For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out, now that's coming to LED bulbs

boing
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Liked.:love_letter:

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Your comments are ruddier phosphor.

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Well, I was really talking about the skillet industry as a whole rather than these companies in particular. (I know they’re older, but not whether they were personally the titans of the industry in the early 1900’s)

They are fine companies who meet a niche market very nicely and, as far as I know, are doing decently well.

My point was really that if I was in charge of a company in the lighting industry, I suspect I’d be looking at the future of having to fire 95% of my workers in a company 1/20th the size with less than equanimity. That I might have a nicely stable niche company at the end of it (partially because the industry was so moribund, no-one wanted to bother to compete) would be cold consolation.

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I have half a closet full of GE Reveal incandescents with their lovely light spectrum stashed away. By the time I use them up I hope that there will be a replacement bulb of similar quality and cost. Or perhaps I’ll be dead first.

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Actually it means no such thing. It means that a %age X will fail on average in 2 years, where X is determined by what the manufacturer is prepared to bear in warranty costs.
My 6 year old laptop had a 3 year warranty and so far nothing has failed. Since failure under warranty would cost far more than the profit on first sale, we can safely assume that such failures are not common.

An acquaintance at a motor vehicle parts maker was asked by a large US car company how much money they could save if certain parts were designed only to last reliably for 75000 miles, but achieve 6 sigma on the 75000 miles minimum. His answer was that they would be much more expensive, since although the current parts had an average life in excess of 100000 miles, only 95% made it to 75000 - by which time, of course, they were out of warranty and were a revenue source for the maker.

I hope this makes it clear, but I know reliability engineering is often counter-intuitive.

I can’t argue with Wikipedia (you really can’t, editors delete stuff) but I guess this story is far more complicated.
In 1937, during the stated period, GE acquired a patent for coiled coil filament bulbs which have a much higher output per watt than plain coils but cost more. About the same time, a Hungarian engineer was introducing krypton filled bulbs. Incandescent bulbs were an arms race.
Other articles on Phoebus suggest it was purely and simply a market share/price cartel. The fact is that tungsten is weird stuff to play with and nobody would turn down a chance to produce better quality filaments at lower cost. The life expectancy and light output of a given bulb design depends entirely on how accurately the filament can be made.

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Christ on a crutch I hate when tinfoil loony talk turns out to be right.

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Okay, that got my chuckle of the day. Thanks.

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I’ve seen this really neat effect where you run a string of cool white LEDs alongside a string of white incandescents and together they make a nice silver and gold.

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I built a shed in the back yard last year. I experimented with running it off-grid using a solar panel and LED strips. My research (links below) showed it was a mature technology. The implementation was straight-forward. Now, my shed is brightly lit. I can run the lights 24/7 and it makes a small demand on the battery. It only takes about 1 hour of sunlight to completely recharge the battery. I have lots of left-over power, in case I need to power my phone, or my laptop, or my wife’s CPAP in an emergency.

I am thinking seriously of doing the same thing for my house. Even if I have to run separate, parallel independent power distribution for the low voltage DC, it seems to be an easy affordable win.

There were only two unexpected bits.

  • DC moves a lot of amps, so you have to use thicker wire than you expect. I calculated the max load that I expected any of my circuits to carry, then doubled the required wire thickness for my wiring.
  • My research implies that you get more long term chemical mobility effects with DC. So, you have to be REAL careful which conducting metals you use in any circuit. Don’t let aluminium and copper touch each other.

My implementation is a simple 12 volt system. It is similar to a car or a mobile home. I mail-ordered a bunch of expensive parts. But you can buy many of the parts cheaper at an auto parts store or a junk yard.

Steps:

  • Do a bunch of research before I started.
  • Put a single 100 watt solar panel on the roof
  • Ground the frame of the solar panel. Make sure the connector between the aluminium frame and the copper cable is stainless steel.
  • Run cables from the solar panel to the charge controller.
  • Run cables from the charge controller to the deep-cycle battery.
  • Ground the negative terminal of the battery.
  • Run a main main feed from each terminal of the battery to a separate buss bar.
  • Run each power circuit. The negative side of the circuit comes directly from the negative buss bar. The positive side of the circuit goes from the positive buss bar, to a fuse box. Then the rest of the circuit goes to a switch. Then it goes to your load.
  • The loads are low power LED strips. Or a 12 volt to USB converter. Eventually, I will add something to provide 110 AC.

Some of my research links:

Notes on copper wire thickness:

  • Use different, consistent colors for Ground and Hot.
  • Use different, consistent colors for guage of wire.
  • 10 AWG gauge: 1 ohm/1000 feet. 55 amps max.
  • 12 AWG gauge: 1.6 ohm/1000 feet. 41 amps max.
  • 14 AWG gauge: 2.5 ohm/1000 feet. 32 amps max.
  • 16 AWG gauge: 4 ohm/1000 feet. 22 amps max.

Partial list of parts:

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Token Ring FTW. If you can find those funky connectors.

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I’d love to try all these new-tech wizbang lighting solutions, but my old Nernst Glowbar lights just refuse to die…

[edit]
Plus, i like the steampunk look of the things.

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I think we need a revolution in light connectors and fixtures similar to the florescent one. What we are doing now is just stupid. An LED fixture doesn’t have the same constraints as an incandescent. It is inefficient and constraining to treat it as an incandescent fixture. Plus, we are wasting a lot of power in multiple AC to DC conversions.

The existing housing AC power distribution systems work well to cheaply deliver a lot of power to a lot of places, but we need to rethink things to efficiently deal with our many new low-power devices. Both Power Over Ethernet (POE) and USB are sorta competing in this space. But, they are primarily a communication spec, and secondarily a power distribution spec. So, they lack the brutal simplicity and redundancy of our existing housing power distribution systems.

If I were king for a day, I’d declare a new housing power distribution spec that looked something like:

  • A couple standard form factor/heat dissipation requirements for a central housing AC to 24 volt DC conversion box.
  • A couple standard sizes of central fuse boxes/circuit breakers for distributing 24v DC power.
  • A standard type and color of Romex cable for distributing 24v DC.
  • A standard wall outlet for 24v DC.
  • A standard ceiling support/outlet for 24v DC lighting fixtures.
  • A standard ceiling support/outlet for 12v DC lighting fixtures. This outlet would be fed with 24v DC and would step it down to 12v DC.
  • A couple standard form factors for disk/flat LED light fixtures.
  • A few standard form factors for flat bar LED light fixtures.

Then in a hundred years, I would be able to plug simpler, cheaper, more efficient laptops, TVs, games, light fixtures into my standard wall jacks and ceiling fixtures.

In the mean time, I am converting a few of my larger florescent fixtures to LED. I gut the insides. Mount a single AC to 12v DC converter somewhere inside. Then mount some LED strips in place of the florescent bulbs. It costs a little more, but the result uses a lot less power, lasts a lifetime, gives a lot of light, and is easy to fix and maintain.

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This article would be a lot more interesting to everyone outside the USA if it wasn’t focused on DMCA. Cory, given your own, rather eclectic, background, you can do better than this rather parochial piece.

The daft thing is that, as an IoT specialist (and have been, before the Internet of Things was a thing, or at least that name existed for it), I agree with a lot of the more general points, but the concentration on one country’s law rankles.

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unfortunately, many of the more objectionable elements of the dmca were wrought from treaties that had already been negotiated. as well, the trade agreements the u.s. has negotiated over the course of the past 20 years have globalized much of the rest of the dmca. this makes it much more than a parochial issue.

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It was the Germans, kinda. Before the Royals started doing it in England in the 19th century, cos Vicky Married Albert, we just had a log instead. Everyone got drunk then set it on fire, which is a good foundation to build a party on.

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I remember showing that to a libertarian once, and he dismissed it as “pro-regulation propaganda,” because “the optimum rational outcome for any of those corporations would have been to produce superior bulbs for the Free Market and Competition to decide on,” so, therefore, it couldn’t have actually happened.

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Please don’t say duty-cycle when you mean MTBF.

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It’s such a shame we can only work with humans, and homo economicus do not exist.

And conservatives/libertarians say I’m working against human nature.

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The problem is updating all the existing wiring in homes and more so large buildings… That is a very hard and expensive problem.
The reason CFLs and LED lights have the classic socket form factor is that is what is in 99.999999999999% of structures and it is going to be a long road till that is gone.

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You should look at the recommended cable sizes for marine use, since small craft are usually 12 or 24V. i have tended to go for a 3% volt drop (because 10% means you are throwing away 7% of the cost of your installation, which is a lot more than wire costs.)
Also, use crimp connects for any high ampersge DC circuits. Get a proper tool.

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