Hacker News Reader

Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

You're exaggerating about light-bulbs. There is no way LEDs last less than incandescents. If you are experiencing this, its possible your wiring is bad. You should call an electrician and have them check that out.

View on HN

There are some very bad, cheap LEDs on the market. Sometimes even under name brands. I've learned to be pretty picky about which ones I buy, both in terms of their longevity as well as the quality of the light.

LED dies often due to insufficient heat dissipation, which could be due to the cramped design of the actual light form factor.

Yes, when I bought a few LED lights from Aliexpress (years ago), they got broken in a few months. But I have philips LED light since ~2012 and that still works without any problem.

> There is no way LEDs last less than incandescents.

Sure there is. I bought a case of Sylvania LEDs in 2019. They're used a few hours a week and I've tossed 5 of the 15 I've installed.

I've been using a Philips 100W equivalent bulb for about 12 hours a day for almost 9 years now.

Companies can always manufacture garbage if they don't care, but LED technology is fantastic.

Exactly

Same here - I am constantly replacing my LED lights whereas parts of my house still have 25 year old incandescents that have never been replaced since I moved in.

Same here. I keep a big box of LED lights hanging around in a box and am constantly replacing them. I had to replace incandescent lights too, but not nearly as often. Everything is designed to fail.

Phillips master ultra efficient, similar to their Dubai lamp, may be what you need. Running much less power per led is more efficient, so there's less heat and the lifetime is massively increased. Big Clive put a good video out about Dubai lamps a few years back.

You are absolutely incorrect. Most of the LED bulbs on the market have incredibly poorly designed power circuits that absolutely cook the passive components.

Unfortunately my experience matches this - our LED bulbs are lasting between 2 and 5 years. There are truly just some cheap, shitty bulbs out there.

But, they cost £3 each and leaving them running 24/7 will cost you less than £20/year.

Standard incandescent bulb life was around 1000h. Do you use these LED bulbs only an hour a day?

I suspect most people simply forget how often highly-used incandescent bulbs had to be replaced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com