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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

The thing is the the lifespan of bulbs is a tradeoff between brightness and lifespan. You make a 2000 hr bulb and it's half as a dim as a 1000 hr bulb, and so you're going to need 2 bulbs instead. Even today, long after the cartel is gone, there is no magic technology to make longer-lasting incandescent bulbs than they conspired to enforce back then.

The cartel was more of a marketing self-regulation conspiracy so that one manufacturer can't make claims that their bulbs are more cost-efficient when they're just plain dimmer.

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> You make a 2000 hr bulb and it's half as a dim as a 1000 hr bulb, and so you're going to need 2 bulbs instead.

Dubious. Most people would not rewire a room in their house to install a new ceiling light because a new bulb was half as bright as the old, because the new bulb would probably still be adequately bright and the new light level is something they could adjust to (much easier than rewiring their ceiling.)

In other words, there isn't a linear relationship between bulb brightness and the number of bulbs people use. The number of bulbs people use is relatively unresponsive to bulb brightness because bulbs need fixtures and changing fixtures is a pain in the ass.

The problem is that nobody checked lumen/watt, or had the knowledge to make an educated choice based on it.

Imagine you sold a 2000 hr bulb that has two filaments in it, in parallel. It would fit the same fixture and make the same light as the equivalent 1000 hr bulb, but it would consume more because it runs at lower current and temperature.

You would make more money: almost all of the cost is the same as for the 1-filament version, but you could sell it for a higher price because it lasts twice as long. The buyer would pay for it slowly in the electricity bill, and ultimately be screwed.

There might be no connection to how many bulbs people use, but how powerful they are. If you make bulbs less efficient, people will uses higher-power bulbs. Like 100 instead of 60W. And if the dimmer bulb is good enough, why not use a 40W bulb in the first place?

>You make a 2000 hr bulb and it's half as a dim as a 1000 hr bulb

First, I assume you mean half as bright. Half as dim seems like the opposite of what you mean, or a very strange way to phrase it.

Second, you're saying that bulb lifetime scales linearly with brightness?

> Second, you're saying that bulb lifetime scales linearly with brightness?

Looks pretty close to it

https://www.raptorsupplies.com/pd/ge-lighting/25a-130v

https://www.raptorsupplies.com/pd/ge-lighting/50a19-rs-75v

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