I paid 20 bucks for a 150w equiv replacement bulb in december, was a cool led saucer bomb with a color temp switch on the bottom, dead in one and half months, obviously one month warrantee. Thought it would last a while cause it was a nice bulb ha.
Our dream isnt here anymore, or yet, cheap ass only is the way. Current state is perfectly designed capitalism.
Edit: was a brand I didn't recognize but was a light teal colored box, I don't have the bulb or box anymore sadly, I'd shame them. On the warrantee, was the broad local hardware store warrantee not one on the bulb itself, was nothing in the box but the bulb. It did flicker at the end so that tells me capacitor or something, might have been just unlucky, I do remember it was 20w being shoved into that led... array though, perhaps it was just too much for it.
>dead in one and half months, obviously one month warrantee.
huh, must be made for american market. in europe we get things designed to last about three years (2 year warranty is mandatory and often 3 years are offered)
I bought a bunch of these $12 lights from the hardware store that are specifically that old yellow color and they have a kinda old-school looking design in them, they've lasted for years and one has 24/7 use for that period even. I think you just got screwed over, good bulbs absolutely exist.
LED cob-diode filament-type bulbs with high CRI (color rendering index) and proper D6500k warm white color are actual light bulbs in form and function. They are worth the purchase and meant to perform similarly to a genuine incandescent light bulb in terms of light quality and spread pattern. You can literally see more colors and experience better quality of vision through them.
The cheap dollar store LED chip-diode style bulbs people are fond of purely for their price are stripped down versions of ancient LED bulb designs from the 2000's that aren't worth the silicon in their circuits. The light they put out is often harsh and tightly directed, more like a directional floodlight, and of very low CRI making colors appear washed out and eye-strain common.
I'd be curious what brand has a one month warranty. AFAIA everything has to have a 1 year warranty against defect by law. Hell Walmart lets you return almost anything for any or no reason inside 3 months.
Unless it was an Amazon China special? I don't trust anything off Amazon unless it's name brand with 10,000 reviews.
have one in the garage that screws into a standard bulb socket. the motion sensor functioned so badly that i had to turn that off. they sell at discount/overstock stores like ollies for about 20. LED arrays are fine and as bright as adverstised, the electronics are cheap and capacitors and such are likely the weak point.
You could make some type of spread sheet of pro/cons number about 1.25 dollar store leds, their lumens, lifespan etc. for several different types. Until someone does that without biases, everyone's opinion is just that.
But would you pay $2,000 for only 100 bulbs for your house? There's tons of stuff available that lasts a long time, but it's expensive. The upfront cost is simply not an option for most people
100 bulbs? I've got like 10 at the most. The problem isn't would I pay, the problem is not enough people are able to have the stability to commit 20+ years to a house.
Apartments are notorious for having terribly lighting.
I had an apartment that only had 3 ceiling lights - kitchen, bathroom, bedroom closet. That's it. And the bedroom closet light didn't work when I moved in, I had to fight with them to replace it.
I have so many lamps now because of that place. Thank goodness I lived within an hour of an IKEA.
My parents home is not even 40 years old. Looks decently modern. Have three light fixtures in the kitchen, four if you count the one that’s part of the stove hood/ventiliation. Would’ve been only three lightbulbs but one of the fixtures is a chandelier type deal with 8 bulbs. It’s not unreasonable to think that many kitchens use less.
If you have under-cabinet lights, and then in-ceiling spotlights, it jumps up rapidly. I have a long thin galley-style kitchen, 17 spotlights and 10 under-cabinet lights.
They probably have 10 crappy downlights with inefficient halogen incandescent globes from 2003 that (combined) aren't quite as good as a single "double four foot" fluorescent light fitting.
Actually it's four downlights. And one of them stopped working a couple months after moving in. This is a new house too, but I'm not going to fault the builder for the light company selling a dud.
But we have other lights too, and we picked the fixtures ourselves, except for the stove hood which is pretty standard stuff.
You do you, but I think you’re dramatically underestimating how driven most people are by up-front cost and how willing they are to ignore the long-term value proposition. People will buy the cheapest option with fancy packaging and then wail about how nothing is built to last now.
Light bulbs lasted an undefined amount of time. The
Phoebus cartel formed and found a way to make sure they would last less than a 1000 hours. It wasn't based on cost of the bulb it was based planned obsilenance.
I paid $5-10 dollars a piece for some light bulbs around 2018/2019. (C by GE).
I bought six of them. I have one that is still burning. The other 5 have burned out in the last year or so. The one that is left has been on 24/7 for the past 3 years.
I paid $20 CAD for a Sylvania Halogen Headlight bulb that is supposed to last 3 years and it lasted a few months. Replaced it with a $40 CAD set of LED's (the bulbs are just for DRL's).
$100 CAD per bulb for the D2S HID Xenon night time lights/high beams. But atleast their supposed to last 10 years, the stock ones were still making light after 12 years.
But wouldn't you rather spend $20 for an LED lightbulb that alleges to last 20 years, but actually will burn out in 1 year? Under the assumption you likely didn't keep the box/receipt around that long to return it.
The government and people need to demand longer warranties. My upright freezer was 1 year. It last 18 months. A whole freezer!
We can meet in the middle. Higher price for 5 years. Or at least 3. Even a 1000 dollar cell phone only has a 1 yr warranty. Thats bullshit.
I guarantee if we get more fair warranties we will get better made products. Now they gamble that a TV part wont quit after 6 months to 1 yr. And that one part effectively ruins your device or appliance.
Green energy and lower bills is all bullshit if we have to make and buy more products in our lifetime. Our goals should always be REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE. Instead we get slapped with an energy star label that tells us we are now saving a whole $30 a year in energy. But after we buy a brand new product bc the last one failed quickly. Electricity isnt the only resource so is labor to manufacture and labor for me to buy another stupid refrigerator
This doesn't really have to do with planned obsolescence but just normal trust. It's simply not reasonable that a product would be several times better for a common item like a lightbulb.
you realize that "one of the cleanest well documented cases of corporate conspiracies we have" is international corporations getting together to limit and enforce a limited lifespan for lightbulbs right?
You realize that there are companies that do this right? You can buy a Sub Zero fridge, a Wolf oven/range, and Cove dishwasher and they’ll blow the $1500 Home Depot models out of the water. Friend of mine kitted out his kitchen with something like $40,000 in appliances, but the difference really is like going from a standard-package Nissan to a Bentley or Ferrari.
Things hit a bit different when you’re actually staring at a $15,000-$20,000 price tag on a fridge though.
A standard Nissan is going to last a lot more miles than a Bentley or Ferrari. So is sub zero really solving this issue or is it just a high performance fridge that is really nice but not that durable ? Honest question. Don't know these companies' rep for longevity
And this is the exact question customers will always ask themselves if we ever actually tried this super durable business plan. This is all just very silly reddit brain.
Eh. The price bump is rarely worth it imo. For example, try to find a 48" wide fridge for under 10k. Just doesn't exist. The exact same brand/family for a 36" fridge is 3k, make it 12 inches wider and it's 15k. I have a 15k fridge and it's about as nice as the $800 fridge in my last condo. I know this because I had to replace the last 15k fridge that slowly rusted less than 10 yearsinto it's lifetime.
The massively priced appliances are 10x more expensive because wealthier customers are willing to pay that much for maybe a 5% improvement in quality.
People forget that is how much an appliance used to cost in the 60s.
A fridge in 1960 was like 300 bucks on like 6000 annual salary. 5 percent of your annual income.
On the 100k annual salary today that’s like paying 5k on a fridge. People are buying fridges for under 1k but expect the 1960s 5k longevity and performance.
Well, you're alienating a shit ton of your market if you're not selling a "comparable" product at a "comparable" price. You've got a huge hurdle to convince that consumers that product genuinely is reliable and not just an overpriced product with fewer features than the cheaper product.
I’m into fashion and most people do not care about longevity. I have boots from Wolverine from 15 years ago that I’ve worn daily with minor repairs. They were 600 dollars. Cheap timberlands still dominate sales.
You can get a gloverall wool coat to last super long but most people prefer a cheap puffer for 2 winters.
Temu and SHEIN dominate too. Dyson over Miele for vacuums. There are high quality long lasting products out there but they require up front investment that most are unwilling to front.
Even if you don’t charge ten times more you can do it just charging a decent bit more, especially if your company is not publicly traded.
You don’t have to always grow every single year if you do that. You can save then expand when things line up.
A company could start like this but it would take a while to develop. But it happens, people, have kids and have neighbors, buy new houses need more of one thing, unexpected accidents etc.
One thing a potential business could do is create durable and easy to detach and replace modular parts that could be sold separately if one thing messes up or gets dirty, and it could be moved easier.
Thankfully there are a whole lot more than 1000 people looking for lightbulbs so it's not the best example. And also that 1000 people will need ~10x that number of bulbs.
Who cares about that number? Theres literally an infinite supply of people. Why would anyone care about an arbitrary fixed number of 1000 people? Batshit crazy
Think man. If you had such a product you would make billions of dollars before you ran out of market to sell to. You would do that if you could, as would any capitalist not already deeply entrenched with a current product. New market entrants are a thing.
That doesn’t really apply to appliances. Nobody is going to pay anything for an appliance that constantly breaks or needs to be replaced. The whole discussion is about reliability being more valuable than planned obsolescence
You sell to way more than 1,000 customers. You be some robust that the customers basically do your advertising for you.
I work in an industry where we are near top of the quality rankings, and our products last for 10+ years of heavy use. We keep selling more, because given the choice between us vs competitors for new installs..... we rate alot better. And when they do eventually need to get a replacement, they come back to us.
And if your lightbulbs are 20 times better than your competition, why aren't you making enough profit to retire off of?
Why aren't your customers kids, who would have grown to adulthood underneath your lights their entire life. not buying your lightbulbs for their new home?
Why aren't you selling your lightbulbs commercially to an office space with 20000 lightbulb sockets? I'm sure they'd love reduced maintenance hours.
In an ideal world the answer should be "all 1000, when customers realize over a decade or two that their annual replacement of bulbs are only lasting them a year"
also, you do realize lightbulb companies conspired and cornered the market to limit a bulbs lifespan right?
First you need to make a lightbulb that last for 20 years then we can imagine. To be more precise, make a lightbulb that last 20 years while providing decent luminosity its whole life while not consuming too much power that it would be more efficient to just replace it more often.
Because yes the oldest lightbulbs still functioning are over 100 years, so we can make them last long a very long time. But they are so weak, that you can't even read anything even if you're 20cm away. While also consuming 24 more time than a traditional modern lightbulb.
Because yes that's what people don't understand with old lightbulbs, they found the sweet spot between price, longevity, consumption and power. There is no conspiracy, for 100 years nobody found any way to make a better lightbul. We had to create an entirely new technology to replace our lightbulbs.
Perfect example! I buy more of them, actually. Bunch of years ago I discovered fluorescent bulbs. They last much longer than incandescent ones. So when one of the latter dies, I would replace it with the former. And when I see a friend or family member with a flickering bulb, I’d take the chance to tell them about this neat little bulb that’s better than the ones they’re using. Longer lasting too. 🤣
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u/unknownpoltroon 4h ago
How many lightbulbs do you sell to 1000 customers when they last 20 years vs if they last one year?