Why the Lightbulb Conspiracy Theory Gets the Science Wrong
You have been mislead about lightbulbs
The story that manufacturers colluded to shorten lightbulb lifespans ignores a fundamental trade-off: longer-lasting filaments are dimmer and less efficient. I explain why the Phoebus cartel standardized lifespans to prevent a race to the bottom in product quality, noting that modern technology like LED finally broke this physical limitation.
Reality rarely fits into nice stories; even something so obvious like products designed to break are bad often isn't.
- freediddy
I've never had LED lights last anywhere near the purported 5-7 year timeframe. The worst ones are the small decorative ones with the tinier screw part that my house seems to have an inordinate number of. Those last maybe 6 months and then they start getting dimmer and then all the lights in the circuit get worse at once. I like LED lights immensely but the idea they last even 2 years is a lie in my opinion.
- cge
While the author mentions that they are not trying to defend the Phoebus cartel, I think they may inadvertently be somewhat misleading in their explanation. What they are saying is, from an engineering standpoint, true. But my understanding of the argument against the Phoebus cartel is that it was using legitimate engineering points as the official justification for profiteering business collusion: that the points were real, but were not the actual reasons for their decisions, or reasonable justification for the particular choices of values they enforced.
In doing so, the article perhaps obscures the point that business collusion, I expect, is more often built around legitimate reasoning taken to illegitimate extents and conclusions, than around outright fabrications.
- wolfgangK
BTW, I don't understand why having the driver converting AC to DC inside the LED spots is the default. For a new house, it seems to make sense to me to have at least one external driver for a ceiling of spots, if not one per floor (not one for the whole house because pf the drop in voltage). But 24V led spots seem much less common and I cannot find many reviews.
Any idea why it's not more common ? It seems efficiency and thermals would be much easier to optimize without the size constraint, plus economy of scale with components.
Any specific 24V led spots / bulbs to recommend ?
- Aardwolf
> In order to put the emission peak in the visible spectrum, the filament would need to run at ~5700 °C (...) No metal can survive these conditions: Tungsten melts at "only" 3422 °C.
Hmm, can we possibly find something that does survive at 5700 °C to use as a light source? Perhaps molten metal confined in a magnetic field...
- mreome
For an even deeper dive into this topic...
Technology Connections:
Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated
- dybovalex
Tungsten will burn in an oxygen atmosphere, therefore standard light bulbs actually use an inert gas (like argon). The gas pressure slows down tungsten evaporation and prevents oxidation. The main reason for short living of the bulbs is that the filament gradually evaporating over time until it thins out and snaps.
- comrade1234
There are varying levels of quality for the same bulb. I don't know what the difference is in the bulb but they make a difference in the order of years.
I'm in Switzerland where we can no longer buy halogen bulbs. Every bulb in our apartment is led except 7 bulbs under the cabinets in our kitchen. I used to buy bulbs from a hardware store but they would only last about a year. When they banned halogen bulbs I found that I could buy them from a photography supplier for more money. The product number was different but it had the right specs. They've been going for three years and no burn outs.
- BGizzle
You have been misled about spelling misled