Are they being driven by an AC/DC converter? It is just possible but unlikely to say the least that the inverter frequency is exciting a resooance in the filament. I was once involved in investigating a case of mystery bulb failure which might have been caused by house wiring acting as an aerial and picking up low frequency transmissions from a shore to submarine transmitter.
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We have a lot of infrastructure and pre-infrastructure issues in the U.S. we’re not solving for a lot of reasons that probably mostly boil down to it-doesn’t-generate-profit.
I think it’s worth putting inside-the-house wiring and lighting on the list for environmental reasons and then pulling a John “We Choose To Go To The Moon” F. Kennedy on the whole bundle and dedicate 10-20 years to fixing the bunch of it.
It’s hard and expensive to fix our transport, the lead in our walls and pipes, the crumbling school buildings, and probably good dozen other things I’m forgetting about. But I don’t think we can afford to keep doing things the way we are.
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I didn’t say it shouldn’t be done… just that you know it is just is not going be easy and you will have to have some kind of transition workarounds. Or do like my former employer did when one of the data centers needed upgrading. While still a good building and it will be useful for a lab and legacy equipment it was old enough that there were no data center building codes and a retrofit was way more expensive than just building a new one. So new data center over where it is close to cheap electricity as well.
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So complex. You need no more than a beefed up version of the protocol used for microcontroller communications. Frame 1, unit address; frame 2, value. UI, central controller, Bluetooth to the handset using pseudo-RS232, sorted.
Sorry, I’m not conveying tone very well these days. I’m agreeing with both you and @dweller_below.
If I’m arguing anything, I’m arguing we only stopgap with the clear idea in all our heads that we are going to fix things so a hundred years from now our great grandkids aren’t asking our children why they all live in a crater running on a pile of AC-DC-AC-DC converters. 
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Filament hum is a thing, typically when dimmed however. Could be something specific with an odd voltage supply a little out of sync or a Hertz thing.
Frankly, I’m often pleasantly surprised that any of it turns on and works…
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I do, but only in my art studio. I like to work at night.
Does halogen lighting require an inverter? (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about E&M.)
Why do LED domestic lights fail? The weakest component is the smoothing capacitor. These electrolytics have a limited life that gets even shorter as the temperature goes up.
Well, but planned obsolescence isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s historical fact, yeah?
Sort of scooped by @anon73430903!
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90 years is wrong, the cartel collapsed by the start of ww2 and was officially supposed to end by 1955
No, halogen can run on 120v (or 240v, hey other parts of the world!). There are 24 and 12 volt one as well, but none of this requires an inverter, as it’s typically AC.
I mean, you can find some halogen 12v DC stuff for cars and boats and the like, but most of the time you just find a lamp to match your voltage and call it a day.
While I’m at it, I should mention that today I found out about studies that have been showing retinal damage created by blue light given out by LEDs at levels commonly found in the ones on houses.
While I radiation causes issues at the front of the eye it appears that ranges around 440nm are dangerous to the back of the eye and may be the cause of blindness from looking at arc welding or eclipses without protection.
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Snow blindness is caused by just this. It’s why the Inuit for centuries have worn a simple but effective form of eye protection:
Winter is brutal in many ways, but perhaps none more so than its piercing glare on your eyes. Sunglasses: not just for summer.
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No, that can actually heal, we’re talking about increases to age-related macular degeneration and actual permanent damage to the retina instead.
The more I read about this the more concerned I get about twenty years hence.
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Oh. I thought that’s what snow blindness was. Yeah, short-wavelength light is not kind to the retina. I wear sunglasses pretty much daily in the winter for this reason.
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As Sarandon recently argued: the status quo is not the safe option.
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No. Not necessary and even harmful.
