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That's funny, I remember going through incandescent bulbs pretty quickly. I always knew where the extra light bulbs were in the house and they were a not-uncommon grocery list item.

It's been a long time since I thought of that. I don't keep spare bulbs around anymore and can't remember the last time an LED bulb burnt out.

Yeah. It's not like changing incandescent bulbs was a weekly occurrence for me but it was certainly not at all a rare occurrence.

My experience is opposite of yours. I have not yet had to change an LED light in the last 8-9 years since I started using them and replacing incandescent ones in my apartment. On the other hand I remember changing incandescent ones quite often and using up all the surplus ones I had after I started the transition to LED.

Yeah ~10 years of LED bulbs and I've never replaced one. I've moved multiple times and brought my bulbs with me. Used to have a drawer with a bunch of incandescent ones ready to go because it was a regular occurrence.

> I've never seen more than 15000 hours from an LED bulb at best.

With the LED bulbs at our home (many of which have failed!), the problem is always the inverter. They just start flickering wildly and inconsistently one day, which is never pleasant, and they need to be replaced. It's frustrating because when the LEDs have stable power, they can produce just as much brightness as before, but their integrated power-conversion circuitry sucks in reliability.

I wonder if it’d be worth it to centralize the inverter…

gjsman-1000's point and yours make sense and somewhere on the page it was suggested to start running DC power just for LED lighting in homes. Until then, our new plan is to use LED light strips and stop buying LED bulbs. The idea is that the strips have an external power supply so I'm hoping the LED's will have the lifetime they deserve.

This is where the idea meets the real world implementation. Yes, LED's can last longer, but the additional electrics used to convert from house-hold AC power can't.

The lifespan on incandescent isn’t a conspiracy. Cheap bright incandescents don’t last very long.

The centennial light was neither cheap or bright - presently it’s about the strength of a 4-watt nightlight. You put enough power through a thick filament it will glow for a very very long time, but no one wants to illuminate their house that way!

It is not a conspiracy, it was a well known cartel that made light bulbs horrible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

The 1200h are slightly above the 1000h target put in place by the cartel.

It's still happening to LEDs as well. Big brands are over driving LED chips, degrading their lifespan significantly.

The story of the Dubai bulbs show that the industry could easily make bulbs that last (even) longer, but there's no money in selling products you'll never need to replace.

My understanding - which may be wrong - was that long-life bulbs used more electricity to operate and that the efficiency gains of a 1,000/hr bulb reduced the overall cost.

So, making up numbers, a 2,500 hour bulb may cost $5 to replace and would incur $20 of electricical charges for a total cost of $25 or 1 Cent/hr. Meanwhile, 1,000 hour bulbs would cost $10 ($4 * 2.5) while incurring $10 of electrical charges for a cost $20 or 0.8 Cent/hr... even factoring in the cost of having to replace the bulbs.

For me, LED bulbs have a failure curve like any other electronic device: high level initially and quickly levelling off to zero. I've probably had... 10% of my bulbs purchased in the last decade or so go back to the store because they've either failed or started flickering. Outside of that, I have zero failures after having the bulb for a month or two. I have a box of bulbs and some of them are bulbs I bought years ago and pulled out of my house when I moved, and I've used them at various apartments since. Still going great.

Edit: one other thing, I'm also sensitive to the cooling needs of LEDs, so maybe that helps. At my last apartment, I had the 'ceiling boob' style built-in fixtures which didn't allow proper airflow for the LED. I built a little spacer and got a longer mounting rod to allow a 1/8" gap around the bottom, central hole and the top edge of the glass. That kept the LEDs cool and wasn't noticeable.

I've seen it go both ways, at least for LEDs.

My house came with installed LED bulbs that were absolute shit. Within a year all the can lights eventually would turn a purpley dim color and slowly all started to fail within the same time and would fail to turn on. Same thing with the smaller fixtures - all started to fail around the same time.

Each time one failed I replaced it with a higher quality LED and every bulb has now been replaced. Most lights I've only replaced once and it's been 6-7 years at least for many of them without any problems.

Previously I used to use incandescent lights and replacing them was a frequent occurrence and just an expected thing to maintain.

You're buying terrible bulbs if you've never seen one last 15k hours. Just buy some reputable branded bulbs (e.g. Phillips) rather than no-name cheapo crap from Amazon.

I can't really remember how long incandescent bulbs lasted, given that it's been over a decade since anyone in the EU used them... But good LED bulbs last plenty long enough.

It lasts long because it's not turned off. When an incandescent bulb turns on the filament shakes violently.