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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Do not buy "bulbs," they are hopeless. Just buy a whole fixture with a big aluminium PCB and directly bonded chips.

My friend's bathroom light that is now a strobe light and the landlord has yet to replace because it requires an electrician to replace the whole fixture would like a word with you.

>requires an electrician to replace the whole fixture would like a word with you.

Kind of like how replacing a gas dryer "requires" a licensed plumber to make the gas connection or you're "required" to drive no faster than the speed limit at all times.

You're getting the runaround. If it was in a vacant apartment that they were showing to people it would already be fixed. If they cared about getting it done ASAP they'd either shell out the big bucks or ignore the law.

Edit: I think a lot of people on HN don't realize how simple swapping failed parts is. Swapping a failed water heater or electrical fixture (especially light fixtures) is a waste of the skilled tradesman's time and the customer's money. Even an incompetent landlord or maintenance service should be able to get it done.

yeah, darn those pesky laws around liability getting in the way of some good old-fashioned handiwork.

As long as you're just replacing the fixture and not running new line a handy man type person can do it legally.

In some jurisdictions.

IIRC, Australia requires an electrician for even this sort of minor work.

Generally, a landlord wants someone licensed with insurance to handle something like that on the off chance something goes wrong. I was going to fix the fixture in my bathroom that was shorting a bit and burning out bulbs myself. Thankfully I called my owner and he had an electrician come in because it turns out a lot of the conduit above the fixture needed replacing due to age.

People who do handyman work for a living can and should carry liability coverage.

example: https://www.progressivecommercial.com/business-insurance/han...

The majority of people doing handyman work without a contractor license are effectively judgment proof so liability coverage is kind of pointless.

Judgement proof typically means you have no money/assets to come after, so even if someone wins a judgement against you they aren't getting paid. That's why you ensure you hire a handyman with liability insurance, so that there's something (the insurance payout) to collect in the event of a problem. Do you mean something else by judgement proof?

> As long as you're just replacing the fixture and not running new line a handy man type person can do it legally.

That likely depends on local codes; not sure about light fixtures specifically, but I definitely have encountered variations in different cities in the same county when it comes to ceiling fans.

Few plumbers or electricians with a license are going to waste their time replacing your dryer or light fixture. They probably will send their (unlicensed) employee who's paid a couple bucks over minimum wage to do it. Their time is better spent on jobs that actually require their expertise. You know, the kind of jobs where you'd pay extra for a credentialed expert anyway. They probably will never set eyes on whatever you called them for.

Those laws (especially when combined with licensing requirements that exclude all but those who have a full time career in that field) are a massive hindrance to individuals and many businesses. They usually amount to little more than a potential transfer of liability. If your house burns down maybe you can try to point the finger at the licensed professional (good luck at that). The only thing it accomplishes is making it (slightly) harder for people who are habitually grossly negligent to keep working in that field. This is a non-benefit IMO because so much business is based on reputation anyway. The downside is that by artificially raising the minimum price access to access skilled labor you cause all sorts of work to be forgone because people can't afford it.

Plenty of house fires have been started by people who couldn't afford to pay an electrician but could afford an extension cord.

Edit: Since I'm apparently so wrong does anyone want to explain why. A down-vote without a reply is roughly synonymous with "your opinion is inconvenient to me but I cannot refute it"

Because the majority of HN reader have always either paid someone or simply never been involved with:

* Home rennovation (requiring city signoff)

* Home repairs

* Rental repairs

* Court over repairs or alterations to property

> A down-vote without a reply

...is using the downvote correctly. Downvoting is for comments that are not productive contributions to the kind of discussion desired on HN, responding to any post that merits a downvote is increasing the noise-to-signal ratio.

The law once mandated that you hire the services of a licensed electrician to replace a lightbulb. Imagine if the same laws where applied to tech. Need to update Microsoft office? No way arround it you need to hire the services of a licensed IT professional! You might get electrocuted in the process not being a professional. So it all makes sense.

It's not really possible to burn down your apartment building if you fail at updating Microsoft Office, so that's one big difference for gas/electrical laws.

Cite please. Was that ever really a law anywhere other than Victoria, Australia?

Actually it is the law at every trade show I've ever exhibited at, just about to the point where you can't plug in anything without a union electrician doing it. One can usually get away with plugging in a laptop, but certainly if you need anything more than the single standard 10A 2-outlet power drop, expect to pay and wait for the official electrician (and they will kick you out of the show for violations).

Edit: I've seen this at least in NY, Florida, California

> it is the law at every trade show I've ever exhibited at

I've read that you can't move chairs, etc, either. I understand it's part of the contracts between venues and unions.

That's not a law, just an event venue rule based on their union contracts.

I have experience in this (US Midwest) Most licensing regulation for these things are for professional commerce, and the more general the more they about demonstrating financial means to cover liability and/or a means of taxation, education or demonstration of work is of minimal to no importance. Aquiring general contractor licenses I often found myself using a web 2 fax service to submit pdf documents to a fax number... over T38/VoIP to the building department who could print the fax from their email as they required physical copies to be filed.

It's rarely criminal for homeowners to DIY within building code regulations, permits be damned. When the bank owns part, appraisal or home sales happen, insurance policies are involved non disclosure can be fraud.

My 2¢ on DIY from general contracting experience,

Water: Undetected water leaks can be fucking expensive, consider location and worst case scenario when making decisions. Don't use shit like AS SEEN ON TV toilet tank gaskets or tool free water valves in a production environment.

Gas: Thread seal tape is a lubricant that helps seat solid metal (usually) connections to create a seal, not a sealant. (can be welding agent for polymers)

Water, dish soap, spray bottle helps test connections.

Gases have different smells or lack there of, different densities (sink, rise, displace oxygen), can combust in different concentration ranges, etc so understand this.

Electric: Changing the load or adding potential for increased load on a circuit (new fixtures, receptacles, breaker, fuse, conductor, etc) could cause arcing and lead to fire in unexpected ways. Sections of copper wire get replaced with smaller gauge at some point over a properties history and then get sealed back up in a wall, among all kinds of other wacky shit. Understand the physics and dangers.

Connections are important, and common points of failure. They should be appropriately terminated and enclosed. Use the proper size wire nuts.

All: Valves, switches, and people are flaky so plan accordingly. Test shut-off or failsafe mechanisms and have a plan for the worst case scenario.

Why do you even need a landlord or maintenance service to swap a light fixture? Replacing a fixture is a bit more work than replacing a bulb, but it's not exactly hard.

It's a shame that ceiling light fixtures in the US are directly wired and screwed in.

In other countries (both in Sweden where I lived before and here in Japan where I live now) there are special ceiling power outlets, so replacing a light fixture is just a question of unplugging and plugging in again. Japan: https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4279/35698610491_8787f45eae.j... https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4230/35790814576_382943d360.j... Sweden: https://www.eldirekt.se/pub_images/medium/1890776__13222.jpg

There's a wide range of quality ceiling light fixtures that you just clip into place, and the LED chips are on a huge metal heatsink so they run very cool https://panasonic.jp/light/led/products.html

I used to think that, and I changed my mind. The fancy retrofit fixtures are almost universally flood lights where the diffuser is close enough to the ceiling plane that it’s visible from far off axis. The result is that the lights on the far side of the room cause unpleasant glare.

With a retrofit lamp, you can use a high quality trim baffle (these things cost about $12, are quite well designed, and are probably already in your house and put a civilized PAR30 or PAR38 LED in, and you get a much better light distribution.

Back when lamps were all standardized incandescents, fixtures could focus on quality. Now, with LEDs, I suspect that manufacturers focus on how cheaply they can build a driver and assembly that meets some minimum performance criteria. So, with retrofit lamps, at least the fixture design is separate.

(There are exceptions, of course. Very high quality dedicated fixtures exist, but they’re quite expensive.)

There's a lot of junk to be sure but tens of Philips & GE bulbs have been doing great for me for a couple years now. They don't run that hot either.

I was surprised at the early failures of my Sylvania bulbs. Had expected that going with a brand that has been in the light bulb industry for a long time, I would get decent quality, but they've all died in under a year. Now IKEA bulbs are my go-to, the mix of selection, quality and price is impressive compared to what I've seen but I haven't thoroughly researched this. Do Philips or GE do better?

The last I looked at them, Ikea bulbs ran hot the packaging advised not to be used in small/enclosed fixtures because they could overheat. Do you find that to be the case with the ones you're using?

I have a couple of 2W/80lm ikea bulbs for bedside lighting, and they are room temperature.

I also own some 5W/400lm ikea bulbs for general room lighting and they do run warm, maybe something like 40°C ± 5°C. The fixture/thingy around the bulb is roughly the size of a fist.

The bulbs are pretty new so I can't say anything about the lifespan of the bulbs, but the price is reasonable, they are not the fancy smart bulbs.

I have only my anecdotal experience, but I'm happy with the Philips & GE bulbs. As I said, they both seem to run pretty cool. Philips makes what seem to be inexpensive-but-quality bulbs, as well as dimmable LED's that red-shift like incandescent used to. They also make a 60W yellow bulb that has very low blue emissions, uncommon for LED bulbs. Some of GE's LED bulbs have really high CRI which I like for making the basement more cheery.

One thing to pay close attention to on the package is whether the bulb can be run in an enclosed fixture. The package should always specify. Following this guidance and picking the right bulb for the fixture will help ensure you get the service life you expect. I don't think I've found any 100W equivalents that are OK'd for fully enclosed application, and 60W equivalent is like 50/50.

I bought one of these for my basement hallway when I was finishing it out. My only concern is that a normal fixture has few failure modes; just the bulb. But if this fixture fails, I have to find a new one that will fit in the same spot. Hopefully it will last til I'm dead.

I've started doing this. Bought a large panel fixture and a separate high-quality LED current source and it has been absolutely great. Next time I build a house I'll probably run all the lighting circuits on a hefty 24VDC main power supply with small DC/DC regulators on every fixture. There's no reason nowadays why lighting circuits should be 120 or 240VAC.

power loss and price of copper is a good reason to bring 120/240vac as far as possible.

Like I said in a previous comment, with LEDs, power requirements are small and distances within a house are small. Coupled with a resonably high but safe voltage (like 24 or 36VDC), there's no reason why 14 gauge copper wire couldn't work just fine for a lighting circuit.

I wish there was more selection available of that kind of thing— when I last looked a year or so ago there was basically just one option at Home Depot, and it had the aesthetics of something you'd put in the laundry room.

Worse than that, though, it was unusable with a dimmer switch; the whole thing visibly flickered every few seconds. I felt bad returning it because I really wanted it to work out, but the quality just wasn't there.

I have an LED fixture that I got from home depot that is dimmable, no flickering. It's connected to a normal dimmer switch. I bought it about a year ago.

My other LED fixtures were ordered through aliexpress. The fixtures were fine, but the transformers that came with the fixtures all failed and had to be replaced (overheated, melted the plastic casing). This turned out to be tricky, because the LED drivers available on ebay and aliexpress are never the same, there are constantly new shoddy ones from noname brands, and the ones I had bought before tend to be nowhere to be found when I need a new one.

I didn't know that the fixtures themselves had dimming features. I put "dimmable" LEDs in my can lights in the basement, and I'm really unimpressed with them. They don't flicker[1], but they don't get very dim, either.

[1] Except after a power outage - then they eerily flash on and off like something out of Stranger Things.

That is the constant frustration of this economic model. Either you buy the driver (or the LED bulbs for that matter) from a shop in your own regulated economic area (like the EEA) and have them handle quality assurance (including the selection of the product) and warrantee, or you get the same product directly from China for a fifth of the price and have to handle the occasional failure yourself.

The sad thing is that the latter is still cheaper than buying from a 'local' shop.

I have had good success with, and have been happy with the quality of _MeanWell_ LED drivers and power supplies. You can get them through Mouser, Newark, Digikey etc.

Honestly I can't be bothered to replace the fixtures.

Edit: looking at the price of fixtures, the economic argument is poor as well.

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