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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

The lighting looks nice, but I think it'll be a little unfortunate when the strip starts failing. Other than the strip that shelving could last decades, but the lights won't.

I've had mixed luck with LED strip, -- with some becoming glitchy after only a few months of operation.

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I've had some start to twitch and it's usually a bad connector. When I first installed my LED lights the connectors were actually a destructive type. They would pierce the strip to make the connection. The resulted in shaky connections that would fail easily. I then upgraded to non-destructive connectors and they work much easier.

They're easy to replace, and decent ones last a really long time.

If you undervolt them slightly, the chips will basically never fail.

Sounds like you bought cheap LED strips. The slightly more expensive ones are a lot more reliable.

In fact, I bought fairly expensive ones but I think what I got were fakes. (Thanks amazon). I subsequently found a vendor that I get reliable parts from -- but the point remains that regardless of how good those strips are, the shelves will outlive them.

You could say that about any lightning source used anywhere. In general, a piece of wood is going to outlast and electrical device.

Right, but if e.g. it were fixtures with socketed bulbs they could be replaced.

I built large bookshelves last year (though not as cool as the posts) and didn't integrate lighting for this reason-- and it's really good that I didn't because it turned out the strip I was using at the time didn't last long.

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