I work at a hardware store. Yesterday, a customer asked me to help him find a light bulb. Specifically, a bulb for a work light. I began showing him our selection of LED lights but he cut me off, saying he “didn’t want any of those f****** LEDs”. He then ranted about the ”f******* government phasing out incandescent bulbs” and the “f*****s” that vote them into office.”
A coworker kind of bailed me out so I walked away, and later explained to me that there used to be special incandescent bulbs that could better withstand rough handling.
So my question is this: we’re these special bulbs as breakage-resistant as modern LED bulbs?
I guess this is an IMHO answer, but my memory of those special durable bulbs were just regular bulbs with a slightly tougher filament (and maybe thicker glass?). LED bulbs with a plastic bulb would be much more durable, again IMHO. Regular lightbulbs could burn out just by being jarred too hard, and those “tough” ones were meant to protect from that, but LEDs don’t have that problem.
One the earlier forays into LED bulbs was this flat plastic one from Philips, which was very durable. Amazon has them for $40 now, so my guess is that they are out of production, but I have one in my utility light.
Yes, incandescent bulbs can be (and are) manufactured for high vibe/shock environments. Garage door openers, for example, required them back in the day.
But all else being equal, I would think an LED bulb would be more durable since it doesn’t contain a filament. OTOH, it either contains or requires electronics. And the electronics should be protected from vibe/shock/temperature extremes if used in a severe environment.
So when he said “work light,” was he referring to a handheld trouble light?
Car headlights are subjected to extremes in temperature, shock, vibration and cost/benifit. LED’s have replaced all filiment type incandescent bulbs in cars becasue they are supierior to them in all of these aspects.
Yeah, the guy is a moron.
A COB LED worklight can withstand a fall from a 12’ ladder while operating. Even an “Industrial” incandescent is unlikely to survive that.
Those incandescents were called “Rough Service”, and were vibration resistant. They were also exempt from the regulations against import of standard incandescent light bulbs when that went into effect in Canada.
They were about 40% more expensive than standard. We don’t carry them anymore, generally we’re either LED or halogen in all of our offerings.
I think I remember some shop light bulbs with a coating to contain the glass shards in case they got splashed. Of course, that was only needed because of all the waste heat from incandescents, another benefit of LEDs.
The International Brotherhood of Rectifiers, Diodes, and Transistors has an extremely powerful lobby that has its tendrils into virtually every industry from communications and computing to childrens’ toys and HVAC. They’ve essentially taken over the government and you can see nearly every government official almost constantly carrying and using a powerful mind control device to give and receive orders via the Brotherhood. As evidence, you can’t even find thermionic valves anywhere except for museums where they are inaccurately portrayed as “unreliable”, “inefficient”, and “delicate”, despite the fact that they took us to suborbital space (along with some Nazi scientists that we snuck in after the war)!
IME the “rough service” incandescents weren’t all that durable either. They were better than the stupid-fragile ordinary lightbulbs. At least stupid fragile for the rigors of a workshop, auto garage, etc.
Consider a standard trouble light = 100W bulb in a cage on a cord. If it had a regular service household bulb in there and you dropped the cage onto the concrete floor from 4 inches it was all-but guaranteed to bust the filament. A rough service bulb would usually survive a 6" fall, but never 8". They could take gentle knocks or bumps and that’s about it.
Oh yeah, granted. The fact the old fashioned “durable” bulbs actually were/are not very durable kind of gives the lie to his whole pathetically obvious rant.
I have to say that early LEDs were not very reliable either. The Chinese are very good at making something so cheap that it just barely works at all, much less for long.
I mean, the last thing I want is a light bulb that is going to wake me up. I want to sit in the dark, constantly nodding off, and incandescent bulbs are so much better for that.
They’re also used in produce coolers, because if the bulb does break, for whatever reason, you really don’t want bits of glass all over everything that’s in there; you’d have to throw it all out. I’ve still got a couple in stock and didn’t realize that they’ve disappeared, if they have.
I wish I’d offered to buy him an LED bulb of his choice. Most likely he’d refuse to accept a woke gift, but there’s a small chance he’d use it and find it to be the toughest bulb he’s ever owned.
The hardware store guy (above post) is just a luddite. LED bulbs are superior to incandescent in most ways, including energy usage and durability.
However, I have one use for incandescent: I have a couple of work lights (maybe properly called “trouble lights”?). The kind with a cage over the bulb. I use “rough duty” incandescent bulbs in them. I have two outside spigots for hose use in the yard. When the temperature goes very low (single digits - rare here in Atlanta area) I hang them in the basement on the pipe where it goes through the foundation wall to each spigot. My thinking is that the slight warming effect from the bulb helps keep enough warmth in the pipe to prevent freezing.
In 30 years of occasional use (maybe a couple of times each winter) I’ve never had a freezing problem…
The one place they are (sometimes) inferior is in traffic lights in northern climate with precipitation. It seems they’ve figured out that there was just enough heat from an incandescent to melt snow/ice accumulation on the lens but the LED don’t get hot enough to melt said snow & ice so certain places are needing to install heat wires, eliminating some of the cost savings from lower electricity usage.
See, they’re not superior in every way & those @#$%& woke products should be banned entirely & we should go back to what Alexander Graham Bell invented! [/s]
Totally endorse that view, about Chinese crap in general and LEDs in particular. Quality vs crappiness in LEDs is definitely a thing.
I would say, though, that it’s not just early LEDs vs current ones that is a determiner of quality (i.e.- longevity). There were quality LEDs in the early days and there are still crappy ones today. The first LED bulb I ever bought, back when they were rare and expensive, was a Cree brand bulb made with ventilated plastic. I got it for use in my kitchen ventilator hood because I find it useful to leave that light on 24x7. And so it has been, in all the many years since LEDs were the new kid on the block.
Meanwhile my main kitchen ceiling light has been replaced at least twice and maybe three times since I switched to LEDs, the upstairs hallway LED at least once, and the ceiling light in the study is currently dead and needs a second replacement. I suspect that part of the problem here is that those bulbs are in unventilated enclosures and may be getting killed by heat, but since incandescents managed to last about as long (maybe even longer in some cases) the mild heat output of LEDs should hardly be a problem – unless of course the electronics is cheap Chinese crap. By contrast I have two table lamps that are used frequently and the LED bulbs there have never burned out.
The fact that LEDs, which we’ve been conditioned to feel will last practically forever, have been burning out just about as frequently as decent incandescents in my ceiling fixtures is a real hot button with me, because I am of an age where being perched on top of a stepladder like a damned parrot while trying to remove tricky ceiling fixture enclosures is not my idea of either fun or safety. From now on I’m using only quality bulbs like Cree or maybe Phillips, and the Home Depot Ecosmart bulbs (“Made in China”) are going in the garbage.
Heat is what appears to be the lifespan limiting bit of the construction. It isn’t just the actual LED but all the support components. Of which there are now not many. There seems to be an element of deliberate design that bakes all of the components in cheap lights.
It is possible to derate a cheap lamp by swapping a resistor to lower the current. The lamp is dimmer but due to the physics of LEDs the same colour. Running much cooler they may live vastly longer.
And of course one has to mention the Dubai LED lights. Which are required to be built to last. But you can’t buy outside of Dubai.