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Usage patterns are important with CFL's. They are sensitive to many on/off cycles, and last longest when they burn continually. So, it might be interesting to take a moment and consider whether your usage patterns have shifted markedly.

Also, CFL's installed in ceiling fixtures have two problems -- the heat goes up into the circuitry (many CFL packages I've seen said not to install upside down), and anyone stomping around on the floor above will induce vibrations which shorten life.

Oddly, the ones I abuse the most -- leaving them outdoors in enclosures, frequent on/off -- have lastest the longest, and those I've simply put in normal sockets have failed the quickest.

I seem to recall there is an issue with CFL bulbs that has to do with ambient temperature. Recessed sockets get hotter, and shorten CFL life considerably.

The circuitry of CFLs (like the circuitry on LEDs) is where the heat is generated (basically the base of the bulb) and can _really_ kill the lifetime of the bulb if they're up in recessed indoor lighting environments.

Also, whatever the rated voltage for your power, don't assume it will be exact, and different voltage can be very noticeable on bulb lifetime. If bulbs keep popping it may be worth checking the voltage of your electricity supply. Ours is nearly 10% higher than it should be...

Inkjet printers from the 90's are also much more durable and overengineered than anything you'll buy today.

More like, the inkjet printers from the 90's that aren't in landfills yet are very durable.

There were lots of 90s era printers that were just as trashy as the ones made today.

Ah yea, good old Survivorship bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

My early 90's Canon eventually leaked all over. It was a big mess. My Epsons clogged and prompted me to do futile head cleaning routines that wasted a lot of paper.

My HP was sort of okay, but it turns out that I don't print enough. Any inkjet would clog under my normal use.

My early 90s HP InkJet was a workhorse, as was the NEC laser printer I had (though it had driver issues). My computers stopped coming with a parallel port.

I would say that over-engineered goods are the ones that last just long enough (and not any more) so that most customers don't feel like they were ripped off when they need to replace the product. The products that you are refering to were under-engineered (they were engineered on the safe side).

Yep. As my college professors used to repeat, anyone can build a building that stands up, but only an engineer can build a building that barely stands up.

In my building, administration changed last year all the floor lamps with CFL. From a total of 19 bulbs, 2 burned out.

They stay on all day long. That means 10% of the bulbs burned before reaching 9000 hours. The rest seems to be unaffected.

However, _older_ lamps (made > 15, 20 years ago) used to last much longer than two or three years on all the time. I know this because I took notice of this at the moment.

I have incandescent bulbs that are more than 10 years old, that burn 2-3 hours a day today. Incandescent bulbs I bought in the last years typically lasted less than 1-2 years at a similar burning rate. I saw a change in bulb quality when the local industry died (east Europe) and all you could get were Osram from Poland or Phillips.

In my opinion, the reaches of the cartel are still strong.

In my opinion, people want to pay less and less each year, which leads to using cheaper materials. 15 years ago a CFL cost a very decent amount of money, I am sure that if you adjusted the price for inflation it would cost at least 4x of what they cost now. You can get a 60W-equivalent CFL for £1.50-2, which is ridiculously close to the cost of regular 60W lightbulbs(which cost £0.5-0.8 when bought in bulk).

It's often cheaper for manufacturers of low-cost electronics to minimally test devices before sale, with the expectation that some will die early in their life and be fixed under warranty. Burning in everything you make is expensive, especially if failure rates are fairly low anyway.

Electronics tend to have a bathtub curve of failure, with high failure rates at the beginning of life. It wouldn't surprise me that older CFLs (with much higher market prices) had greater levels of testing/burn in before being shipped, leading to much lower failure rates.

I believe it's typically the heat sinks/packaging etc. that go with the LED bulbs, long before the crystals themselves do (which are the most expensive part, though they can fail too).

I lost an expensive (and weak) GE LED lamp I bought a few years ago. In fairness, they weren't rated for a super long lifetime - or at least they didn't have a very long warranty.

I noticed this as well, especially with CFLs from Phillips.

> 'There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached.'

What's more worrying is that Governments have outlawed traditional light bulbs in favor of LED or CFL ones. If that's not some powerful lobby, I don't know what it is.

In the EU, incandescent bulbs were banned as part of a directive [1] to reduce energy use, as only 10% of the energy put in was converted to light. That sounds like a sensible move to me rather than lobbying.

In the UK, CFL bulbs were also subsidised and/or given out free to households by the energy companies before incandescent bulbs were banned.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/31/lightbulb...

I'm all for decreasing energy consumption, but the last two flats I've rented have come as-built-new with dimmer switches which do not work with newfangled fixtures.

One was a set of many small ceiling fixtures for which only LED lamps could anymore be bought in shops, and those flickered because the switches were dimmers (which themselves would save energy, because most of the time 50% was enough).

The second flat had a $200 electronic dimmer switch, again as installed by the builders, and a halogen fixture with some sort of ballast or whatever you call it these days. This also flickered constantly, and worse, it burned out the dozen tiny $5 halogen bulbs every week. The fixture had to be replaced; the new one takes standard-size halogen bulbs and has no ballast thingy to make them flicker.

It has become quite unpleasant to move into new buildings and find that the electricals are not compatible even as built. And most shops won't sell some of the bits I need to fix it, because the government told them not to...but other less-convenient shops still do sell them.

There are plenty of LED lamps that can be dimmed. They are more expensive than non-dimmable LEDs, but they work fine.

The LED "bulbs" I had were dimmable, socket type MR8. The thing is, they still flickered. I think it was something about the dimmer switch itself being unhappy--the flickering was not constant, but it was impossible to stop completely, even at 100% brightness on the dial. My point is, these things have given rise to all sorts of weird incompatibilities that we didn't have before, and I am tired of it. Anything like "Well there are bulbs that will work but you just have to order them from this one guy" is not really a solution--we're talking about lights in a house, not the International Space Station. :) The government has forced us into using technology which is not ready for true mainstream use (as opposed to geek use).

Mine (bought at elkjop) makes a lot of noise, otherwise ok. Where did you get yours?

Amazon. I have about 4-5 different brands because I bought several different ones to test colour tone (most "warm white" leds are too cold white for me to want them in my living room).

This is the one I've liked best:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-MASTER-Dimmable-Halogen-Repl...

Not as bright as they claim it to be, though. I have 4 of them in the living room, and there's no way it's equivalent to 4 x 50W halogen bulbs.

Factor in the energy cost of making CFL/LED bulbs (including the additional electronics and mining the required material and all the shipping it requires) and the energy costs of dealing with the toxic waste they contains, and now this doesn't seem as much like a sensible move.

When you compare retail prices and actual lifetime you notice that the new bulbs are significantly more expensive than the now banned traditional ones while having overrated life expectancies and now you understand that the manufacturers are getting more money and faster, suddenly this overpriced incompetence has a feel of greenwashing followed by an aftertaste of lobbying

Factor in the energy cost of making CFL/LED bulbs (including the additional electronics and mining the required material and all the shipping it requires) and the energy costs of dealing with the toxic waste they contains, and now this doesn't seem as much like a sensible move.

I know of no study that agrees with your conclusion. Among others, Umweltbundesamt (German government), BUND (German NGO, parts of Friends of the Earth), Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science) have come out in favour of CFL bulbs.

I can't believe we're still having this discussion in 2014. To add to cygx's point, a quick break even sum:

A 60W equivalent costs around $1.50, and using ~12W of energy. Even if we use the lowest electricity cost for the US ($0.08/kWh), and assume the incandescent bulb was free:

cost of bulb / power difference * cost per Wh = break even time

1.50 / (60-12) * (0.08 / 1000) = 390 hours

So you only need to use a bulb for 390h to recover the total purchase cost. You can argue all you want about lifetimes, equivalence etc, but these are not marginal figures, especially when you factor in that real EU electricity prices tend to be 2-5x the figures I used-- with German or Danish electricity you'll have pay back times well under 100h.

Those like you and ekianjo make a good case for regulation. The EU banned incandescents, the world did not implode.

Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion that CFLs and LEDs are more harmful to manufacture and recycle than incandescents?

This. I'm glad there are still sensible people out there on HN.

In EU you can very easily walk into any shop and still happily buy incandescent bulbs without any problems - 150W, 100W, 60W -despite the ban. Manufacturers very quickly caught on the fact that while incandescent bulbs for home use were banned, "specialist" bulbs were not and cannot be banned for a variety of reasons. So if I go into my nearest supermarket, I can buy a 100W incandescent bulb that is designed for "traffic lights use only, not for home use". Of course no one cares that everyone uses it at home, but it's perfectly legal to sell.

> In the EU, incandescent bulbs were banned as part of a directive [1] to reduce energy use, as only 10% of the energy put in was converted to light. That sounds like a sensible move to me rather than lobbying.

If it makes economical sense, let consumers judge for themselves. The cost at purchase of LEDs / CFLs is way higher than traditional light bulbs. Everyone should be able to have access to cheap lights.

As long as we haven't figured out and implemented a way to align economical and ecological sense, your suggestion is a non-starter.

Haha. We are not going to consume LESS energy in the future, unless you want to live in poor conditions. The working assumption is how do we create more, cheaper and in a cleaner way. There's a bunch of papers out there on how energy consumption and level of life are closely related.

Maybe you should have read what I wrote. I certainly do not advocate conserving energy no matter the cost.

I'm saying that at the present there is no economic incentive for consumers to save electricity large enough to make them switch to less energy intensive means of lighting.

We certainly won't maximize our standard of living by senselessly wasting energy. When there are two ways to light a room, yielding the same amount of light, but one uses much less energy, it is the superior one.

The tricky question is how to make it the economically sensible one for the consumer, as well.

When there are two ways to light a room, yielding the same amount of light, but one uses much less energy, it is the superior one.

Not necessarily. What about manufacturing costs? If manufacturing a CFL/LED is more labour or capital intensive then it's production uses resources that could have been used to produce other goods. If that's the case then a ban on incandescent light bulbs has a hidden cost.

You shouldn't look only at the visible effects but also at those invisible. A great essay That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen [1] by Frederic Bastiat comes to my mind. It explores this kind of situations.

[1] http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

Do you have any evidence that supports the possibility of LED beings more labour or capital intensive, or is this a hypothetical, "well maybe it could be worse" in an effort to confirm your existing opinion?

I've seen numerous citations to the effect that we are consuming less energy these days on a per-capita basis.

Not seeing a whole lot of citations coming back from your side of the table.

Then why are we banning inefficient engines and impose huge tax on ones with large emissions? A car without a DPF costs less to buy and maintain than a one with it, yet no one makes the argument that "everyone should have access to cheap cars"?

Personally I would buy the car that has the most reliable and most powerful engine - even if it was a 6.0L V8 - but huge taxes on such thing are stopping me from buying it.

I think that the problem of pollution, and other externalities, can be best handled by Pigovian taxes, not by explicit bans or heavy-handed regulation.

cheap lights: http://hackaday.com/2011/03/08/soda-bottle-skylights/ http://www.juggaar.com/2013/08/bottle-roof-lighting-green-en...

That only 10% of the energy used by a lightbulb is converted to light does not mean that the bulb is wasting energy.