Streetlights Are Turning Purple
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
"The purple streetlights are a result of the phosphor coating delaminating from the LEDs"
>The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Rest of the article follows a similar pop-culture style which leads to a lot of unnecessary filler.
"The mystery of the purple lights appears to be both more mundane and more worrisome than anyone has realized — a mood-indigo check-engine light on the entire infrastructure of modernity. When LED streetlights start changing color for no apparent reason, it's a visual cue that we might need to rethink, just a bit, how we build the future."
Or maybe you're desperately stretching for a hook for a story about a quirk of LEDs.
On the minus side, the article seems to try to make some weird, more general point that is just scaremongering: "omg the sky is falling, sometimes components with hidden defects cause failure on a large scale years later".
The author also suggests this has never happened before, which is of course false. I guess they never heard of the "capacitor plague" cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague, which was a lot more serious.
Maybe they should have done what was done years ago, install a bright white light behind a colored lense.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330676601_Degradati...
They note that "Chromaticity shift in the output light is one of the most common failures in LEDs [...] [Chromaticity shift] is considered as one of the most important measures of quality and is often studied and reported" (page 6) so it sounds like this could hardly be new info to the manufacturer.
LPS is such a better technology for streetlighting but sadly the sudden swing to LED has made commercial production of the bulbs non-viable (esp. as LPS lamps actually are long lived, and so are replaced infrequently) and so even places that realized that the benefits of LED streetlights were largely fiction have found themselves forced onto the inferior technology.
Edit: There's some nice information at http://lamptech.co.uk/Documents/SO%20Introduction.htm
Could they be dumping the defective but still functional lights on markets with clever marketing?
I don't think the part about monitors is true. For a first few years on the market, flat-screen monitors used fluorescent lamps for backlight, specifically CCFL. Backlight made with white LEDs arrived a decade later.
LED backlit screens are so much more reliable!
Manufacturing defect, Evergy will replace.
... eyeroll