Longest-lasting incandescent light bulbs
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
TL;DW: (if I rember correctly) Bulbs with shorter lifespans are generally more energy efficient. There was good reasons to not making bulb that last forever.
That is, by definition, more energy efficient.
In the technology connections video he does the math to show that long life bulbs are just an all around loss.
If one "forever bulb" can only output 10 lumens @10 watts but you need 100 lumens, and a "one year" bulb can create 100 lumens @60 watts, the disposable bulb wins.
Cooler bulbs seem to generate a larger fraction of their energy in the infrared. Hotter bulbs generate not only more light, but a greater fraction of that light is visible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law#/media/File:Bla...
Shorter, not longer.
"As regards life standards, before the Phoebus Agreement and to this day the general service filament lamp was and is designed to have, on average, a minimum life of 1,000 hours. It has often been alleged—though not in evidence to us—that the Phoebus organisation artificially made the life of a lamp short with the object of increasing the number of lamps sold. As we have explained in Chapter 9, there can be no absolutely right life for the many varying circumstances to be found among the consumers in any given country, so that any standard life must always represent a compromise between conflicting factors. B.S.I, has always adopted a single life standard for general service filament lamps, and the representatives of both B.S.I, and B.E.A., as well as most lamp manufacturers, have told us in evidence that they regard 1,000 hours as the best compromise possible at the present time, nor has any evidence been offered to us to the contrary. Accordingly we must dismiss as misconceived the allegation referred to above."
From [1], quoting Anton Phillips discussing members building higher voltage and longer lived bulbs,
“This, you will agree with me, is a very dangerous practice and is having a most detrimental influence on the total turnover of the Phoebus Parties…. After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by paying no attention to voltages and supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life.”
> [...] lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which raised their efficiency [...]
to
> [...] lowered the useful life of such bulbs, which falsely claimed to raise their efficiency [...]
emphasis mine. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phoebus_cartel&di...
Please watch the video from Technology Connections linked above to understand why a) Phoebus was indeed a cartel but b) which did not have as nefarious purposes as has been later claimed by e.g. populist TV documentaries such as "The Light Bulb Conspiracy".
Specifically, the life-time of a bulb has to do with filament thickness (the filament sublimates until it is too thin, melts from resistance and breaks). At the same time, thinner fillaments will get hotter, and therefore be brighter at the same power level. (specifically, more of the heat energy is radiated away in the visible spectrum). This means bulb life-time and efficiency an inherent trade-off.
Meaning that the best 2000 hours incandescent lightbulb is either less luminous or less efficient (or both) than a well built 1000 lightbulb.
Wether the cartel was nefarious is slightly beyond the point and primarily of historical interest.
As a "proof" the centennial lightbulb is about as luminous as a candle, that is useless in almost every case.
It is impossible to build a new centennial lightbulb that anyone would want to buy outside of niche industrial or artistic applications.
We bought a bunch of Philips Hue bulbs around 2015 or 2016. They were expensive bulbs, but every single one is still running fine. The downside for Philips is that once I replaced all my bulbs, I stopped needing to buy lightbulbs.
The Hue bulbs are still available, but a lot of the newer LED bulbs I see claim much shorter lifetimes.
It's usually the electronics that dies (specifically: electrolytic capacitors, if included).
Life of the LEDs themselves depends a lot on operating temperature. Running hot (like in the cramped innards of a bulb), their output gradually decreases or they burn out @ some point. This is the fate of many cheap bulbs with poor thermal design.
Separate electronics (read: and their waste heat) from the LEDs, cool them well (and/or run at reduced power), and the LEDs can last practically infinite. Just like standby LEDs on appliances don't burn out. And -potentially- failed LEDs or driver electronics can be replaced independently.
But this does require a purpose designed fixture. Chip-on-Board (CoB) LED is the keyword here.
Yes you can make a bulb that lasts "forever", but it is very dim and consumes a lot of energy
I wonder if anyone has actually looked into what the real first instance of planned obsolescence was.
There is the “insurmountable physics” problem of needing to spend money on something perceived as having no ROI worth speaking about (if it’s even positive).
This is what most “planned obsolescence in the modern day” is about, not spending money you don’t absolutely have to. The precision of modern manufacturing and the progress of material science similarly allows very low tolerances, because you don’t need to account for anywhere near as much manufacturing variance. Therefore you can hew much closer to what you need to provide, and lower your costs as a result.
An other factor is the market cycling, why would you design a phone to last for 10 years when pretty much none of your target market will keep the phone 3, and it will net you no brand loyalty whatsoever?
Finally there’s time to market, pretty much all foldable phones seem to suffer from cracking or delamination, because it’s a super popular idea which commands a huge premium, so as soon as that was an option manufacturers started releasing device with limited real-world durability testing.
Some may argue that this would stifle innovation and we would likely not have foldable phones today if such requirements were in place. But in my opinion if such innovations can't be made durable, then the world would be better off without them.
Well, that would be one way to reduce e-waste: make phones so expensive that a lot fewer people buy them. Because whereas before that test matrix had five phones, but legislation increased that to seven, including two that can't run the latest OS so we have to back port the fixes to the previous OS. None of that is free, in fact, it's quite expensive.
Beside, how many people do you know that base their phone buying decisions on whether or not their current one is still supported? Of the folks I know, no one does that (granted, I live in Redmond, WA, which has some techy types living in the area). They just buy a new one when they are tired of their old one, or they have New Phone Fever.
I would love to see a short comic about a smith who creates swords out of gallium for cheap, only for them to literally melt in your hand shortly after walking away.
"yes they screwed over the consumer with their anti-competitive cartel but hey they were saving the planet so it is all forgiven" was is his basic take
The ends justify the means.
it was not up to the Phoebus cartel to choose what was a "better bulb"
The cartel dissolved many years ago, and there wasn't a flood of _better_ longer bulbs because there physically can't be.
Longer bulbs have existed for a long time, but they are much dimmer in addition to using more power. As such they are not desirable to people.
Even beyond the cartel, power plants wanted the higher efficiency lightbulbs to reduce strain.
Those points are far better.
In any case, the cartel's goal definitely wasn't saving the planet. Can you even imagine a evil shadow organization with that goal? Their goal was profit, and to get profit they wanted standards.
Standards make it so a consumer can get various different products that work predictably. The world would be a much worse place without agreed upon standards.
Yes "Standards" where they big player dictates to everyone else how they must do things.. Of course they hide it in a "standards organization" like how W3C is functionally a decision of Google at the point, but we do have "web standards" which are what ever google says
Or how Microsoft more or less forced out OpenXML with Open Office XML which is anything but open...
I could list 100's of examples
That's a misrepresentation of his take. He does not say that the cartel should be forgiven for their anti-competitive practices.
He just said that what is often referred to as planned obsolescence, may simply have been an early form of product standardization and wasn't necessarily intended to be anti-competitive.
Because of the increased efficiency, you saved much more on the energy bill, even offsetting the extra cost for more light bulbs which were cheap even back then.
Even if you don’t give a fuck about the planet, most people care about their wallet.
I reject that mentality, it is a path to lots of unintended consequences not to mention government over reach when the "experts" we are forced to follow also have the power of government authority
Seems to me you let your politics, prejudice and personal hangups totally cloud and warp what was actually said in the video.
His point was about the consumer’s end costs. It was cheaper to replace the lightbulbs than to be energy inefficient. He provided pretty solid evidence for that too.
It wasn’t about “saving the planet”.
> While it might seem astonishing that so many longest-lasting light bulbs have been so infrequently turned off, this is the precise reason for their longevity. Most of the wear and tear that leads to burnouts in incandescent light bulbs is caused by turning them on and off, not by burning them. Each time the bulb is turned on and off, the filament is heated and cooled. This causes the material of the filament to expand and contract, in turn causing micro stress cracks to develop. The more the light is turned on and off, the larger these cracks grow, until eventually the filament breaks at some point, in non-spectacular fashion, thus causing the light to burn out.
I knew running filament bulbs on low voltage is the key to their longevity, but this is another important aspect
For example, turning engines on and off heavily thermally cycles them. It can get worse when they are rapidly cooled or rapidly heated. Jet engines running at constant speed have high cycle fatigue to worry about, but steady temperatures don't pose a thermal stress issue.
But shutting the engine off in cold air and letting them go from very hot to very cold suddenly will cause the thicker parts to cool slower than the thin parts, stressing them near the change in thickness. That results in low cycle fatigue (where you can count the cycles to failure in the dozens/hundreds/thousands vs. millions/billions for high cycle fatigue).
They worked daily for 20 years before I swapped them out for LED lights. Never had one fail.
I attribute it to the fact that the dimmer switch they were on could only do soft turn ons and turn offs. Always took about 3 seconds to turn on and off.
The Casetas allow me to soft-start each bulb, and to run lights at less than full brightness most of the time.
It would have been interesting to see the effect on incandescent bulb life, but I also took the opportunity to replace all light bulbs with dimmable LCD, so the question is moot.
I got my soft-starter from amazon for €10.
For LEDs the issue is the driver boards, they get crammed into the tiny socket and live a very, very hot life. Doesn't matter that the LED has 100000 hour lifespan or whatever they write on the box when the driver dies after 5000 hours.
I personally have not be clear on which side of this argument holds more accuracy, but given today's anti-consumer leanings in manufactiring (particulatly in the US), I have my misgivings about it all.
The two mechanisms can easily interact.
Also:
http://donklipstein.com/bulb1.html
"Due to the high temperature that a tungsten filament is operated at, some of the tungsten evaporates during use. Furthermore, since no light bulb is perfect, the filament does not evaporate evenly. Some spots will suffer greater evaporation and become thinner than the rest of the filament. These thin spots cause problems. Their electrical resistance is greater than that of average parts of the filament. Since the current is equal in all parts of the filament, more heat is generated where the filament is thinner. The thin parts also have less surface area to radiate heat away with. This "double whammy" causes the thin spots to have a higher temperature. Now that the thin spots are hotter, they evaporate more quickly. It becomes apparent that as soon as a part of the filament becomes significantly thinner than the rest of it, this situation compounds itself at increasing speed until a thin part of the filament either melts or becomes weak and breaks."
Halogen bulbs last longer because the sublimated tungsten is converted to volatile halides, which then preferentially decompose back to elemental tungsten at the hot spots, healing them.
It's an outdoor security light over my garage. I don't know what technology it uses because the bulb is screwed in too tight for me to unscrew it with one of those things you put on the end of a pole to change out of reach bulbs, and I'm not agile enough on a ladder to be willing to get up on the garage roof to do it by hand.
The bulb is clear so it is not fluorescent. I think it is some kind of gas discharge lamp. When it turns on it takes a minute or so to reach full brightness.
It's been there since I bought this house 16 years ago. It's on a sensor that turns it on sometime during twilight and turns it off sometime during dawn. So figure maybe 10 hours a night average. That's over 58000 hours of on time.
But 58000 hours is over twice the average lifetime of all the likely technologies for this kind of security light except LED and it is definitely not LED. So I'm curious what technology my bulb actually uses.
I didn't care for the conclusions drawn in the story, but I liked the story itself and the multimedia aspects of it were engaging and fun.
thanks for the good read.
the text just started growing as soon as it loaded
is that a new anti-adblock thing
There's no reason you couldn't have monochromatic LEDs in the same colour, part of me wishes we went for that instead of white ones which are usually pretty cold and harsh though they've got a lot better on that front with the really warm white ones being quite nice.
The animals and insects hate it too. It's brain damaged people who like sterilization white illuminating every space!
(No offense if you prefer cool white, but kind of)
> The second-longest-lasting light bulb is ... and was installed ... on September 21, 1908
> Another working light bulb dating from 1908 ...
And in the next section:
> The third longest lasting light bulb began operation in 1929-30
Clearly the text from the third section onward all contain an off-by-one error, assuming there aren't any more yet-to-be-listed entries.
Unfortunately it looks like they took down the webcam, which is what I was looking for
On the home page:
> Click the "Home of the Worlds Longest Burning Light Bulb!" image above to see the Bulb-Cam in action
Which...wasn't the most intuitive, admittedly!