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Comment by ericj5 | Hacker News Reader

Do blue LEDs on home electronics bother anyone else at night time as much as it does me? They appear so much brighter to me than other colors

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I have a drawer full of black electrical tape and small round dot stickers almost entirely due to blue leds. Though it's convenient on everything. The electrical tape blocks it out entirely, for the most part. The round stickers let through some light so is great for dimming it down a bit or just use multiple to block it completely.

I think they're so widespread now largely because they were so expensive when they first started becoming common that they were used in expensive equipment, and became a way of making things look higher end.

I’ve found that for many of them (particularly the smaller ones) I can color them in with a black pen in a way that dims them ~95%, that way they’re not overbearing but I can still see whatever status they were trying to tell me.

Ballpoints or other fine-tips tend to follow the shape of the recess and it does a pretty tidy job.

I've got a laptop charger with a blue led. It's awful, I have to remember to unplug it at night, even in the other room. I've forgotten before and woke up to use the washroom only to find the whole living room lit up from the little led and I'd feel instantly wide awake.

Contrast that with a USB charger I picked up in an emergency, unaware it had a red led that was on constantly as long as the cord was receiving power, fucking terrible design and I've thankfully replaced it, but it didn't bother me too badly when I had to use it in my room at night. I could still sleep and everything.

Yes, I was getting annoyed by an access point I bought that had blue status lights but amazingly it has a setting that turns them off either always or during specified hours. I'm floored that every device doesn't allow you to disable them.

I remember a Digikey catalogue c.2002? where it seemed like blue LEDs were the star of the show. Page after page of this new wonder. And then the following decade-long flood of blue-LED-festooned consumer products, where every new bit of kit needed to visually proclaim how new-fangled it was by blasting out that particularly shrill wavelength of visible light.

So cool, but so annoying.

Yes, I have LightDims (https://www.lightdims.com/) on nearly everything.

> Do blue LEDs on home electronics bother anyone else at night time as much as it does me?

Don't have home electronics in your bedroom is my advice.

Easier said than done unfortunately.

For example: it's hard to get through summer without a fan or air conditioner in your bedroom by me. A surprising number of those come with always on lights and it's not always clear until you plug them in.

Beyond that there's just "not everyone has the luxury of a single purpose room." Especially now, lots of people need to setup their home office in their bedroom. I have a vacuum with an always on indicator light, and the only good place to put it is a bedroom. Some people have studios and their entire apartment is their "bedroom."

All in: you're right, it's best to keep your electronics out of the bedroom, but that's not always practical and way to many things have unnecessary status lights.

I just black tape everything in my bedroom. I don't need to see a light to know the fan is on.

Having grown up in a small house and spent quite a lot of time in a friends house which is a lot bigger (I'm still young, so this was very much post video games for example), I think the mental separation of having multiple rooms in a house (rather than everything being done in my bedroom) is probably worth another 5 or 10 percent on exams for me at least. The idea of having a "games room" for example is utterly unthinkable to me still, for example.

I have a guitar pedal that uses blue and red LEDs to indicate mode. Part of my bedtime ritual is to stomp it to the red mode.

I have an electric kettle that holds water in a vessel with transparent sides. When the kettle is turned on and heating water it illuminates the water with blue LEDs.

It doesn't bother me at night time as the light goes on only when it is in use. But the fact that it has lights at all is bothering.

My kettle's thermostat only releases the power switch, but doesn't actually cut the power, so if something is blocking the switch from going to the "off"(up) position - like a large plate or something similar - it boils off all the water and then starts burning itself.

Happen once and I only noticed because the light was on and I couldn't hear the water boiling because it wasn't there anymore.

A deaf person wouldn't be able to hear the kettle going through its phases.

Disability-first design has a way of blending in for people who aren't yet disabled.

Haha! I have this one too. I’ve always wondered, wouldn’t red represent the fact it’s being heated better? Anyway, I have to admit it looks cool unfortunately

That's the feature that sold me on electric kettles!

The one in my humidifier bothered me so much I opened the dang thing and was pleasantly surprised to find the LED on its own tiny board which I then disconnected.

There has to be another way of showing an appliance is receiving power which is both visible at night and in broad daylight. The super-bright LED is overkill in anything but the brightest lighting scenario, and makes any room immediately ugly and unpleasant after 6pm.

I have a hard drive enclosure in the bedroom that was too bright to my taste. So much so that I opened it to remove it (which, incidentally, was really easy, it was plugged in the board via a connector, I didn't even need to cut wires or anything)

While blue LEDs are wonderful to have, I don’t get why anyone would add them to a product as an indicator.

They are annoying and typically insanely bright. Also, just because something has bluetooth, does mean that a blue LED is legally required.

When Mr. Akasaki's invention started making waves, blue LEDs were still more expensive. So a blue LED was a signifier of quality. They became more affordable, so everyone started putting them everywhere. And made them bright so you would notice.

Probably an analog is curving a 42" screen designed to be viewed on a couch across a living room.

Overbright indicators of any kind on electronics bother me. The brightest are indeed usually blue, but green and red are also offenders.

Yes! I cover them all up with electrical tape or LightDims

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