I find this part doubtful. If the cost-per-year overall was less for the “forever” bulbs, when accounting for purchase price, failure/replacement rate, and efficiency, the market would have moved over to them long ago, especially considering that people don’t want to spend time buying or replacing light bulbs. All it would take is one startup to completely disrupt the entire market with a lower cost, less hassle product.
I suspect that the “a bit less efficient” part was actually substantial enough to result in a net negative overall savings relative to the “standard” bulb product offering.
Way back when a company I worked for had us on a Japanese Quality Management kick because Japan was so good at manufacturing it would eventually be the dominant economy in the world.
One article discussed quality and obsolescence. Remember the good old days of Detroit, when replacing an alternator was a fairly common thing? The winding burned out or the diodes died or the bearings went. Someone examined the alternators for a Honda or Toyota (I forget which) and discussed the difference. Basically, everything was bigger. They said this was the alternator for a car twice its size- heftier diodes, better bearings, thicker wire. The Japanese system just prided itself on not producing fast-failing crap. As we can see, that has both helped their auto success and galvanized US companies to do much better.
(Remember those analog electric clocks in the dashboard of Detroit cars in the 1960’s and 1970’s? That pretty much died after about 2 years? I don’t remember ever seeing one in an older car that was actually keeping time. They were just dashboard filler…)
Consumers will buy quality if its cost effective and worthwhile. The problem with “long life” bulbs I suppose is knowing whether they really are or if you’re being fed a line of BS. It takes too long to find out.
My OP was about the past, as incandescent light bulbs aren’t exactly a hot issue today. The “communist” part was about the light-bulb situation in non-hypothetical countries, such as the U.S.S.R., where factory production and quality had a loose relationship with “profit” and market demand, and companies like Osram and General Electric presumably didn’t have any influence.
Assuming that the fixture isn’t in some very inconvenient place, the cost of replacing a light bulb is negligible compared to the cost of the electricity to run it, so even small differences in efficiency trump cost of replacement.
Heavy duty bulbs were also usually rated for 130V, so when run at 115V the filaments would last much longer but give off a yellower light that many find unpleasant.
That’s the thing: I can produce an incandescent light bulb that easily lasts 20 years. But you’re not going to like the color and intensity of light it puts out…
The issue with LED lights has been covered by Big Clive in various videos. This video on the Dubai LED was a counterpoint. Modern cheap LED lights would appear to be following the incandescent model. The designs provide insufficient heat sinking for the LEDs, drive them too hard and often seem deliberately designed to run any electrolytic capacitors too hot. The word “baking” is appropriate.
Big Clive has a set of videos where he shows how to trivially modify a cheap LED light to a lower power output, one which will then last nearly forever. Just replace the single resistor that sets the current through the LEDs on the controller IC. Unlike incandescent lights, the colour is the same and the efficiency is the same. Just dimmer and runs much cooler.
It isn’t suggested that this should be a common household mod. But it underlines the problem that there is still designed in failure.
I can’t help but wonder if this is responsible for the phenomenon I’ve noticed lately and mentioned in another thread – the unusually high incidence of “one-eyed” new cars equipped with LED headlights I’ve been seeing, where one is inoperative. I’ve seen too many of those to be explained by a mere random wiring problem.
You would hope car headlights would be built to a much more stringent standard than cheap no-name household lights. But it is probable that manufacturers are still having problems cooling the headlamps. We think of LEDs as being very efficient, and they are, but a bright lamp still creates a lot of heat, and LEDs are a lot less tolerant than a length of tungsten wire. I see aftermarket LED lamp systems with inbuilt fans. In a car this isn’t going to end well.
In an integrated car system one might hope that the LED headlamps get connected to a CAN bus and are directly controlled. But expediency may rule over nice design.
So are bulbs rated with average consumer use? If so, what is average consumer use? If you live where your power has power surges, is that taken into account into average consumer use?
My unscientific home study over many years finds incandescent bulbs that are left on for long periods last far longer than those bulbs that are regularly turned on and off. Does LED longevity parallel here between long periods of use vs constantly being turned on and off?
Most electrical and electronic devices don’t like thermal cycling. All manner of latent weaknesses can be exposed. An incandescent lamp is probably one of the worst. Cycling fatigues the filament and the envelope seals for a start. So power cycling does indeed result in significant reduction in lifetime. Traffic light controllers for incandescent lamps keep the lamps warm with a continuous low voltage and perform a soft ramp up of voltage when turning the lamp on. This makes a big difference.
For LED lamps there isn’t the clear thermal shock. There will be turn on stresses, there always are. But I doubt they matter compared to thermal degradation of the lamp components when it is on.
Overt abuse power cycling might shorten the life of the mains voltage input power capacitor. Much depends on the design of the lamp circuit.
Yes, but look at that light bulb. It produces an ugly, yellowish color of light that most consumers wouldn’t tolerate in their home. Plus it produces way less light (lumens) than a regular bulb did. So it’s inefficient in 2 ways – both in using more current, and producing less light output.
(Plus it has to burn continuously (no on-off thermal shock) to last that long – most consumers wouldn’t tolerate that, either.)
I often said the same thing about automobiles. Back in the day (60’s and 70’s) urban legend had it that Detroit had 200mpg carburetors (remember carburetors?) but the oil industry paid them to bury this tech. My view was, if it was simple tech, then why wouldn’t some country like China or the USSR have used that tech? They don’t give a crap what Exxon wants, and they certainly had the spies to figure this stuff out if their own scientists couldn’t…
As for consumer quality in Russia - I remember an article about central planning n the USSR. An example was plate glass - the factory quota was set in square meters of glass, so logically - the factory made quota by making the plate glass thinner. As a result a lot of it broke before it reached the construction site. It would not surprise me to learn their light bulb production met the same goals - quantity over quality.
I think those of you making reference to an under-voltaged incandescent bulb giving off an unpleasant kind of light are taking a rather dim and jaundiced view of this issue.
Somewhere in Orwell’s essays is a story about the everlasting gramophone [phonograph] needle “but big business bought it up and suppressed it.” We still haven’t got that everlasting needle - and we don’t miss it.
Following the dismantling of the Los Angles transit system in order to sell more cars the city became famous for its petro-chemical smog and congested roads.
GM showed off a zero-emission concept car in 1990. The California Air Resources Board passed a mandate that seven car makers in California create zero emission vehicles.
General Motors subsequently became a pioneer of the Electric Vehicles with their mass produced EV1 in 1996. But, fearful that other states would be inspired to pass similar legislation and threaten their regular car sales they successfully lobbied for a cancellation of the mandate, cancelled production and trashed the leased cars.
Tesla CEO Elon_Musk claimed in 2017 that Tesla was started in response to GM’s cancellation of the EV1 program.
Last quarter of 2021 GM made 440,745 vehicles and 26 of them were EVs. Tesla made 308,000 in that quarter. All of them EVs.
It is a fact that many large corporations are content to sit on the markets they dominate by hook or by crook. They engage in regulatory capture to avoid laws and trash their own technologies that that may affect their profit margin. The health of the public means little to them.
More recently the VW Diesel-gate scandal. European car companies convinced law makers that Diesel engines were the technology to achieve low carbon targets because of their superior efficiency. They won tax brakes and diesels became engine of choice. Later it was revealed that they programmed their cars to detect when they were on an exhaust test rig and then retune to get a good low emission score.
VW and GM made huge mistakes by trying the ‘game the system’ and now paying the price.
Competitive markets need to be nurtured and protected by just enough regulation to ensure there is level playing field and fair competition for the public good.
Sadly there is a tendency for cosy cartels to form in many businesses.
Adam Smith recognised this, way back in 1776.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. "
The economy is bedeviled by corporations who prefer to sit on markets and reach into their box dirty tricks when threatened rather than engage in fair competition and innovate.
While there are sharp practices like this that do conspire to defraud the public, it does not do to get carried away and imagine there is an ever lasting lightbulb, miracle engines that run on water or perpetual motion machines,the wonders of which, are deliberately hidden from us in some secretive chocolate factory or skunk works.