, customers are not as concerned about 10 year life as they once were.
- On top of all this, standard driver technology and integration has improved (as well as Chinese MFG quality), hence the total number of components has gone down and the MTBF has gone up.
- In the commercial space, 5 year warranties are starting to be replaced by 7 and 10 year warranties. To support those warranties, improvements in design and components do need to be made.
Now GregP507 and LightDoctor, if you would like to provide some verifiable proof of your assertions, not just unsupported anecdotes, then the smart members of CPF will no doubt keep an open mind. However, if you cannot support your hypothesis, then I would put forward that it is not ethical to mislead people as CPF is viewed at least within our community as a good resource.
HalfMan is a troll. Plain and simple. He's the semi self appointed guru of this board, who thinks he knows everything about all types of lighting and wants everyone else to bow down at his feet and learn from him. I for one will not bow down.
As to your story of the Polish lamp factory, I remember 25+ years ago seeing lamps from Poland that were pretty rugged, and they would last forever.
Greta, my apologies in advance, but I will not tolerate LightDoctor's attitude.
LightDoctor, I have likely forgot more about lighting in the last week than you will ever know and unlike you, I don't give myself a sycophant title like LightDoctor to try to garner attention for myself when you have, being objectively based on your posts, little real knowledge about Lighting.
It is one thing to disagree with postings, but when one willingly posts and defends what is erroneous information, that is trolling and to that end, as CoveAxe has pointed out, GregP507 has posted grossly inaccurate information which he (and you) are defending. Keep in mind that Greg opened up a 6 year old thread to make his assertions.
So, I will attack the post, not the poster (but CoveAxe has already covered this pretty well) .....
" I think one of the greatest engineering challenges in recent years has been how to shorten the life of an LED emitter. Normally, they are expected to last for decades, but as a business model, longevity is a money-loser for a manufacturer. At the outset of a new technology, the high price and steady adoption-rate can provide a healthy revenue-stream, but as competition cuts in, and the consumer saturation-point comes nearer, those revenue-streams begin to dry up."
- That you think this is fine, but it is completely wrong and there is nothing to support your claim. Lumileds, Cree, and Nichia have consistently pushed up their power end lumen density AND at the same time pushed the maximum temperature for lumen maintenance WHILE also improving the color stability of their products. When mid-power packages came out such as 5630, you would be hard pressed to get to 50,000 hours at 75C junction and 65mA. Now Nichia, Samsung, LG and others will support 125+ mA, at 85C solder point temperature and hit 75-100K+ hours
" When the incandescent light-bulb was introduced by Thomas Edison, the vacuum-tube design was nearly fool-proof. Nearly everyone has heard of the electric light bulb that has been burning in a California firehouse for over a century, and in fact, the same technology used in radio vacuum tubes means that quite often those tubes are still working perfectly after 80-90 years."
- And there are electric heaters (which is what a bulb is when ran at low power) that have lasted that long as well. It is well known and proven that incandescent bulb life is proportional to the 12th power of the voltage applied. What that means is that if you take a bulb designed for 230V and use it at 120V, that if designed for a 1000H life, that it will last about 300 years. There is no magic or amazing design, just using the bulb as a heater ... not really a bulb. Sure it puts out light, but it is pretty ineffective as a lighting appliance. Now if you know nothing about incandescent bulbs, this may appear as some sort of magic and you may buy easily into conspiracy theories, but if you do know about them, you know this is just basic physics.
- The same would go for your Polish bulbs. It has never been difficult to make an incandescent bulb last, just making one that lasts that is also efficient. As the consumer mind-set was for a certain lumen output for a given bulb outside the Iron Curtain, no doubt that is the direction the factory was pushed. Given under the Iron Curtain that retail supply chain was very flaky, you would have wanted something that lasted, even if it was wasteful as getting replacements was difficult. Then when you add the instability of the electrical grid, you would certainly want a more rugged service bulb. However, if you wanted to sell them to "Westerners", you needed to hit a certain lumens/watt for mass-market, otherwise you were a nice rough service bulb ..... which are less efficient ... which is primarily how they achieve long life. The additional filament supports are for vibration tolerance.
" Fluorescent-tube technology is nearly as old, and these as well, have seen their longevity decrease substantially as well. I'm not sure exactly how this planned-obsolescence was achieved, but I suspect it has something to do with allowing the slow infusion of oxygen through the base of the bulb. "
- Again, a ridiculously inaccurate statement. Fluorescent tubes used to last 10,000 hours (if you were lucky), and experience somewhat significant lumen depreciation over their life. Sure some lasted longer, but on average, they were useless pretty close to 10,000 hours.
- A pretty standard T8 lasts 20,000 hours and achieved 90-95% lumen maintenance over that time.
- 40000, 60000 and now even 80,000 hour tubes are available and they keep to that same 90-95% lumen maintenance over life. In addition to that, they have excellent color stability and efficiency has been maintained or improved
"Since LED lighting is a robust solid-state technology, I suspect the weak-points will have to be engineered in the driver circuitry, which in itself is quite robust. Possible weak-points are electrolytic capacitors and thermal heat dissipation. If the capacitors are allowed to degrade, and/or the temperature of the circuit is high, it may lead to earlier failure. i suspect it won't be long before we see LED lighting with a service-life similar to that of incandescent or CFL bulbs."
- Actually for cheap bulbs and lights, the trend is to pretty much eliminate the driver completely and the inherent failure point which pretty much throws your planned obsolescence argument out
- As well, most recent bulb designs like the slim-style and 4Flow almost completely decouple the heat of the LEDs from the driver increasing driver life. However, yes some suppliers have reduced warranties (and the associated carrying costs) because frankly at the price points, customers are not as concerned about 10 year life as they once were.
- On top of all this, standard driver technology and integration has improved (as well as Chinese MFG quality), hence the total number of components has gone down and the MTBF has gone up.
- In the commercial space, 5 year warranties are starting to be replaced by 7 and 10 year warranties. To support those warranties, improvements in design and components do need to be made.
Now GregP507 and LightDoctor, if you would like to provide some verifiable proof of your assertions, not just unsupported anecdotes, then the smart members of CPF will no doubt keep an open mind. However, if you cannot support your hypothesis, then I would put forward that it is not ethical to mislead people as CPF is viewed at least within our community as a good resource.
Last edited:
In 1992?They would've been put out of business simply by the advent of CFL's, let alone LED's.
Bullzeyebill
Flashaholic
Re: wow gold6
Lightdoctor, you are in violation of CPF rule 4 In this case baiting and flaming. Attack the post, not the poster.
Bill
HalfMan is a troll. Plain and simple. He's the semi self appointed guru of this board, who thinks he knows everything about all types of lighting and wants everyone else to bow down at his feet and learn from him. I for one will not bow down.
Lightdoctor, you are in violation of CPF rule 4 In this case baiting and flaming. Attack the post, not the poster.
Bill
