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Comment by BenjiWiebe | Hacker News Reader

LED lighting can last "forever", but if you cheap out on power supply components and overdrive your LEDs to get more brightness for less, they won't last.

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Without consumer visibility into those factors it’s a classic market for lemons, though.

indeed, it is hard to compete on quality in the long term.

If the incentive is to design for failure after the warranty expiry, isn't warranty length a good proxy for quality?

No, because the amount of people that actually follow through the warranty vs. just buying a new lamp is so small, that even with a bad product it's worth the cost of covering them.

Wouldn’t this also upwardly shift the economically optimal warranty period for high quality products?

Yeah, the only real way to fix this proactively is mandatory labeling and that requires a lot of regulatory oversight to see through.

Which isn’t necessarily bad of course, but it requires political willpower to put in place. Otherwise you’re just dealing with organizations like consumer reports trying to do their own analysis and lift the curtain, but that’s not nearly as effective as a nutrition facts style label mandated to be right on the box.

This isn’t even long term though. Every GE bulb I have purchased (8 bulbs of different styles from different stores) has failed in less than a year. I will never buy another GE lighting product again for the rest of my life.

As far as brands go, I've been decently happy with Philips, but yeah everything else is a crapshoot— Feit Electric I've had several failures, same with Ikea bulbs.

Obligitory link to the UAE edition Philips bulb that you can't get anywhere else because they don't overdrive it to thermal death and it lasts forever, but between that and being locked out of the whole market there, maybe just turn the current down a smidge for radically longer life.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

Ironic, because in pretty much all other respects, Dubai is a solid kick in the knackers to the environment.

I dunno, working hard to prevent the spread of an environmentally friendly innovation to maintain bragging rights rather than trying to spread it as far and wide as possible sounds like a very Dubai kick in the environmental knackers to me.

It's Philips who doesn't want them sold elsewhere, not Dubai.

That was a few years ago, but now they do have a "high efficiency" version available everywhere that has a similar power density, but uses a more failure-prone traditional SMPS instead of the simpler regulator in the Dubai version.

Oh good. I could have sworn I heard that the timed exclusivity requirement came from the Dubai side, but in any case I am glad to hear that they are more widely available now.

LED lightbulbs are terrible but good LED lamps and fittings do last forever!

In a lightbulb the power electronics, LEDs, etc. are all squished into a tiny package that struggles to shed heat.

I have a 15 year old led desk lamp from Philips. The Power supply is separate, the LEDs are attached to a heatsink. It could be taken apart and components replaced if someone is handy. Modern xiaomi desk lamps, ceiling spotlights and light fitting with integrated lefd are decent as well, LEDs are not overheating.

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