> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven?
Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices.
Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices.
The topic has been discussed here in the past a few times, including [2] and [3]
1: https://readmedium.com/en/the-phoebus-cartel-was-never-reall...
Company X makes a great product that everyone only needs one of and lasts a long time. Over time, the market starts to dwindle and. Company X is going broke. Now, Company X must either invest in innovation or reduce the lifespan of its current offering.
There's nothing inherently evil about this concept, but we tend to want to chalk it up to greed when Company X really just wants to survive and make a profit, which I suppose is the point.
The problem is the concept is ripe for abuse. If Company X makes their product worse, but starts charging more while laying off employees, posting record profits during recessions, adopts unnecessary subscription models cosplaying as continued service and development, etc...now we get to the greed part. There seems to be a line between designing a product to secure the longevity of Company X and straight up using your customers as micro-transaction ATMs with planned obsolescence. Some companies conspire to cross it.
A properly protected door should last many years. One that we bought was not up to outside use, and failed. That manufacturer ended up purchased by a competitor, I think.
One can model their business around market rules. It just might not be as huge as you want.
But Instant Pot is the classic example of going broke because everyone bought exactly one of their products and never needed another (ignoring the three we have...)
Keep a perfunctory tidbit of the once great company chugging along to provide replacement parts, do some servicing, and sell new ones at a much reduced volume. Just enough to keep a handful of people employed at good wages and turn a miniscule profit.
I know it is heresy to suggest this kind of thing when our entire way of life is predicated on infinite growth, but our entire way of life is also grossly inefficient (not to mention inequitable) and we are facing ever more scarce resources on a planet with less and less carrying capacity for our wasteful and destructive tendencies.
Of course this is all just yelling at clouds, because billionaires and the people who service them cannot be made to think in these terms, else they wouldn't be where they are in the first place.
That's the expensive bit. That's a lot of machinery and tooling sitting around mostly doing nothing.
It is my understanding that when Instant Brands filled for bankruptcy, they weren't selling just the Instant Pot. It wasn't even the original Instant Pot company. They were selling a wide range of kitchen products. I don't think they went broke because people bought exactly one Instant Pot.
The story doesn't end here. Apparently, Instant Brands emerged from chapter 11 as Corelle Brands.
> They go broke or rely on an ever growing market, ie housing is always being built (most of your examples).
Wouldn't that mean those new houses have new families which want a new Instant Pot? In fact I can think of other situations: people moving, going to college, splitting some of their items in divorce, etc. Sure, it's not much but it's not like the demand grinds to a halt.
My experience: swan-neck kitchen taps all now seem to be quite different in design from one-another. To replace a washer, you have to dive under the sink, completely dismantle the tap, replace the washer, and re-assemble the tap. And the new taps start dripping after just a couple of years.
So you have to hire a plumber; and he'll probably work faster (i.e. lower charges) if he's fitting a new tap than repairing an old one. So you might as well order a new tap before you call the plumber out.
No, that's exactly the problem. Company X surviving isn't a good enough justification for it to start making shittier products. Especially when they don't inform the customers of the degradation.
This is a business model problem, or perhaps a whole-market problem; papering over it with "oh just a little planned obsolescence is good, because it lets the vendor survive" is kind of a bailout, and prevents the problem from being corrected. By now, this has happened in so many places across so many industries that it's a rot that runs deep through entirety of the market.
Then their strategy worked - if you really believe it's more complicated. Haven't investigated this particular subject, but many others subjects are _made_ complicated to achieve a particular outcome. Along lines of: 'let's protect the children' argument.
- Lower-quality components (especially capacitors) being used to meet the lower price point. This is by far the most common failure mode I have experienced, it's never the LEDs dying but the power supply.
- Higher-quality LED light is usually result of driving the LEDs harder, causing them to fail earlier.
- Probably some other reasons too.
But yes, the reasonably-priced LED bulbs don't last any longer than incandescents. I am replacing a few every year around the house. The saving grace is that they generate a lot less heat. I was in a house the other day that still had incandescent bulbs in the bathroom fixures, and could feel the heat from them as soon as I switched them on.
I actually swapped out my shower light because it got so hot the insulating wire melted and it created a short. Took forever to figure out, but once I did, I got a nice $30/$40 shower light fixture that went right in the same spot and its much nicer now. I'm just glad the short was running through metal wire/fiberglass and never started a fire.
Usually they’re over-driven and you can jump a burned out LED and scrape off a bit of a resistor to reduce the amount of current going through to (over-)account for the reduced current need.
The existence of poor quality products does not indicate malice -- many buyers demand low end products.
Cost/quality/performance is an engineering tradeoff without a "correct" answer. The answer is up to the opinion of the customer.
Buyers want cheap bulbs, they don't want crap bulbs. If that means $1.25/unit is impossible, so be it.
I have $1.25 bulbs in my home. I use them in unimportant locations with infrequent use. They are perfectly serviceable for this use.
> The customer will choose the cheap bulbs because they can't be sure the expensive ones are better quality. They often aren't.
This is a big problem for all consumer products. The root of the problem is that most consumers are wholly unqualified to be a judge of engineering quality themselves, few even know how to effectively obtain trustworthy information about quality, and those who do often value their time more than the effort required to do so. For larger purchases, some people who care to be informed will do some research, but I don't really think there's a solution for products <$500.
Even trying to find such a content creator on the fly can be dicey since so many of them are doing paid reviews or at the very least are sent free products + incentives. That, or get lucky googling site:reddit.com/r/[subreddit] [product] to find a thread that isn't too recent, isn't overrun by shills and isn't woefully out of date and full of deleted/overwritten content.
Another problem is that there are just too many products these days. 40 years ago someone might have 5 options for a vacuum cleaner, period. Someone on the internet today might have 500 options. It's just information overload. Someone who really cares to, might go through the 236 options that Consumer Reports has tested [0]
But most people aren't the type of people who would spend a half-hour arguing about consumer product quality on the internet. Most people aren't willing to spend any time to evaluate their options for relatively small purchases beyond the immediate moment of purchase.
[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/vacuum-cleaners/b...
Good information for the quality of cheap consumer goods is hard to find because the information is not particularly valued by most people.
This can't be understated. You never know with a bigger price tag if you are actually paying for a better build or just for branding + tidy profit. So you see two light bulbs with similar specs and the pictures on the box look indistinguishable.. unless you have specific experience or knowledge you are often doing yourself a favor to buy the cheaper one. Sometimes things are priced because they are actually better, but too often it is purely branding that justifies the price tag.
Not specific to lightbulbs, but I've also noticed a trend where a more expensive product with a big name and obviously more of an ad/branding budget actually is better for a few years... and then at some random date the bottom drops out and the product becomes almost indistinguishable from cheaper options while the price tag remains the same. Or even increases if they have enough market share and brand recognition.
And sometimes the better quality isn't worth the price. I bought a "Coochear" brushcutter on Amazon for a whopping $125 when my more expensive Husqvarna died due to a spun main bearing. At $125, I didn't care if it lasted longer than the time it would take me to remove the saplings that I needed to. The thing goes through 2" trees like they weren't even there. Yeah, it vibrates a lot more than it should and runs really rich, but it works a lot better than I expected for that price.
I know that I could have gotten another Husq that would work great but I really don't want to spend $600 for something that only gets used a couple times a year.
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
Only shows you bulbs can be made well and last long. But those are not for you. (Assuming most readers here are not Saudi)
Key points from an AI summary:
- Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan.
- Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products being suppressed.
- The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot.
- Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-04/cheeri...
1. Stronger filaments that last longer will be a lot less efficient, so the consumer ends up using a lot more electricity.
2. The filament doesn't burn per-say, but actually evaporates. This is why it'll eventually break. But where does the evaporated metal go? It condenses on the inner surface of the glass, making the lightbulb dimmer than when it was new.
So 1000 hours is a good middle ground. The lightbulb is fairly efficient and 1000 hours isn't long enough for the inside of the glass to get too dark from the condensed filament metal.
Price of the bulbs was also reasonably low. It's cheaper to change out a lightbulb every 1000 hours than the electricity costs of a 10 000 hour lightbulb that emits the same amount of visible light. I don't have hard numbers for that, but it's my understanding.
Watch the youtube video linked by one of the grandparent comments. It's super informative and also contains some experiments to show the trade-offs.
Ultimately which scenario makes the most sense: that these businesses went through the time and effort to set up this testing organization out of a desire to ensure they all made better products for consumers, or out of a realization that they could all stabilize their revenues if they all sold products that would need to be replaced on a regular basis?
This also strikes me as an area where consumer choice can be particularly effective: most of the attributes of a lightbulb aside from energy consumption are pretty tangible to the end user, and since they are fairly inexpensive and replaceable, the buyer is more able to evaluate them side by side than many other things. It makes total sense to me that the manufacturers would see this as a problem, and choose to limit consumer choice instead of competing to make better products.
Additionally, the companies set up a whole compliance regime with bulb testing and fines, not for bulbs being too dim, but for bulbs that lasted too long, which I think clarifies the intent more than anything else.
Undoubtedly there are some alternate materials you could make a light bulb out of that present a trade off between longevity and efficiency. But there will also be materials that last a long time and have high efficiency. Moreover, even if they want to use the filament material that emits whiter light and then burns up faster, they could then use more of it so it still doesn't burn out quickly. But they don't want to do that, because it would cost marginally more and more importantly then you wouldn't have to buy as many light bulbs.
It's no good to pretend this isn't possible. There isn't an inherent trade off between brightness and efficiency, because inefficiency is just the percentage of the electricity that goes to producing heat rather than light. At the same power consumption, a more efficient bulb is brighter. LEDs are rated as "100W equivalent" even though they consume ~20W. And the LEDs themselves last far longer than the equivalent incandescent light, but then they purposely combine them with a power converter that burns out much sooner. It's marketing, not physics.
For every issue created by cartels or monopolies, there will be at least one "Akschually..." competitive explanation from libertarians that will either give a completely benign explanation of why this is actually good for your or blame the government/regulations for the issue.
Those explanations will become memes and every single time the subject is discussed they will be brandished by the faithful as axiomatic truths in ad nauseam fashion.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.This is just an internet forum for us technology well paid proletarians, you shouldn't take it that seriously.
You seem to be out of your depth here, while accusing people of propaganda.
Anyway, no there aren't. The efficiency x longevity trade-off is inherent to the incandescent bulbs, you can't just wave all of Quantum Mechanics away. Material changes will increase or decrease the entire pair, and bulbs were already made with the best material that could possibly be used.
And leds, of course are different.
Anyway, nobody on the entire thread is denying that the cartel wanted to increase profits. What people are trying to say is that reality is more complex than looking at a single organization goals and deciding what happens.
What you're ignoring is that although a different material would still have the trade off, the optimal point on the curve for that material could be in a different place. Material A lasts for 1000 hours at a given amount of light/watt, Material B only lasts for 500 hours at that amount of light/watt, but lasts for 3000 hours at only 15% less light/watt, which some people might want. As an example, there are some applications where the bulb is repeatedly being turned on for only short periods of time, which would tend to shorten lifespan from thermal stress but also implies that power efficiency is less important because the bulb isn't continuously on.
The optimal trade off would also be different for different people. If your light bulb is hard to reach, saving two bucks worth of electricity over its lifetime may not be worth having to drag out a ladder or disassemble a piece of equipment to change it more often. If you have electric heat in a cold climate, a bulb that generates a higher ratio of heat to light isn't costing you anything because you were only going to use a different kind of electric heater regardless. But the cartel took those peoples' options away, claiming that the trade off could only be made one way.
And even for a given material, the failure mode is that enough of the material evaporates for it to lose structural strength and snap. Implying that you could use more of the same material with the same efficiency but improve structural strength.
> And leds, of course are different.
They don't operate in a universe with different physical laws, proving that incumbent incandescent bulbs are nowhere near the limits physics imposes on efficiency.
You don't have to ban longer lifetimes unless you're afraid someone will find a way to do better.
Hotter filament gives more efficient and whiter light (the black body radiation has more visible and less infrared), but the hotter filament doesn't last as long (faster evaporation rate).
It's perfectly possible for end users to use a dimmer switch to make incandescent lamps last much, much longer at the expense of less light and a "warmer" colour.
Lifespan is very, very sensitive to the temperature.
Not a single one has burned out in something like 4 years of runtime. Honestly the paint inside the bulbs is going to fade away completely before these things go out. The trick is 2 things:
1. Don’t move them
2. Use a dimmer and run them around 75% power
The free market is designed for this. If the bulb lasts 5000 hours, but burns 1/2 as bright, consumers can easily decide what they prefer.
And further, the cartel did not have exceptions for product enhancements, or improvements, which might have enabled > 1000 hrs without any drawbacks.
Why are people defending this cartel? Market collusion is generally frowned upon.
The standards were set around what could be sold as a standard lightbulb.
The 1000 hours limit is in practice a lower bound to a combination of luminosity and efficiency
> "A longer life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and proportionally more heat) than a shorter life bulb of the same wattage"
As long as we can recycle (or at least safely get rid of) the burned out ones I'd say its a win from ecology perspective, and at least in some cases also for end users. But this wasnt the main driver of the change, it was the good ol' corporate greed as per the same wiki page.
I seriously doubt you can recycle the tungsten as it literally evaporates and oxidize on the lightbulb.
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...
A stable DC current and temperature limited LED can easily last decades.
Ok here it is --
The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
> These fascinating lamps are a result of a collaboration between Philips Lighting and Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum - the ruler of Dubai. They are designed to be the most efficient available, matching high lumen output with very long life. Once you see the construction and circuitry you'll realise this isn't just marketing spin.
Now I want to actually look into and see if they're available elsewhere, because my LED bulbs really do seem to fail pretty frequently...
I know this is a common pop-history thing to cite on the Internet, but I would think hackernews would understand the benefits of standardization.
If every brand's lightbulb has different luminousities how on earth would architects decide how to space fixtures?
This "cartel" is how we avoided a dimness war, like the loudness war we had in digital music a decade or so back