How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?
I’ve bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said “up to 20,000 hours” which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don’t).
They don’t? What are you talking about?
Yes Lemmy is just as dogshit, if not more than Reddit in terms of smug bullshit replies. I’ll be downvoted to oblivion by saying this so hopefully someone sees my comment before it goes to the bottom…
Edit: yep. Already downvoted lol. God forbid i criticize Lemmy. I guess ya’ll ain’t interested in making it a better place?
? What are you talking about?
The same reason that western countries refused to buy the extremely hard to break Superfest glasses manufactured in the GDR (East Germany) during the Cold War: planned obsolescence and consumable goods mentality in the interest of profit (they got a west German salesman to take the glasses to a trade show, and nobody gave a shit, because part of the industry’s profit model at the time was the sale of new glass due to breakage.
In point of fact: better, longer lasting LED bulbs DO exist, but they’re only sold in Dubai (due to the monarchy there basically decreeing that they wanted that to happen, so Phillips made them for them, but will NOT sell them outside of the country, because it would kill their sales elsewhere).
The same reason that filament based incandescent bulbs burned out. Planned obsolescence.
There’s a very real conspiracy (not just a theory) about the “arms race” in light bulbs for long lasting bulbs. Eventually, they made bulbs that lasted so long that they stopped making money.
Lighting manufacturers intentionally made worse bulbs to simply improve profits. They realized that they were driving themselves out of business. Everyone in the light bulb industry agreed to stop development of even longer lasting bulbs, just so they could continue to move units and make money.
Also, with LEDs, the thing that burns out fastest isn’t the LEDs (there’s usually a dozen… ish, in an LED bulb)… It’s the electronics. The power needs to be converted from line power to something the LEDs can handle, which is usually DC. So there’s a full power supply in the bulb to convert AC to DC, with a certain voltage to power the LEDs.
Sometimes this conversation is simple, a full bridge rectifier with little more than a filtering capacitor, other times it’s very complex.
The power supply in the bulb is usually what fails first.
Stop buying the cheap ones. :-)
