Well, today I learned to install one capacitor in reverse orientation on the PCB on a 34 year old computer...
Definitely starting Wednesday off productively.
Definitely starting Wednesday off productively.
It's something to check, but the polar ones should be clearly marked as such.
PSA: Electrolytic capacitors have a rough lifespan of 10 years. Any much older than that need to be checked out-of-circuit for ESR and then capacitance. Also, tantalums (historically) suck(ed). [0] Quality audio equipment from the 80's like a/d/s/ car amps used only ceramic caps and other over-engineered passives, and have the potential (pun intended) to basically last forever.
0. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/whenwhy-(not)-to-use-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Premature_fai...
The normal lifespan of a non-solid electrolytic capacitor of consumer quality, typically rated at 2000 h/85 °C and operating at 40 °C, is roughly 6 years. It can be more than 10 years for a 1000 h/105 °C capacitor operating at 40 °C. Electrolytic capacitors that operate at a lower temperature can have a considerably longer lifespan. ... The life of an electrolytic capacitor with defective electrolyte can be as little as two years.https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=led+bulbs+enclosed+fixture+ra...
What I have seen done is cheaping out on parts in order to get the price as low as possible, because customers shop primarily on price.
Not to lash out, but it kind of hits a nerve for me, because people think we design products to purposely fail. Hell no, we try really hard to do the opposite, but everyone just loves to buy the cheapest shit.
The $25 LED bulb that will last for eternity will rot on the shelf next to the $3 bulb that will probably be dead in 6 months. And one more "they build these things to fail" complaint will be posted online.
Additionally, the issue is that as a consumer, it's not easy to differentiate between quality markup and greedy markup. I don't see the cap manufacturer on the box so the 25$ light bulb might last 10 years or it might last 6 months just like the 3$ one. At least with the 3$ one I can come back and buy another...
This is so true and insightful. Even plenty of so-called “luxury goods” are trash. And outside of luxury, it seems like most markets are dominated by roughly 90-99.9% products that are all identically garbage, just ranging from 1%, 2% up to 800% profit margins. So the person buying the high-end brand and the one buying from Aliexpress both have the same quality components (trash tier) and sometimes the same PCBs and designs. If you want a good quality refrigerator, you can buy a Viking or something for $9,000, or spend any amount of your choice from $800-5000 for something that will die in 2 years and be outside of warranty. It makes my blood boil, especially in areas like appliances, where the amount of waste, by tonnage, is super offensive.
This is just fashion, right? As something becomes commoditised, it starts to become subject to fashion, which means cheap and looks fashionable is more important than durability. So you can buy one every year and keep up, and throw away the old one.
There have been plenty of discussions on HN about brands that used to produce durable products no longer doing so. I mostly buy cheap stuff because I assume that everything will be built as cheaply as possible, so I will get something that will not last anyway.
It's not my fault if other people are too dumb to comprehend TCO because I would buy the $25 bulb if it had a 30 year warranty.
A 30 year warranty would certainly make a difference in the decision making. But more typically you see the $3 bulb, with a 1yr "warranty", next to the $25 bulb, and the $25 bulb either has an identical 1yr warranty, or has a warranty period not commensurate to the price difference, such as a 2yr warranty.
And? That just sounds like they have good engineers. If you are designing a machine, you have an target lifetime. You'd obviously want the product to last through the warranty period, because warranty claims are a cost to the company.
Every choice of a component affects lifetime. Designers of mass-market products can't just use premium components everywhere -- the mass market will not pay steep premiums for otherwise equivalent products.
Value engineering and planned obsolescence are not the same thing, but they are often confused.
That being said, Samsung appliances suck and I hate them. Mine failed within warranty several times.
> And, with the pressures of multinational oligopolies and BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street.. there is little incentive to invest $100M into a moderately-superior incandescent lightbulb using yesterday's technology that lasts 100kh and 5k cycles and sells for $1 more than the next one.
It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first.
If you release a light bulb that is identical to the best selling one on the shelf, but claims 10x lifespan, your competitor will do something like gluing a weight in theirs, putting some marketing BS on the box, and will put you out of business. Consumers just don't pick products based on actual quality.
> It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first.
This is a failure of marketing and buzz of the sales channel(s) and manufacturers to educate properly, not the failure of the customer.
Many people think there's some unethical conspiracy going on, and consumers actually want a product that lasts a long time, but companies are refusing to give it to them. But this is projection of individual preferences on to the market as a whole. Consumers want cheap shit that is in fashion, and their buying preferences prove this time and again. Maybe you want a 50 year old toaster in your kitchen, other people are buying products based on other factors.
If consumers really wanted to pay a premium for high duty-cycle equipment with premium lifespans, they can already do that by buying commercial grade equipment. But they don't.
If you are familiar with the history of home appliances, you'd probably come to appreciate the phrase 'value engineering'. Even poor people can afford basic electric appliances now because of the ingenuous ways that engineers have designed surprisingly usable appliances out of very minimal and efficient designs.
If you look at ads for electric toasters 100 years ago, you'd see they cost over $300 in today's money adjusted for inflation. Thank god for value engineering.
I seems to me that there is also a social dynamic to things. If consumer grade products become a race to the bottom then it is going to become more difficult for regular people to purchase products which aren't low quality. There's also a degree to which society (e.g. in the form of government policy, cost of living adjustments, etc.) factors in differences in prices.
It completely changed the way our societies operate. I think it is a good thing that people have the option to buy crappy washing machines, rather than being forced to use the washboard and bucket my grandmother used. Yeah, they sometimes do develop a bad belt, or the timer mechanism might fail. But it beats being unwillingly forced into homemaking as a career.
The world only has so much wealth to go around, and that isn't the moral quandary of the engineer picking an item on a BOM on Tuesday morning to fix. If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted that could have been spent elsewhere.
> At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted
This also is a counterpoint to your position though: of everything that goes into say, a fridge, it’s all wasted in 5 years now because Samsung chooses to put a PCB that is barely fit for purpose and will just fail with an error code, and because instead of putting such a failure-prone part behind a door and using an edge connector so it can be swapped in 5 minutes, they bury it God-knows-where in the chassis requiring an $800 labor charge, and charge $300 for the part. (As though that PCB is actually more complex than an iPad logic board, lol). So the whole 600 pounds of steel, refrigerant, insulation, glass, ice maker, and the compressor goes to the dump since who would invest $800 in a fridge that could have the same failure in a month and only the part is warrantied (you have to pay labor again). The poor people you’re worried about are buying these components over and over again because the appliance makers like this system. All this is done in bad faith. They’re morally bankrupt compared to their grandfathers who made appliances that lasted decades.
If it squeezes a small but solid chunk out of product lifetime too, then it's also likely to harm people on the fringes. If they can buy it with one less month of savings, but then it breaks a couple months earlier, they're probably worse off. (For actual pennies divide both of those numbers by some orders of magnitude.)
People don’t want to walk their clothes basket down to the laundromat for one more month while they save for the nicer washer that lasts a little bit longer. They want the cheap one now, because they just got off some shitty shift at work, and they’re sick and tired of lugging their laundry down the street. Having a quality washer [x] years from now is not a desired part of the equation. Immediacy is of higher value.
2. If everything lasts twice as long for 15% more, you can get a half-expired used one for even cheaper.
> they already know that. They're not dumb.
I think they're not dumb and they already know it's extremely difficult to figure out which brand fits that criteria, if any, so it's not worth it because it's such a gamble.
That's also true. At the individual unit level, small differences in MTTF/MTBF are negligible because product failures are naturally distributed anyway. The mean time is just a mean, and nobody gives a shit about a good mean product failure rate when theirs happened to fail below the mean. That's true no matter how much you spent.
That costs a ton. I just want a better lifespan, I don't want to 20x the duty cycle and also pay B2B prices.
It's too hard to figure out which consumer products have a better lifespan, so companies do a bad job of catering to that need. This makes companies try too hard to be cheapest, and they often fall below the sweet spot of longevity versus price. Then everyone is worse off. That's not the fault of the engineer but it still means the engineer is participating in making things worse.
Therein lies the problem. A more durable product exists, and yet, even you don't want to pay more for it. And you are likely much more privileged than the rest of the world. What do you expect the rest of the world to be doing? Most of the world isn't picky about whether their hand mixer has plastic bushings or ball bearings. They're are choosing between any appliance at all and mixing their food with a spoon.
> It's too hard to figure out which consumer products have a better lifespan, so companies do a bad job of catering to that need.
There are many companies that try to break this barrier over and over, with tons of marketing material proclaiming their superiority. Why do they all fail? Because their hypothesis is wrong. The majority of the mass market doesn't want appliances that last for tens of thousands of hours. Most people use their appliances very lightly and for short periods of time before replacing them.
I think a lot of people on this forum have points of view tainted by privilege. Poor people aren't dumb, they know that they are buying cheap stuff that doesn't last as long as more premium options. They're making these options intentionally because a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush to them.
This is disingenuous as hell.
I want to buy a version that cost 15% more to make. I don't want to buy a version that cost 3x as much to make (or is priced as if it does).
When I can't find the former, that is part of problem. When I don't buy the latter, that is not part of the problem.
> They're making these options intentionally because a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush to them.
The best way to have the most birds in hands on an ongoing basis is to optimize for both price and lifetime per dollar, not just price.
Well, it just doesn't work that way. Premium components that truly extend product life are multiplicatively more expensive than what you'll find in value engineered products, if not exponentially so. Furthermore, a product that is 15% more expensive than competitors won't sell 15% fewer units, it will sell significantly fewer units, and then your fixed costs will also be higher, on top of the higher BOM costs.
Quality products with measurably longer lifespans in pretty much any product category are significantly more expensive than lower quality equivalents. The entire global manufacturing industry isn't in on some conspiracy.
It's not a conspiracy when a product that is somewhat more expensive but lasts much longer per dollar doesn't sell well, but it is a market failure.
I think it if was clear at a glance that such a product lasts much longer, there'd be enough buyers to avoid the low-volume costs. At least in many markets for many kinds of product.
> And you also said that the difference between a 5 year washing machine and a 30 year washing machine is probably "a matter of tens of dollars". Why is it suddenly multiplicatively or exponentially more expensive?
You're conflating my statements about BOM costs and the final price of the product, which are two entirely different things. Demand is not a constant for your product at any price (because the market is likely elastic, and you have competitors). Demand will go down as price increases, often sharply. If you add tens of dollars in BOM cost, your product sells fewer units as a result, and now you have fewer units to spread the (potentially significant) fixed costs across. So, unfortunately the tens of dollars in BOM cost might mean hundreds in cost to the end consumer.
But if you insist they would, then we can talk about a world where that level of quality is the minimum. Somehow. I don't really care how. It would be better, yeah?
> Poor people could always purchase used appliances.
The reality in mid 20th century US demonstrates this isn't the case. Most went without the modern appliances that are commonplace today.
You realise incorrectly, I would say. It's very defensible to claim that Western society has the most - by a giant margin - social, economic and technological advances in history, and to boil it down to this is just a bit silly, in my opinion.
> Every choice of a component affects lifetime. Designers of mass-market products can't just use premium components everywhere -- the mass market will not pay steep premiums for otherwise equivalent products.
Dying just out of warranty is only okay if the warranty covers the actual expected lifetime of the product. And for appliances, it doesn't.
The difference between a 5 year washing machine and a 30 year washing machine is not very big. Anyone pinching those specific pennies is doing a bad thing.
At least in the US, people move frequently, and a washing machine that lasts for decades isn't even a benefit, because they'll likely have left it behind.
> The difference between a 5 year washing machine and a 30 year washing machine is not very big. Anyone pinching those specific pennies is doing a bad thing.
Absolutely right, it's only a matter of tens of dollars, probably. However, retail consumer appliances live and die at the margins. Nobody is opening up their washer to inspect the components to see if the $510 washer has better components than the $499 washer. All else equal, they're buying the $499 washer 90% of the time. Your fixed costs are going to eat you alive when spread across your fewer units, and retailers will stop carrying your product because it isn't moving.... All the while the $499 washer is going to be sitting in that home 5 years from now when the realtor puts a sign out front. And literally zero people are buying a house based on the bearings in the washing machine.
You say this in the same breath you talk about people being desperate for any cheapest appliance instead of having nothing?
> And literally zero people are buying a house based on the bearings in the washing machine.
Well that's them being dumb.
Yes? I think you’re suggesting that the existence of old machines would be good for the poor. That’s true. However, manufacturers don’t make used machines. They only make new ones. So the forces of supply and demand do not apply.
> Well that's them being dumb.
Wat. No I’d say choosing a home based on location, school district, or inherent qualities of the home itself is a less dumb idea.
As far as I can tell you were discounting the value of old machines, and suggesting long durability wasn't useful. I'm glad you agree they're useful.
And I know manufacturers make new machines. I'm suggesting that if the cheapest machines were much more durable at not-much higher prices, the end result would be better for everyone including the poor people that would otherwise have bought the even cheaper model.
(If we switched cold turkey it would be worse for them for a couple years before it got better. So let's not switch cold turkey. But that's not a reason to act like the current situation is anywhere near optimal. It's great that appliances have gotten massively cheaper than they used to be, but we could do even better.)
> Wat. No I’d say choosing a home based on location, school district, or inherent qualities of the home itself is a less dumb idea.
Wat. Do you think that's an either-or choice?
It's reasonable to say people choose a home based on price, right? If there's a washer and dryer as part of the package, the expected lifetime is basically an offset to the price.
Often worse -- in many markets a buyer will pick whichever available option has a plurality of their preferences. Most buyers are going to prioritize the location, size, and permanent qualities of the home, and that's going to narrow them down to a short-list of options. Major renovations tend to affect the price of a house somewhat, but the quality of individual appliances typically does not, because they are easily changed and account for maybe 1% of the value of a home. Even a home without appliances entirely will tend to sell just as fast and for prices similar to other homes.
Product have an expected lifespan longer than the warranty period. This is malicious if given as a target. I'd like to see MTBF numbers on everything so people can lump together and sue the shit out of manufacturers who do this. Would also make it easier to check the 25$ light bulb.
Also it is mathematically stupid, because products do not fail at consistent rates, nor are they used by customers are equal rates. If you want to minimize warranty costs, you do need to target some mean lifetime well beyond the warranty period.
MTBF (or MTTF) might be useful number if you buy 100 light bulbs, but is not really a useful number for you buying one appliance. Product failures don't follow a normal distribution. The stuff that ticks people off about shitty products is the infancy-failure part of the bathtub curve -- It's when you get 13 months out of a $200 blender that fails in infancy that you're pissed. Not when you get 24 months out of a $20 blender that fails from end-of-life.
"The Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence"
Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
> bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption
There is no reason to suspect that material science would not advance. Or other constraints would change. A specific company choosing that particular sweetspot for a particular product line is fine. But a collusion between companies dictating that specific constraint (in lieu of, e.g., wattage per lumen) is too clear a marker of anti-consumer intent.
The temperature of incandescent bulbs is directly related to the light that they give off, and tungsten is the obvious best material, there's no other materials on the horizon giving an improvement for the tech. It really is a pretty well understood tradeoff surface on a very mature technology (which was then displaced by completely different ones).
No it isn't. It is simply optimization of price and the features/form-factor that many buyers have demanded.
If anything, the lifespan of a ~$1.50 household LED bulb is quite incredible. I'm not sure exactly how anyone would be able to increase the lifespan at that price point and keep the traditional Edison form factor.
> Amazon should be required to test all [..] products on its site such that they can prove safety and standards conformance.
No, the manufacturers should be required to... the same way it works for literally every other product with safety regulations.
I don't think I've had any last more than 5 years.
If you bought a cutting edge LED bulb back in 2002 or so, those had a life expectancy of over 60 years, and the build quality was such that you could reasonably expect to get that.
There are plenty of teardowns on YT showing how poorly even major brand name LED bulbs are put together.
> I don't think I've had any last more than 5 years.
Do you shut them off every 3 hours? That's probably what the estimate on the box is based on. Run the same bulb half the day and you'll only get 2.5 years out of it.
> There are plenty of teardowns on YT showing how poorly even major brand name LED bulbs are put together.
I've seen them. And dissected my own. Still, at the price that modern LED bulbs are being made, I'm surprised they're built as well as they are. Brand name Sylvania bulbs are $0.79/ea in a bulk Amazon right now.
LED bulbs aren't lasting any longer than incandescent bulbs used to. My house has 2 bathrooms, one had incandescent bulbs when I moved in and I didn't bother to replace them. Those incandescent bulbs have outlived multiple sets of LED bulbs in the other bathroom.
I honestly worry about the increase in e-waste with LED bulbs vs the old incandescent bulbs.
> Do you shut them off every 3 hours? That's probably what the estimate on the box is based on. Run the same bulb half the day and you'll only get 2.5 years out of it.
Which given that LEDs should damn well last 20-30 years of always being on, this is all a farce. I can't even pay 2x the price to buy a bulb with an honestly stated lifetime on it.
> Yeah I would hope those bulbs were built pretty well, they were crazy expensive... expensive enough that they wouldn't be competitive in lifetime-per-dollar against today's crappiest bulbs even if they lasted a person's entire lifetime.
I bet they would be. Given LED bulbs last less than 3 years now, with some not even lasting 2 years, a 20-30 year bulb could cost 4x as much and be competitive.
The real problem is that those long lifetime LED bulbs are not driven as hard, so the light output isn't nearly as high. AFAIK all research in the last 20 years has been into bright LEDs with meh lifetimes, so I wonder if it is even possible to mass produce long lifetime consumer LEDs anymore.
(Except the LEDs in all my consumer electronics have no problems staying on for 5 years non-stop! Tiny output, long lifespan...)
They tend to last a lot longer for me.
The reason indicator LEDs last a different amount of time is because they are very different applications. If you want to walk around your house lit by an indicator lamp, go right ahead, but most people want more light, and more light = more heat and degradation of the diode.
And that's a very time consuming and somewhat risky operation on an old machine you want to keep running. Some old PCBs are quite fragile.
I wish there was a way to test capacitors without removing them.
[1] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/is-there-any-way-to-...
What if I have a stash of big electrolytics that have been out of service for 10+ years? I know that I need to reform them over a few days, but can they even run at spec after so long out of operation?
We're talking BIG stuff, 400v, 200+J each
But if you wanted to use them in production, and be able to blame me when it didn’t work, I’d say no.
The last few times I made a mistake, there wasn't even an explosion, even less a short-circuit. The thing slowly boiled and bubbled or unfolded.
Anyway, it blows up because the capacitor's insulation layer isn't some stable material, it's a tiny oxide layer built over the metal plate by anodization. If you put a high voltage on it with the wrong polarity, you reverse that anodization and short the liquid and the metal electrodes.
I think this will allow me to classify today as productive.