Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated

[@TechnologyConnections]

So... yeah. And I didn't even get into things like the effects of thermal cycling stress! Couple of fun facts that didn't make it in: one way to make an "energy-saving long-life" bulb is to design it for 130V, thus when on 120V supplies it's being underrun. And those are very weird because, for instance, it'll often be marked a "60W bulb" - but only at 130V. So in a sense it's like installing a dimmer that you can't go over 85% brightness or so. It works, but you have the same efficiency and output trade-off. And to touch on that thermal cycling stress, light bulbs for stage lighting were pretty niche and expensive, so stage lighting controllers would often have slow warm-up period upon power-up and never switch lights fully off when a show was going - instead, a very small amount of current was run through the filament to keep it hot, but not hot enough to glow. There were plenty of ways to extend the life of incandescent light bulbs, but every one had its own little unique trade-offs. Be glad we have better tech now!

[@Scudmaster11]

I'm working in a company that makes things that are not designed to fail at some point

[@skmgeek]

​@@Scudmaster11ok 👍

[@flatfingertuning727]

DJL projector bulbs (and likely some others) have a filament in series with the main filament, which is located behind the reflector making its light output useless. The extra filament doesn't get nearly as hot as the main one, and I suspect its intention is to limit peak current. If a bulb of that style (using numbers which are probably nowhere near those of the actual DJL bulb) if the main filament has a resistance of 0.1 ohm when cold and 1.0 ohm when hot, and the other filament has a resistance of 0.4 ohm when cold and 0.5ohm when hot, then the light output would be about what it would be if the main filament had been 0.2 ohm when cold and 2 ohms when hot, but the inrush current would be only 40% as great.

[@avlisk]

Having lived in Phoenix, where my light bulbs lasted 11 years, I learned that Mexico runs on 130v, and the bulbs in my house were 130v bulbs from just over the border. So, when the bulbs in my Maine house were being changed 6 or 7 times a year, I ordered some "Mexican" bulbs from Amazon. Only one needed changing this past year. I fully embrace your hypothesis.

[@thecrazerkid2146]

Can you make a video on refigerantion compressors?

[@glennvanderburg8708]

"The world is complex, and you should be skeptical of simple narratives." That's a great message that is applicable far beyond the topic of planned obsolescence.

[@kueapel911]

Many things these days are being pushed onto people so one sidedly biased. Like how everything were blamed into communism back then, everything are blamed onto capitalism these days. People just love simple and short conclusion to things. One misleading online article would easily misguide the entire world for decades to come. The only way to fight it is for each individual people to change themselves into adopting critical thinking, otherwise only dictatorship would works.

[@giornogiovanna2602]

German author Marc-Uwe Kling had a fitting quote in QualityLand 2.0, roughly translated: "If you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense, you probably fell for a conspiracy theory. Let's be honest: you can say a lot about life on this planet, but surely not that it makes sense. Commonly, the search for sense is what humans are programmed to do. A conspiracy theory is a fishing rod for humans with a bait made out of false sense."

[@DeadBaron]

and yet, Occam's Razor states the simplest solution is often the correct one, and I've seen it proven time and again in my decades on this planet.

[@CraftyF0X]

@@DeadBaron That's the popular interpretation of Occam's razer not what it truly says.

[@user-op8fg3ny3j]

@@CraftyF0X wdym?

[@hydra70]

Another important thing about the centennial light. They never turn it on and off, so it doesn't experience thermal shock like a bulb in normal use would.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Yup, it was used as a nightlight/emergency light before they realized its longevity was probably some kind of record. So even then it was rarely ever turned off. Since then, it's only _intentionally_ been turned off when the department moved it to a new fire station. And it's had its own dedicated UPS to keep it on through power outages. (Though it did turn off by accident once when its UPS was faulty. 😜)

[@xaenon]

In addition to which, I believe it is powered on DC. AC powered bulbs do experience some small degree of thermal cycling due to the constant reversal of current. They don't get 'cold', per se, but the fluctuation in light output IS demonstrable, and that means the filament is experiencing a 60 hz thermal fluctuation as well. DC does not have this; so the bulb got hot and STAYS hot. Demonstrable how? If you have a turntable, you'll know that the speed of those things is calibrated using an optical strobe disc - which DOES work with AC-driven incandescent lights. Also, you can actually hook a pair of head phones up to a solar panel under an an AC driven incandescent bulb and hear the 60 cycle hum.

[@kargaroc386]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was running with less current as well lower the current a little and the brightness and heat goes way down, and the lifespan rockets up exponentially.

[@2ndfloorsongs]

I use incandescent lights as heaters in my outside dog house. I wired the bulbs in series and I've had the same pair running for about 10 years now. Definitely last a lot longer.

[@Poldovico]

@@2ndfloorsongs Heating technology is 100% efficient, eventually.

[@mwbullen15]

Remember those 90's batteries that you could pinch to see the color change to show how much charge was left? I'd be interested in a video explaining those.

[@dbeierl]

Very quickly -- when you pinch it you engage a load resistor that puts a considerable load on the battery and heats up starting from one end. It's designed so that only a fresh battery can get it to heat up from one end to the other. It's covered by a liquid crystal thermometer that registers the temperature change by changing color.

[@maiabones]

​@@dbeierlso it's like an adhesive aquarium thermometer that activates when you complete the circuit with enough power left to warm up?

[@dbeierl]

@@maiabones yes.

[@Muonium1]

@@dbeierl and the design that allows only a fresh battery to be able to heat the entire strip is a simple V taper on the printed metal strip wire behind the LC. The thin narrow part has high resistivity and is easier to heat up than the wider low resistance part at the top. Of course, one can also simply drop an AA battery on a table to find out whether it's still "full" or not.

[@BillAnt]

​@@Muonium1- Those thermal power meter strips have all but disappeared nowadays for some reason. The "table drop" is not the most accurate way to determine the capacity of batteries, best to use a cheap battery or multi meter.

[@sergiorr90]

You are a youtube treasure. Its very difficult to find a channel like this that places enough effort to carefully investigate a topic, displays well documented demostrations and with arecording quality that is just amazing. Thank you for your educational videos and greetings from Colombia.

[@Dorumin]

zerg rush

[@Stefano--]

And everything perfectly subbed 👌

[@RandomBlackBox]

Nice Profile pic brother.

[@benmiller200]

It's the outtakes that keep it top tier.

[@ruairi_d]

Congratulations on 2 million subscribers!

[@innercityprepper]

Seriously, this gives me hope for civilization.

[@ArbitraryConstant]

I had a meeting at work where someone mentioned TC, half the people already liked the channel and the other half said it sounded interesting and they'd check it out

[@Levi_OP]

Yes

[@brandonlong7866]

I was here around 500k and ill be here till the day I die. I love learning new things from him!

[@drinkpepsi69]

thanks

[@Anfros.]

One of the reasons LEDs burn out too quickly sometimes is that the electronics in their bases are heat sensitive. So installing them in a fixture that doesn't allow air circulation around the lamp, like most fixtures meant for incandescent and halogen bulbs, can make them overheat and burn out. So if you find you are changing LEDs often it might be due to the fixture not the light source.

[@jonanderson5137]

Absolutely correct.

[@gubx42]

True, but the more efficient LED bulbs will last longer, even in inappropriate fixtures, simply because they waste less energy as heat and are therefore less likely to overheat.

[@Anfros.]

@@gubx42 yes, led bulbs that produce less heat are less prone to overheating. It also matters where in the bulb the heat is produced.

[@andersjjensen]

IKEAs LED bulbs are dirt cheap, last forever and never get any more than lukewarm even in enclosed spaces.

[@39XenonD]

As stated in the video, quite a few are overdriven. I've had some in perfectly vented, open fixtures and yet they burned out in under half a year. Typically lamps that are meant to replace halogen bulbs. Small form factors where the diodes grill the electronics because they are in very close proximity as the lamp can't physically be bigger. One desk lamp I had was suspiciously hot on the brightest level and surely burned out quickly after a few months (custom LEDs not meant to be changed - so... in a well designed enclosure (?)). Bought a different one, but as it turned out electronically quite identical. Toasty on max brightness, but much cooler one level down. Almost the same output in light but astonishingly less hot. It's now running perfectly fine with daily use after 4+ years. Edit: Forgot to mention that for double the perceived brightness you need to quadruple the power (= quadruple the heat) iirc. So a little less bright can go a long way.

[@FerralVideo]

My coworker hit this case spot-on. Before energy efficient bulbs were a thing, he intentionally bought a 230v light bulb to install in a 120w fixture. This bulb would then run all day every day, and had clocked more than ten years of just sitting there cooking away energy to produce a modicum of light.

[@lakse123]

My parents brought over a 240V chandelier from Europe in 1970. My brother has it and it still works on 120V here in Canada. It's perpetually a dim orange over the dining table but looks nice enough. So yeah, 50 years with the same bulbs. Grossly inefficient of course but so what. Now, I have a cute Swedish Christmas candelabra that uses seven hard-to-find bulbs in series, each rated for 17V or something. I got sick of having to find the busted bulb every xmas and hunt down expensive replacements, so after some math I wired in a suitable resistor with a heatsink in series. Now they are dimmer but don't die. Sure they dump a lot of heat, but in mid winter who cares? They're inside and warming the house.

[@antimaga856]

@@lakse123 You could use a standard incandescent dimmer, wired to a receptacle to achieve the dimming with less heat loss (I can appreciate the heat benefit here).

[@stevesedio1656]

There were coin shaped diodes that dropped into the socket before you screwed in the light bulb. The bulb was redder, but not significantly so. Extended bulb life, at the cost of lumen per watt.

[@AZaksLife]

In some industrial applications, many times ago, there was some 380V light bulb running intentionally at 230v and they last over 50 years. I saw them with my own eyes working until a few years ago and they were installed in the 60s. They turned on and off several times a minute (they were signal light bulbs)

[@stevesedio1656]

@@AZaksLife Running at a lower voltage, means the filament runs cooler. Reducing temperature by 10C, doubles the life. I'm not surprised these never failed, even being turned on and off. Turning on, when the filament is cold and has a lower resistance, is the highest stress.

[@audvidgeek]

For a good comparison for this is to look at projector bulbs that were used in movie, slide, or other film projection. Those bulbs typically only lasted about 50-100 hour long, but were extremely bright and gave excellent color rendering for displaying vivid color images. The tradeoff of the nice bright light out of them was the short life span

[@Merrsharr]

And yet somehow I've never heard of a projector light bulb burning out in the middle of a movie.

[@fg68at]

In Professional Theaters you have xenon arc lamps, a highly specialized type of gas discharge lamp. They made a very bright light of 6.000 Kelvin, light daylight. They where introduced around 1954. Lifetime is 3500-4000 hours. Other Xenon lamps with no specific colour for other uses have a lifespan of 1500 hours.

[@nickryan3417]

@@Merrsharr It happened occasionally, but there were procedures put in place to significantly reduce this - I've been in the odd film when "the projector failed" - and this is most likely going to be the bulb. The primary consideration is that most bulbs tend to fail when turned on, not when running and this meant that the failure happened at the beginning of the movie and required a relatively quick and simple replacement as long as the bulb wasn't too hot. From memory, from talking to a projectionist, they recorded the life of the bulb and replaced them before they blew. When the manufacturing is consistent enough, the expected duration of a bulb was a reasonably predicted duration.

[@ng.tr.s.p.1254]

@@Merrsharr The concept of preparing carefully has existed before you were born.

[@SeanBZA]

@@Merrsharr Many projectors also had a very nice slide mechanism, where you had a second lamp and optical block there, that you simply slid into place to replace the failed lamp, and then had a few hours to allow it to cool down to be able to change it, and clean the optical assembly, as you would find then very dirty from contaminants in the air blown in to cool them.

[@quinnobi42]

"Incandescent light bulbs are called that because they rely on the phenomenon of incandescence to produce light in a bulb." I love this explanation.

[@m0llux]

Ah, the floor is made out of floor! :)

[@Rohanology27]

To be fair science can either name something Obvious-McObvious face or Obscure-YouWouldNeverGuessium So I’ll take the W when we get it

[@danielt.8573]

Keyboards are keys in a board.

[@carlosdgutierrez6570]

Technically they are LER, Light Emitting Resistors.

[@mabus4910]

The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club!

[@BlueLegion]

I'm surprised you didn't use candles as an analogue to compare the lightbulb to. There is literally a saying that the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

[@mikefochtman7164]

"My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night. But ah my foes and my ohfriends, it gives a lovely light." A little poem my mother taught me ages ago. :)

[@deus_ex_machina_]

@@mikefochtman7164 How would the logistics of a dual burning candle work? A straight candle attached at the middle whose wax falls into a drip tray (which needs to be cleaned often)? A U-shaped candle?

[@agranero6]

"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long"

[@mikefochtman7164]

@@deus_ex_machina_ LOL.... it's a poem for goodness sake. You MUST be an engineer! lol Okay, take a tall narrow one, warm it in the middle so you can bend it into a U shape. Enjoy.

[@cameron7374]

@@mikefochtman7164 I also went through the sideways candle and the U-shaped one in my head before I read their comment. (Though I didn't come up with the drip tray, that actually makes me prefer the sideways one.)

[@noba4696]

At my University in Germany this was actually the topic of one of my first lectures (mechanical engineering). So I want to contribute because you excluded Halogen-lamps: Halogen lamps use e.g. Fluorine to bind the sublimated tungsten and "refill" the tungsten wire at the thinnest spots. Thats why those lamps have a much higher life expectency and brightness/efficiency, though need a socket that can withstand higher temperatures. I remember vaguely that Osram had a warranty program where you could send in black-tinted halogen lamps, because it meant there was a defect in the manufacturing process, since the tungsten isnt supposed to "get" to the glass.

[@MrDuncl]

Mains voltage halogens weren't as good as made out. I replaced a ten+ years old normal bulb with a mains halogen one in an outside lamp and it failed after less than a year. I recently bough, mainly as a historic curiosity a Philips bulb that has a low voltage halogen capsule and a transformer between it and and the base. 40W of life from 20W and supposedly a longer life. Car bulbs seem to be the pinnacle of incandescent life. Even the headlights seem to last about 5 years.

[@noba4696]

@@MrDuncl yeah outside lamps are a special case, depending on temperature and exposure to e.g. rain, a halogen lamp will fail fast. Even slight fluctuations in the supply-voltage (1V is enough) can kill it. That's why most halogen lamps are 12V, since the AC-DC converter prevents these fluctuations.

[@petarmiletic997]

@@MrDuncl Car bulbs last a long time because of the lower voltage. To achieve the same power output from a low voltage the filament resistance needs to be lower. For example a 12v 55w bulb resistance at operating temperature is ~2.7 ohms. A 120v 55w bulb has ~260 ohms. This lower resistance is achieved with thicker shorter filament which is far more mechanically robust than a long thin one.

[@VitorFM]

​@@petarmiletic997did you know that the working voltage of cars are about 14V? The car battery can reach 13V when Fully charged. Car lamps are well designed! They are filled with hallogen to reduce evaporation and create a auto healing effect. Most times they are made out of quartz and not glass. They also have a better filament support, because it needs to withstand vibrations. The 1000h limit is a bad thing! They could have limited the efficiency, but they prefer to limit lifetime. This is a simple excuse to limit lifetime.

[@petarmiletic997]

@@VitorFM True, but the nominal voltage of the bulbs is 12 volts. At 13 or 14 volts the power will be slightly higher than nominal. Most modern cars will start to PWM the bulb once voltage exceeds 13v to extend bulb life. Also usually only headlight bulbs are halogen. All other (turn signal, position, brake etc) are normal incandescent. But allthat is not really relevant because All else being equal - for a given wattage the filament of the bulb will be thicker and shorter for lower voltage, and thus mechanically stronger.

[@Etienne.6329]

I am so thrilled... I asked you about this topic on Patreon, you made a lengthy response concluding with "I've never really thought of making a video about this, but honestly you have me thinking about it now"... and here it is ! Thanks a lot !

[@becauseimafan]

Oh hey that's really cool!! Thank you for asking him - and thank you for supporting him on there!!! (From someone who can't afford to, but recommends his videos, and lets all the ads play, even on later repeat viewings. Love this guy!)

[@Etienne.6329]

@@becauseimafanit is isn’t it ? That’s something he hinted at a while ago and it was driving me crazy because he was literally the only one on the entire internet who didn’t say "it’s an evil conspiracy" and I wanted to learn more so bad. I’m very happy there’s one video about that on KZbin now

[@EbonyPope]

Well the better light spectrum was a coincidence not an aim of the planned obsolescence. Therefore I don't really see how this could be an excuse. Yes it's brighter but this was not the intention. It was to make it burn faster. Therefore using it as an example is still valid.

[@Robobvious2]

Hey thanks for suggesting this idea! It made for a good video!

[@jeremiahrex]

I worked on a product at a previous job that required long life bulbs. The product used incandescent bulbs to generate light of a specific temperature for a spectrometer. The oranger long life bulbs put out more energy in the wavelengths desired, so everything was calibrated for that. My part in that project came decades later when our supplier of long life bulbs discontinued them. We had to hunt around for another one that was fairly close and then recalibrate the device. An uncommon use case for sure!

[@AndrewTaylorNintyuk]

finding bulbs for easy bake ovens that still cook the same would be a light hearted but equally difficult challenge.

[@TheScarvig]

That's interesting for me because I am working on a project that uses nir spectrometers that have two tiny incandescent bulbs as ir sources with as far as I can see no way of changing them.... I guess I hope that they outlast the rest of the sensor....

[@toweri_li]

You didn't work for X-Rite or GretagMacbeth, eh? :)

[@skayakitty625]

xkcd 1172 is real

[@Palidine4M0O]

Seems like a joke or maybe misunderstanding of xkcd1172 by @skayakitty625 or @jeremiahrex, since in my opinion @jeremiahrex is showing a point that the long life bulbs were not just better for his product to exist as a useful tool for long term lab use but also good for reliable long term results (being forced to readjusting the chromatograph every 4 months would change long term results). Yes the origin company stopped selling the long term bulbs, but infinite profit isn't the desire in our world, we want to live long and want our ideas and infrastructure to live long, but yet we're going to sell our people garbage to fill landfills. Thinking of @somemorenews recnet right to repair video.

[@starlingeyed]

I was one of the people who used the Phoebus cartel story to prove planned obsolescence, so this was some humble pie for me, haha! Amazing and informative, as always. I love getting to learn something new--especially when it corrects something I'd thought before!

[@johngaltline9933]

Just remember the only proper example of a monopoly we have is the government. Use that instead.

[@ethanpeters3047]

​@@johngaltline9933curious about what your point is here. mind explaining?

[@cobaltno51]

​@@johngaltline9933lol, there are hundreds of goverments

[@Bruceskyy]

Veritasium on life support after this video

[@rabbidpig3480]

@@ethanpeters3047seems like it’s anti communist maybe?

[@jacobwing406]

This is consistently some of the best content created on this platform. No hyperbole. I would watch this with cult like devotion if it were on pbs, or British television, or if I had to pay a cable bill to see it. You are truly adding to the society you are a part of, while educating those who choose to watch. Thank you, and I hope you know your self worth, because it is immense!

[@Thermalions]

and you get thematic jazz music at the end.

[@bella_ciao4608]

He has a lot of the same of the same appeal of How It’s Made, but with a more personal approach. Instead of a disembodied narrator, we have this guy talking to us. I like this approach better, although maybe the B roll of that show would be helpful for this one

[@GeebusCrust]

​@@Thermalions it sounds like the end of a PBS show. Or like Bob Ross.

[@Thermalions]

@@GeebusCrust If you turn on the subtitles, in almost all the main channel videos he describes the jazz music at the end in terms thematically matched to the subject matter.

[@GeebusCrust]

​@@Thermalionsholy- That's genius

[@CalebFrey]

Kelvin... degrees. [stares knowing exactly what he did] Always gotta turn on closed captions for the extra Alec sass

[@khrdina]

Ha, I did twitch a little when he said that. :D

[@abbiking3910]

And also for the secret messages at the end- I mean... nothing. You saw nothing. Carry on.

[@Green_Bean_Machine]

Vsauce moment

[@Enjoymentboy]

My grandmother had a solution that enabled her to make her lightbulbs last so long that she never had to buy any. What she did was save all of the burnt out bulbs in her house and whenever she went to a hotel or restraunt she would take some with her and swap them out for working bulbs. I remember once when out for dinner she stood up, unscrewed the bulb in the fixture over the table, took out the bulb in it and put in a burned out bulb and then proceded to call the waitress over to tell her we had no light. I don't condone this behaviour but I was always amazed at how brazen she was and never got caught.

[@drewgehringer7813]

I've read that was fairly common in the Soviet Union too, since lightbulbs could be difficult to find in stores

[@jonanderson5137]

That's next level.

[@2009dudeman]

@@GerardMenvussa Yes, but funny theft because it was clever. Everyone thinks of stealing the toilet paper, but not the light bulbs.

[@Alabaster335]

Probably no cameras in those days?

[@azmax623]

We had a lava lamp at work that used the same light bulbs as the refrigerators in the break room. When the bulb in the lava lamp died, we'd have a 'mission' to swap it out with one from the fridge, then call facilities to come replace the burned out fridge bulb.

[@nathanahrens4280]

As an electrical contractor this was an amazing dive into a niche area. Thank you

[@inasimplerhyme]

I just wanted to say thank you for the lack of ads. As someone who (occasionally) uploads KZbin content, I know it's possible to have it set so that ads periodically interrupt videos. This would probably make you more money, but you don't, and it is such pleasure! There's nothing like watching 20-40 mins of quality content with no interruptions. Again, my thanks!

[@jacobakers8041]

Just use Brave. It has built in ad blockers that Google/YT can't get around. I haven't seen an embedded ad in a video in a LONG time.

[@myaccount__7269]

Do you work for free? Pay for KZbin premium ti support those people

[@Soutame]

He substitutes that with Patreon membership. There's 6975 members there now with minimum 1$ per month subscription. Since he rarely uploads the video (due to its quality). I can say he may have enough income to compensate that. Don't expect it to be norm for another channel since it is extremely hard to replicate.

[@The_One-Eyed_Man4246]

​@@myaccount__7269People like you that use mental gymnastics to justify making the human to technology relationship in a state that puts the technology in a position of master over the human, as it literally counts the user down, before restoring control of their devise to the user, makes my blood run cold. 😮 It makes me dream of a world where I could rig up an ad screen to your everyday technology needs. For example... your toilet so that you couldn't flush until the ad had finished playing. 😂 Then I think you would get an attitude change real quick.

[@myaccount__7269]

@@The_One-Eyed_Man4246 what the hell are you talking about. Lay off the drugs . I’m saying if you use KZbin premium the ppl you watch get a cut of $ which is higher than their ad pay. Just becuase you don’t understand this new thing called the internet doesn’t mean no one else does.

[@playludesc]

As far as planned obsolescence in LED bulbs, I have found paying like 5% more than the absolutely cheapest makes a huge difference in their longevity.

[@krzysztofwaleska]

Switching to 12V onrs is even better. ROHS hates high temperatures. Dividing power supply and light source lowers temperature on those joins, that causes most of lamp deaths.

[@Palidine4M0O]

Oh no, playludesc, you're going against the idea of the OP. Why have long lived bulbs that don't fill up landfills faster? I don't mind innovation, i'm not afraid of it, and I don't think that just because I know more about material science or electronics that I can argue logistics/markets/waste. This planned obsolescence obscenity is leaking back into cars (techy cars impossible to repair), PC's/phones, etc. Lovely to see that we're all accepting of that... wondering what happens when that leaks into healthcare and some material shortage literally kills a lot of people (think pharma just shutting off and a lot of people dying, not just the old, many different ages). Maybe we should build things that last

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

​@@krzysztofwaleskaFrom what I understand the issue is the heat in the LEDs themselves - sealed fixtures cause further problems primarily by decreasing the efficiency of the heatsink. The big thing to look out for with LEDs (and admittedly this isn't really feasible in practice) is how hard the diodes are being driven. Unlike incandescent bulbs, LED don't rely on heat to make light so running them more gently can *substantially* increase their lifespans without a substantial decrease in efficiency. That's a big part of what Alec called out from BigClive's videos - he frequently features cheap LED bulbs and tears them down to both assess their efficiency and to show how to hardmod them to last longer at the expense of being a bit dimmer.

[@peanutbutterisfu]

The problem is the circuit boards burn out on the led bulbs the actual leds would last very long

[@bosstowndynamics5488]

@@peanutbutterisfu The solid copper strips the circuit boards are made of are not the failure point, otherwise all electronics would fail in similar ways

[@sjgrall]

I've always wanted to see an incandescent bulb filament without the enclosure glass burn out. You've satisfied my life-long curiosity.

[@sjgrall]

@@tripplefives1402 I was not allowed to break things as a child. Extremely strict and controlling parents. It’s had a negative impact on my adult life…

[@macdaniel6029]

​@@sjgrall NO kid should be allowed to break stuff. Most kids do it anyway because kids are stupid.

[@salad_tasty]

@@tripplefives1402 hope you're happy, you've made an internet stranger reflect on their trauma

[@darrellm4794]

@@sjgrall Get out and break some stuff dude! Making it work again is how I learned; not with glass so much.

[@Reverend_Salem]

i saw it, accidentally. i had a lightbulb that the glass had broken and i turned it on and it popped.

[@rj7855]

One addition ,as watchers of big already know: running leds with lower current not only makes them last longer but also makes them more efficient (opposite to incandescent lights )

[@arthurdefreitaseprecht2648]

Exactly! Good point, that (at least for me) still makes the cartel bad. On top of that, why didn't they put a minimum limit on efficiency instead of capping the intended life? I know it was done to increase efficiency of lighbulbs, but it seems suspiciously benefiting to the companies. One could just decrease the quality of the filament, making it last less and still have a bad efficiency, and it would still be compliant to the 1000hr max. So for me even with this explanation, the cartel is still the 100% bad guy.

[@PainterVierax]

@@arthurdefreitaseprecht2648 there is no cartel. Cheap led bulbs are just penny pinched designs mostly from no-name brands. Long lived led bulbs exists, as most early adopters got ones and nowadays brands like Phillips still produce them with even better efficiency.

[@Heizenberg32]

​@@PainterVieraxI have only my personal experience to go by. After a few "High end", $10 a piece, bulbs died in less than a year, I have stuck to the $1 - $2 a piece ones without any noticeable drop in life span.

[@10siWhiz]

@@PainterVierax Why are Dubai bulbs not available worldwide?

[@n.shiina8798]

@@PainterVierax even Philips maxed out the LED rating because they follow what's the market demanded. cheaper lamp. this is the reason why Dubai lamp exists and they were forced to make it that way because UAE wanted a real efficient and long lasting bulbs.

[@ZandarKoad]

"The world is complex, and you should be skeptical of simple narratives." So true. Such a simple, straightforward message and narrative. I'm not skeptical at all of it.

[@NiyaKouya]

Throughout your video I was constantly thinking about many cheap LED bulbs actually having "planned obsolescence" and Clives videos about it. Nice that you brought it up yourself. And there's a perfect example that LEDs can run almost indefinitely: the "Dubai lamps", manufactured by Philips, with more LEDs than usual, proper heatsinks and a decent controller that runs the LEDs with less current, thus cooler, leading to a hugely increased lifespan. (Clive did quite a few videos about them and how you can "hack" some normal LED bulbs to get on a similar lifespan with only minor loss of brightness)

[@n.shiina8798]

Dubai lamp is based on glass chip that is impossible to be properly heatsinked. they made it efficient just by using double the filament at the same power level thus increases its efficiency and lifetime. total heat output might be roughly similar since they have the same power. as the driver, i believe there's nothing different compared to their standard deco classic lamp

[@Muonium1]

@@n.shiina8798 LED filaments don't NEED to be heat sinked. The large surface area alone and helium gas fill of the bulb is enough to draw heat away. With appropriate power draw they run for ages just fine. See the video Filament LED Light Bulb: 5 years and Teardown Time

[@bradkoerner1]

Terrific video. Very accurate. I've been in the lighting industry for 20+ years and you really nailed the key issues. And you are very accurate about the lifespan of LED lamps being largely predicated on cost cutting.

[@Swordfish728]

In a simple comparison with an incandescent, replacing a poorly-made LED once a year sounds like a non-issue, the problem is that many light fixtures are not designed to have the LEDs replaced beacuse of the long supposed lifetime. So if they fail prematurely it's a much more expensive part to replace. Or they're installed in hard to reach places requiring professional help, as opposed to something designed to be serviced by anyone.

[@casemodder89]

Thats the real problem !

[@ntsecrets]

This will become less of an issue over time for 2 reasons - leds will become more efficient and have less heat waste and fixtures like this will slowly disappear. EDIT - misread the OP disregard.

[@Conservator.]

@@ntsecretsWhy do you think that fixtures like this will disappear?

[@RetroCaptain]

A friend bought a Ryobi LED spotlight new. He told me it lasted a handful of uses and the yellow led block inside quit. Technically it died under warranty but he lost receipt and couldn't be bothered. Waste of everything as it was permanently glued together and not repairable

[@ntsecrets]

@@Conservator. I misread it my apologies- thought you meant the fully enclosed fixtures designed for incandescents. I haven’t had any non changeable ones fail on me, but external factors such as lightning are always possible.

[@Bant_Panorama]

Fellow Chicagoan here, I was a retail rep for the ComEd energy efficiency programs for around 7 years all over the loop, west side and Evanston/Skokie. We discounted CFLs and LEDs for over 10 years along with smart strips and TSTATS. My company line for when people invariably asked my why they do it was it was easier to discount products than build out infrastructure etc. Spent most of my time explaining color temperature and lighting facts labels. I wish I would have had some of your clean explanations for the technology stored in my brain all those years ago as you explain things very concisely.

[@danieldyman7196]

I worked in Minneapolis for XCEL in their direct replacement program, basically changing bulbs and shower heads directly in the apartments of whoever uses Xcel energy. It was annoying at times but doing some of the maths having saved thousands of tons of coal from being burned really made me feel quite good about my work

[@Bant_Panorama]

@@danieldyman7196 very cool, we called that the home energy audits, exact same from what it sounds like.

[@ItalNico]

Thank you so much for this video TC. I've had this memory of visiting a firehouse on a field trip when I was in kindergarten back in 1979 and being lifted up to see a very old lightbulb that I only remembered had been on since the early 1900s. I also recall that it was around Christmas time as one of the firemen was dressed up as Santa Claus and we all were given little plastic firehats which was really cool when you're five. I had no idea where this event took place but I grew up about an hour from Livermore so when I went to the webpage for this old light bulb sure enough it was the same place. You've helped me solve a 40+ year old mystery and I'm happy to hear that the light bulb is still going. I guess a revisit is in order one of these days.

[@BrandEver117]

I live on the Oregon Coast, and the local power utility not only gave out free LED bulbs, but also faucet aerators and surge protectors (the kind where one outlet controls the others). They don't hand them out regularly though, it was a thing they emailed out and you signed up for. I got them but I ended up donating most of them to the local ReStore because they were those crappy old-style plastic ones and I prefer the filament type.

[@tomschmidt381]

Great history lesson of the incandescent bulb. I grew up in the Chicago area, until you mentioned it I had forgotten about the the Con Ed bulb exchange program. I managed to build up quite a stash by the time we moved to NH. Managed to use them for years, I forgot when the stash finally ran out.

[@bensmith4563]

The good old com Ed Light bulbs had those when I was a kid

[@Gormathius]

Honestly, to me the most interesting thing here is the part about the tungsten evaporation process, as I always wondered why lightbulbs blacken over time when there's nothing in there that could form a layer of soot.

[@suspectsn0thing]

We use the same effect to coat stuff in thin layers of metal - evaporative physical vapor deposition.

[@capuchinosofia4771]

Honestly same! Super interesting tidbit

[@larsulrich2761]

It would be interesting if you would do a follow up on the Dubai LED light bulb which is designed to last much longer than a normal LED by increasing the number of LEDS and underpowering the diodes.

[@wich1]

And contrary to the incandescent lights, being more efficient at the same time as lasting longer…

[@xFluing]

It comes from Dubai so you know it's just bullshit

[@emberklavins9567]

I came down here to comment this very thing! please do! BigClive has done a great video overviewing the technical side of the subject.

[@thoreberlin]

Phillips now sells 200 lumen/Watt bulbs elsewhere under the UE (ultra efficiency) label. There are other vendors reaching that too. EU changed the labeling on light sources and now most LED bulbs don't even get a C. The UE lamps get an A.

[@lifeai1889]

unlike incandecent bulb when you underrun led the effiency goes up and it last longer

[@rocbolt]

I like those utility branded bulbs! In that tradition my local electrical concern will hand out free LED bulbs for so much as sneezing in their general direction. I once called in to report a hawk nest being built on a power pole, they thanked me for the tip, and a week later a 4 pack of bulbs arrived unprompted in my mailbox. I've heard similar stories from other locals, I think just about any interaction, positive or negative, will result them palming some LEDs into your hand like a grandpa with Werthers candies.

[@nanolog522]

Thats pretty sweet, would not happen in that way in Germany, sadly.

[@dickJohnsonpeter]

I got a box of fifty LED bulbs from my electric company. They do just give them away in places.

[@miawgogo]

​@@bgeeryso user too?

[@rbryanhull]

​@@bgeerythey've found that it's more cost effective to get customers to use more efficient bulbs than to build a new power plant.

[@Coconut-219]

​@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket It feels fundamentally manipulative to market "rationing" as a "feature" though. I'm all for "efficiency" but not when their approach to efficiency is "I'm going to give you less and convince you it's more." That and trusting a single party that has all of the power to make that decision without having a compromise with the other party (the client, the citizen) present seems like a bad idea.

[@mglenadel]

My dad used to keep a cardboard box full of spare lightbulbs, because they just burned out. When compact fluorescents came out, he, out of ingrained habit, kept on buying bulbs regularly, without waiting for them to burn out. When he passed, I found a box with several still unopened CF bulbs, some of them likely years old.

[@tsartomato]

wire bulbs started to piss me off so much that i've switched to hydrargyrum bulbs the moment they went for skeuomorphic designs to fit into old sockets i was very happy

[@dlarge6502]

Excellent, now you dont need to buy any. Forward planning pasy off. I bought a ton of CFL's when LED was coming out and all the shops were selling the CFL's off cheap! Still using them to this day. I have 1 LED lamp simply because the warm up time for a CFL is too slow for that particular location in the house. You'd be shocked how many people I know are still buying HALOGEN bulbs!!!

[@jasonriddell]

@@dlarge6502 buy what fits your sockets I NEED PL13 CFL lamps as that is what my house (mostly) uses and I dont want to rip out EVERY fixture to replace them with LED so I am NOW buying every PL13 lamp I find as they are banned next year for sale in my country )-:

[@tsartomato]

@@dlarge6502 and then you have to walk 500 metres and back to the government disposal centre every time one goes out

[@BrendonGreenNZL]

​@@tsartomatoor leave it in a drawer in the bedroom until it accidentally gets broken. A little mercury vapor never hurt anyone, right?!

[@fullmetal929]

3:14 My tech teacher in highschool was an engineer for a big company (I wanna say GE but don't quote me on that) before he became a huge part of his job was designing a specific fail point or date (or range of dates, anyway) for their washer and dryers. It's honestly crazy that those practiced are legal.

[@laurencebois5119]

My parents had an old energy saving light that lasted almost 30 years... The thing is it took what felt like 30 years for it to warm up to full brightness.

[@kvbk]

It really saved the energy for 30 years by not burning.

[@victorbaird8220]

😊

[@gorak9000]

That sounds like a compact fluorescent - they're the only bulbs that need to "warm up" to produce the full light output - well, other than high pressure sodium, or other HID bulbs, which I don't think you have inside your house.

[@tissuepaper9962]

​@@gorak9000 buddy, what do you think "incandescent" means? Here's a hint, it doesn't mean "cold". Some types of filament-incandescent lights reduce wear on the filament by heating it up slowly.

[@randybobandy9828]

​@@gorak9000I used to have many HID lights in my house 😂 but I was different

[@pris1883cr]

Happy to see a shoutout to bigclive's channel! He makes such excellent educational content. The most lovely part is the joy he exudes when he has discovered a genuinely well engineered or cleverly engineering product

[@Zeem4]

The thing about the free bulbs was interesting. Here in the UK, years ago, power companies were required by the government to meet certain criteria for helping customers to be more energy efficient. Many of the electricity companies chose the lowest-effort option of sending customers packs of CFL bulbs - over and over and over again, regardless of whether they needed them or not. To this day I've still got a box full of CFL bulbs, unused in their boxes, sitting in the shed.

[@ILoveWomen]

Our new built house in the UK also came with CFLs in every room. This was back in 2016. For how much the house was, cheaping out on those relatively crappy bulbs instead of giving us LEDs annoyed me, with a low CRI rating which genuinely caused me eye strain at night. Now I got some basic Philips "candle light" LED bulbs. Perfect colour temperature, instant on and 40/60w equivalent.

[@revengenerd1]

I remember CFL bulbs being expensive then late 2004/early 2005 suddenly many companies in the UK giving them away for free. Went with a relative who was paying their rent to their HA home and there was at my reckoning at least 200 could be double that bulbs piled up and free for people to take, took so many of them at the time, by 2010 I did start working out that I felt tired more often due to how dim they were in comparison to regular bulbs and went back to regular bulbs which helped a lot. These days I use LED bulbs which are a compromise but far better than CFL ones.

[@maybeitsmir]

i love that because you've explained the latent heat of vaporization so much and so well, i knew exactly what the "plus tax" was at 13:41

[@donatj]

The first LED bulb I ever bought back in 2008 is still going strong. I paid almost $30 for it and it consists of about 2/3 copper heat sync. I have had many modern LED bulbs fail on me, most of which have no or very little visible heatsink. I think there may be a similar trade off in LED bulbs as in incandescent - a trade off between how strange the bulb looks and how long it lasts.

[@cem_kaya]

yeah it is weird that most led bulbs do not have a proper heat sync.

[@aserta]

I have the first type of Phillips LED bulb on the market, still powered, still working. Subsequent purchases of the same bulb brand and line have never been as reliable, and every time they go bad, i take them apart and inspect them. The quality of the parts inside keeps decreasing with each iteration. Heat sinks, diodes, all. The only thing that has improved is the mother board. They've managed to make them both heat sinks and boards at the same time.

[@Aubreykun]

I have some COB filament style bulbs which are still going strong 8 years in. Granted they're only 4w, and the filament style means they have plenty of chips. So they might be being underrun. I got them from a discount store even and they had to have been under 5$ each. No visible heat sinks. They don't give off much more light than you get during the day with the blinds down however.

[@timetoerist1313]

Heatsink?

[@qwesx]

@@timetoerist1313 Heatsink.

[@Yezpahr]

You truly are the Mythbuster of the Tech industry. This cartel gets brought up occasionally where I work. (a second-hand shop / thrift store.) We still sell them, but not many pass the 5-second test stage. I once had a lamp end itself so violently that the glass popped clean off, without shattering the glass. I presume air got into the bulb and turning it on did the rest.

[@Kalvinjj]

Incandescent lamps did all kinds of weird stuff, never experienced a lamp just coming back to life after a flick like he did there but this gives context to people shaking the lamp and testing again (tho that was likely hearing a rattling piece of filament fallen inside). One lamp I had on a clamped fixture (the kind you can clamp to a desk side or in my case a shelf) sagged so much during it's lifetime that the filament tangled on itself and it just decided to become brighter. It was funny and pretty darn bright for the little it lasted.

[@ADHJkvsNgsMBbTQe]

As an early adopter of LED bulbs (and CFL before those), I have a growing collection of failed bulbs of various types. Most lived up to their minimum advertised lifespan, although in an accelerated fashion due to being run continuously rather than just a few hours a day. It still puzzles me though that some have expired where their twins last twice as long. Seems like I got a few good theories at the end of this episode. Congratulations on 2M subscribers!

[@lifeai1889]

yes leds nowadays is designed significantly worse the capacitor fail constantly and they even overdrive the led chip to acheive planned failure if u take apart led with same wattage ull know its got less chips to spread the heat

[@izimsi]

I've seen too many failed lightbulbs nowadays. The cheap LED lights are either running in overcurrent, lack the proper heatsinking, use shitty chips or combination of the above, especially GU10. All of the ones I seen it was the led chips that were burned.

[@mernokimuvek]

From my experience CFLs last more than LEDs. I had both non name chinese and reputable brand LED lamps fail in a few month. Even the cheap chinese CFLs lasted around 2 years and the reputable brand ones around 6-8 years.

[@calebkemplay6040]

​@@izimsii bought a box of LED bulbs about a year ago, I probably got 200-300 hours out of each bulb. After taking them apart to investigate it was innediatly obvious they had designed them to overdrive the LEDs. I bought 4 LED lights when they first came out and, 3 of the 4 still work. One of them has at least 6000 hours on it (I use it on my workspace lamp about 12 hours per day).

[@kurthanushek5520]

Until recently, I worked for a condo association which maintained over 100 bulbs in outdoor fixtures on photo cell switches. When I started, almost 25 years ago, they were switching over from 60W incandescent to the equivalent cfls in large part for the labor savings of longer life. We dated when they were put in as they had a one year warranty and were pricy, over $10 each. I continued it until I retired earlier this year. The cfls went through 3 generations, each getting smaller although they were rated very similarly. being on photocells, they operated about 4000 hours per year with only one on/off cycle per day. I believe the on/off cycles are particularly damaging to the cfls. Some of the first generation bulbs lasted 10 years or more, far exceeding their 10,000 hour or so rating. Almost all of them lasted 5 to 6 years. The second generation reduced the life somewhat. The third generation, that probably was really pressed on price as leds were nipping at their heels price wise, was the smallest of them all. Some of them only made it about a year, few of them more than two thus many of them did not make the rated 8000 hours. In changing over to leds, it didn't seem that they were lasting their rated lifetime. I never did, but it would have been interesting to check life of the cheapies rated at about 5000 hours and the name brands with 15000 hour ratings.

[@AllToDevNull]

Lavalamp Tip: Lava lamps often use very expensive bulbs, and lots of them. 1. Use a smart plug so you have a fade in effect. This prevents the fillament from shock by the high current and it lasts much longer. I use 50W halogen lamp dimmed to replace the 30W lamp. Runs for years 80% of the time.

[@Internetexploder1]

Your tiny bits of dry humor are the highlight of my day. When you said 'kelvin... degrees' I legitimately laughed so loud my roommates came to ask if I was OK. Thank you so much for these videos.

[@VAXHeadroom]

Ditto :)

[@DrummerLocnar]

when he looked at the camera as he said "degrees", he knew exactly what he was doing 🤣

[@joshua43214]

I had to pause to see if the comments where exploding lol

[@AndrewGillard]

Check the captions for that line! 😸 This channel always has great captions with neat Easter eggs that I usually forget to turn on until the end, but I'm temporarily mostly-deaf in one ear thanks to a rather painful infection and that reminded me to turn them on this time :) (Trying to find the silver lining of this bloody thing that's been stopping me sleeping lol)

[@sonan333]

@@AndrewGillard I totally forgot about caption easter eggs! I love when a creator adds their own captions, and doubly love when they add easter eggs. Tom Scott does the same, too. And hopefully the infection goes away soon. Do you know what caused it? Do you get them often, and if so, do you have a fix? I'm asking because I had a friend who would get them quite often when he was younger.

[@toolisgod6]

At 21:50, when you hit us with the subtle low-key "Nice" while keeping the same tone in your delivery, I laughed out loud. Well played 😆

[@mikep490]

Your video, as always, is spot on. We saw that back in (if memory serves me) around 1980 when there was a fad of selling long life bulbs, mostly door to door. The average user won't keep track of bulb life but we could tell that the light was dimmer. Fortunately, when I moved to my new house, I still had the "crate" of bulbs. The new house would guarantee to blow a standard bulb every couple months. It turned out the house was running close to 130V. The utility moved the transformer tap to its lowest setting. Voltage was still a couple volts higher than specs called for but I could then go back to standard bulbs.

[@MaxW-er1hm]

I used to get those. The 60s were brightness equivalent to 40w standard bulbs , but they lasted for me , far longer. I didn't chart it out , but I def paid attention at the increased cost. I'd say they lasted about 4x as long. One in the garage , where it was hard to change lasted approx 7 years non stop running

[@jeffwalker7661]

My example of planned obsolesce is in 3.5" floppy disk drives. I was a lab aide for a computer lab filled with old, often donated PCs. The most common part to break on them was the floppy drive. We had stacks of disassembled floppy drives we used for parts, but it was rare that we could use parts from one to fix another. The reason is that the same part failed in every one of them. There was a lever arm that was responsible for opening the metal cover of the disk and for detecting the presence of the disk, and causing the drive to clamp down on the disk. Thus, this was the only part that received the mechanical force of the disk being inserted. In drives full of metal parts that didn't seem to need to be metal, this lever arm was made out of plastic. It was made out of plastic, and the middle of the lever arm was hollowed out. No doubt this saved a few pennies of plastic. But the result was that this lever arm was almost always the first part of the drive to fail as it snapped from the repeated mechanical stress of floppy disks being inserted. This seemed like a clear case of designing something to fail after a certain amount of use when a solid plastic lever arm would surely have lasted much longer with no downsides to the design and barely any impact to the cost.

[@queenbeeautumn]

Floppy drives definately got worse in the 90s and early 00s, I don't know if it was planned obsolescence as such though, there was a huge race to the bottom in terms of pc price, at the same time as pc tech was advancing faster than ever before, a lot of manufacturers probably didn't expect their machines to be in use for more than a couple of years, I remember manufacturers advertising on the basis of "power" "performance" "price" and bundled software, but I never saw anyone mention reliability as a major selling point (at least in consumer machines, servers and industrial stuff did emphasise reliability, and their prices reflected that)

[@zyeborm]

Don't attribute to malice that which may more easily be explained by incompetence or stupidity. Or more likely in this instance if they made that bit thicker it would warp coming out of the injection mould or some other random something. Or it was just a simple oversight, it worked a few hundred times in testing so it's probably fine right? Planned means somebody sat down and intentionally did it to break after a certain time. That's actually quite hard to do. Making a 10,000 hour light bulb is much easier than a 1000 bulb, much looser tolerances.

[@IanBLacy]

You could probably 3d print replacement parts depending on their size and tolerance…

[@paulelderson934]

Could it be to prevent magnetism? I'm being skeptical of the narrative here, because a KZbin video told me so.

[@petermescher332]

Fun Fact: Putting bread dough in the oven to rise with the oven light on (providing those 40 watts of heat) is a great way to proof it if your house is on the chilly side.

[@FUZxxl]

The oven I bought even has this use case in its manual: prove dough on the “light only” setting at 50 °C.

[@jeepien]

Unless you replaced that appliance bulb with an equivalent rated LED.

[@petermescher332]

@@jeepien I If you put an LED bulb in your oven, it will melt, so it’s uselessness for proofing dough is kind of not important.

[@jeepien]

@@petermescher332 :: Yeah, I probably would not try that myself. Although there are LED bulbs that are "appliance" rated, I'll let someone else test that.

[@petermescher332]

@@jeepien I think those are the fridge bulbs… I do make use of those.

[@play005517]

As a member of the overclocking community, I never knew you can actually overvolt your lamp

[@edithmaverickfolger4014]

I just got the mental image of a lightbulb and an attendant muffin fan.

[@m.f.3347]

i mean, you can overvolt anything at least once

[@Babihrse]

Well it's the most analogue circuit there's nothing to blow except the bulb itself.

[@citylockapolytechnikeyllcc7936]

The lamp becomes a fuse... or the lamp IS a light-emitting fuse

[@krzysztofwaleska]

Very popular thing that was done using autotransformers to overvolt lightbulbs, when nothing comparable was available to amateur filmmaking. But life of that bulbs was 10-30 hours. Old times.

[@Myriadys]

I used the formula on the "lamp rerating" article to find out how long a 120V light bulb would run if run at 12 volts instead. The output was ≈114 billion years, but I think it would only glow about as bright as the toaster wires, so YMMV.

[@WordSarien]

You know, this helps explain a question I had as a kid. I always wondered why the lights in your car (not the headlights, the dim lights that illuminate your speedometer, temperature controls, etc.) never seemed to burn out, and I never got an answer other than "It's a different kind of light". I never even considered the fact that the lights were dim was, in part, the reason they lasted so long. Fascinating video as always - thanks for making it!

[@Hellgie1]

I remember the story about the computer repair guy who found a chip in a particular brands printers that kept a count of how many pages were printed. When the count got high enough the printer would stop working. He would simply replace these chips and the printer would magically work again.

[@matthewjohnson3656]

That quite literally happened to my epson eco tank printer. Got to 16000 pages and then displayed an error saying it had reached its end of life. I cleaned out the internal sponge and got a software jailbreak key for $5. I hate that they do that but the printer is so worth it. The ink is so dirt cheap.

[@pedro.alcatra]

@@matthewjohnson3656 ma men say exactly what printer you have. Pleasseeeee. Lime the model and the year if possible. Thanks in advance

[@matthewjohnson3656]

@@pedro.alcatra It was an Et-2750 but I have a feeling they have the same lock installed on all their machines. I still love it despite that. I think I spent maybe 40 on ink over 20k pages and 4 years.

[@pedro.alcatra]

@@matthewjohnson3656 Yes the have a block feature em every product. HP, and brother as well. But I was wondering if I could buy exactly this one and then unlock the printer in the same way you did!

[@pedro.alcatra]

@@matthewjohnson3656 MA MENNNNN. I saw the price. And God. It is absurdly expensive. Like 450€

[@nezu_cc]

Gotta love the random shoutouts to Big Clive. He makes content that isn't for everybody but I feel like everybody needs to know the information he is giving out. There is way too much crap out there and to this day I see people using extremely bad/cheap/outright fire-hazard electronics and claiming that they are as good as the ones that cost way more.

[@geo8rge]

So why can't I get 'Dubai' LED lightbulbs like they sell in the UAE?

[@casemodder89]

​@@geo8rge because the revival of the cartel. Today there is no positive side in shortening the lifespan of led lights. In fact the lower the current the led is driven at the HIGHER the efficiency AND lifespan. the curtent cartel is all about cost savings (higher current per led chip eeks out more light per chip /less chips per bulb needed) and selling more of them (the higher current runs the bulb hotter which in return shortens the lifespan significantly - a gamer would call that a double kill) In other words today you change the stupidly engineered 1000h led for 8x the cost of an incandesant bulb at about a third the energy cost. Thats a win for the manufacturer - not the consumer !!!

[@Conservator.]

@@casemodder89 I agree. Especially cheap Chinese led lights tend to over drive the LEDs. If you can tinker with them, they’ll last ‘forever’.

[@ShanesGettingHandy]

@@geo8rge Because they would cost more to produce, but everyone would still reach for the cheaper option that outputs the same lumens anyway... Sometimes it's the consumer's fault.

[@PainterVierax]

@@casemodder89 There is no cartel anymore. Those are just cheap LEDs bulbs engineered with too much cost-cutting measures. On the other side, well designed led bulbs still exists on reputable brands like Phillips. They are just more expensive.

[@iggysixx]

My grandparents had a 70 year old lightbulb that was still in working order. I regret not taking it with me when we were clearing out their house (as, apparently, I was the only one who noticed and cared)

[@johnpearson492]

My grandparents have a light bulb in a sealed fixture in their shower. They have never changed it since buying their house in 1965. It's very possible the bulb is original to the house from 1948.

[@lumberjackdreamer6267]

10 minute shower, twice a week? 16 hours per year, 60 years lifespan.

[@goju09alt9]

​@@lumberjackdreamer6267Who the fuck takes a shower twice a week.

[@BasicWorldbuilder]

​@@lumberjackdreamer6267I can appreciate how you came to this estimate. However with the smallest amount of research, you would see the average American bathes five to six times a week for 15 minutes. Multiply that by two unless they took every shower together. So you might need to rework that math buddy 🙂 edit: Did the math myself and conservative estimates would be in excess of 7000 hours.

[@gyrgrls]

It's just a filament of your imagination.

[@beardyface8492]

Way back in the mists of time photographers (in the UK) used to make use of this effect of overvoltage for a "daylight" type of artificial lighting, there were specialist bulbs (& cheap photographers who used imported 120v bulbs), which a pair of were wired in series (and thus ran at approx 120v) so the effect, shadows etc could be assessed to compose the photo, then for a brief duration while the photo was being taken they'd be switched to parallel (240v) & give a much brighter & whiter light, then switched back to prolong the life of the bulb.

[@wowcolors]

Thank you for making this video, so few people seem to understand the basic laws of physics behind incandescent light bulbs.

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

I was wondering from a landfill perspective. If the 2500 means twice as less waste. Less packaging. Less transporting of the new bulbs around. I think as they pointed out it's probably more complex of a topic.

[@LetrixAR]

​@pleasedontwatchthese9593, but then you have more energy consumption... It gets complicated.

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

@@LetrixAR exactly!

[@AzariahWolf]

I saw some people in the "too soon to have watched the whole video" comment section effectively going "Yeah! They could absolutely make everlasting light bulbs if they wanted to!" Like, do you have no understanding of basic physics and entropy?

[@CAHSR2020]

If the short life bulb is objectively better why did it need a secret cartel to keep it at the top? I also took issue with the straw man argument that long lived bulbs were implied to be the same brightness as short life bulbs. Where is evidence supporting this claim? The inherent benefits of short life bulbs are claimed to be what kept it the standard after the cartel was disbanded without acknowledging that consumer expectations, expensive plant tooling, and market inertia had all solidified on the short life standard whether better or not. The video casually jumps from era to era mixing methods and motives as if they all occurred at the same time which is every bit as disingenuous as the myth he's trying to bust.

[@Merrsharr]

I heard that one of the greatest stresses on the filament is getting turned on (thus the experience of bulbs burning out as you turn them on) and the Centennial Light never being switched off is one of the reasons it lasts so long.

[@WECB640]

100% correct. When the filament is cold, it has much less resistance than when it is hot and glowing. This initially excessive current draw is called "inrush current" and it is very detremental to both vacuum tubes and their cousin the incandescent lightbulb. Most incandescent bulbs die when they are switched on due to the inrush current. Additionally (not covered in the video) is the alternating magnetic field of the filiment and how it actually vibrates against the static magnetic field of the Earth. This oscillatory vibration accellerates the decay of the filament and shortens the lifespan. If you can run the bulb at the same volts/amps but in DC, you will gain longevity.

[@rowdyreverb]

Wasn’t that in another video on this very channel? Or am I having deja vu

[@Jaker788]

If that was rhe main reason, we'd have a lot more 100 year old bulbs, but thr primary reason it's lived this long is simply because it runs so cool and low power. It's a well known factor in lifespan of incandescent and halogen bulbs. You can buy even for halogen headlights the ultra bright ones that last about 100hrs, or the dingy cheap ones that last 500-1000hrs, or something in between.

[@truthhurts2149]

​@@Jaker788the centennial bulb used to be brighter

[@testacals]

@@truthhurts2149 Well even if it was, something caused it to be less bright

[@gr8fulfox488]

This video is one of the reasons I've been subbed to you for four years; no bias, no spin, just straight facts.

[@tusing7780]

I wish Veritasium put a *fraction* of the effort into his videos that you do in yours.

[@hectorcorona9536]

That or research time and humility

[@hotpocketsat2am]

and integrity to not shill for companies

[@TacComControl]

I honestly wish Veritasium would put a fraction of the runtime of this video into a video of his own admitting that he was wrong and that he shouldn't make that mistake again.

[@hankglidden1463]

What? Why are we dissing Veritasium? He makes fantastic and incredibly high production video, that I should mention take orders of magnitude more effort to create than this one.

[@hotpocketsat2am]

@@hankglidden1463 he made a video about this very subject, but he spread the idea that this was greedy companies trying to get more money instead of the truth. he’s also made a video about self driving cars while blatantly being sponsored by a self driving car company. and although this is definitely a lot less bad he’s spread a myth about sm64 speed running.

[@BrandEver117]

While it may not apply in this case, planned obsolescence can still very much apply to consumables...printer cartridges are a good example.

[@radellaf]

How so? Cartridges for quite old printers are made and sold (thus not making the printer obsolete). If anything, printers become obsolete too early because of a lack of driver support. Or they break as soon as the warranty is over.

[@harmonic5107]

​@@radellafsome very popular old printers maybe. But most printer cartridges are for one or two specific models and they stop production every 5 years or so. Though I think what the op was talking about was cartridges that say they are empty before they actually are. Or are designed in such a way that they dry out with non use. So an otherwise full cartridge would be unusable.

[@pontiacg445]

@@radellaf Some manufacturers put microchips on the ink cartridges that will literally time them out after a certain amount of time passes. HP is about the worst in this regard. During the chip shortage, one printer manufacturer had to provide new device drivers that skipped these nonsensical added e-waste circuits and their checks, because they wouldn't have been able to sell working ink cartridges otherwise as there were no chips. You know what happens in a sane world when an old inkjet cart dries up or runs dry? You waste a sheet of paper. You know what ends up being trash when the circuit board says it's time? It's more than an easily recyclable piece of paper. Plastic, circuit boards, ICs, and probably half a tank of ink.

[@sihamhamda47]

​@@pontiacg445and also even worse thing, the recent HP printer models require internet connection and a HP account in order to work, even for a very basic printing feature

[@sonictech1000]

Most "planned obsolescence" is just a balance between cost and longevity and is mostly consumer driven. People may say they want longer lifespan but when they pull out their wallets they often choose the cheaper product over the better built one.

[@moonbongyang6460]

I remember the early days of your channel, before you had a set, Vacuum tubes, Belle, phonographs... And i thought, this is the kind of in-depth nerdiness that the Internet was made for. Thanks for the years of great content and congrats on 2 million!!?? subs

[@Respectable_Username]

I've had a few bulbs go since moving into my apartment almost 4 years ago (wait, how has it been nearly 4 years already?!) but given the relative height between the ceiling and me, even when on a step ladder, I'm _so glad_ for the improved longevity of modern, non-incandescent bulbs! I literally need to ask somebody to come over to help because I'm just _slightly_ too short to reach the fitting to change the bulb myself, so less frequent bulb changes are very welcome! 😅 Edit: This isn't a comment on the "The Thebes Cartel isn't a good example of planned obsolescence" topic, merely an expression of an added frustration with the process of simple lightbulb replacements, and a praise of newer technologies that reduce that frustration somewatt ❤

[@jasonriddell]

had an apartment with 13 foot ceilings and I tell you the fixtures up there were NOT "user relampable" and lucky for me the lights never burned out

[@katethegoat7507]

I'd recommend getting a taller ladder, you never know when you'll have to do some ceiling work

[@pc9434]

*Phoebus Cartel

[@questioner1596]

"Somewatt" lol!

[@FredFredBurger92]

They make pole-mounted lightbulb-grabber things for changing high or hard to reach places, and you can find some for fairly cheap, might be worth looking into to. :)

[@ronaldgarrison8478]

Vacuum tubes were also somewhat of a commodity. I remember drug-store tube testers. I also remember equipment with parts lists that included a section such as "vacuum tube complement." That is, the tubes were set aside as a special category, because you expected to be replacing them from time to time. It was also advisable to remove the tubes when shipping the equipment, packing them separately with cushioning.

[@Heizenberg32]

"Protected from burning by it's own little envelope of nothing" You have a way with words, my friend!

[@nerdbot4446]

Alec: Opts to not mention the name(s) of lightbulb inventor(s) to avoid flame wars in the comments Also Alec: K°

[@Christian-ie7xq]

That felt personal 😂

[@pullybungieharder]

The same issues occurred with vacuum tubes. My father learned to blow glass in order in order to make the 1000 of vacuum tubes he needed to build his isotopic scanner for medical research involving nuclear materials. His hand made bulbs lasted at least twice as long as the commercial bulbs, and allowed him to run his equipment long enough to do the analysis he was working on. The problem, according to him, was the enitrerly unnecessary and unwelcome "kink" in the wire, which shortened their lives considerably.

[@MrDuncl]

With the early vacuum tube computers the important realisation was that (like light bulbs) most tubes fail when they are switched on. The solution try to avoid turning them off if at all possible.

[@grn1]

@@MrDuncl During WWII Alan Turing suggested using an electronic computer to help decipher the "tunny" codes coming from Nazi Naval forces. The Nazi Navy used binary encoded signals with a XOR adder scheme to 'encrypt' (technically still encoding and not encrypting but most historical documents use the words encrypt and decrypt) long range communications while their Army used modified Enigma machines which used scrambled analog signals in an unusual frequency and were sufficiently dealt with using electromechanical computers. At first Turing's suggestion was rejected because of the known issues with Thermionic Resisters (the British name for Vacuum Tubes) burning out far too quickly but Tommy Flowers backed him up explaining that the air force had already found a solution to the problem, just don't turn the dang things off/keep at least a minimum of power flowing to the Tubes. The air force used vacuum tubes for their radar technology and Flowers had worked with said technology before joining the Warehouse crew to help decipher Nazi communications. The result was the first fully electronic computer (aside from the tape feed storage) called the Colossus and it was so successful they built 2 more. I think is was less than a decade later, long before the Colossus was set to be declassified that an American team developed the first general purpose electronic computer using similar concepts despite not knowing about the Colossus beforehand. Even though the US and Britain were allies during the war there was still a lot of secrecy between them (probably still is but we won't know until stuff get's declassified) and Britain initially wanted to keep the electronic computers a secret figuring they might be useful if they went to war against someone else.

[@MrDuncl]

@@grn1 Yes I have been to Bletchley Park and seen the Colossus replica. Regarding the secrecy, after the war Tommy Flowers approached a bank about setting up a computer company only to be told that making an electronic computer would be a fools errand. He could hardly say he had already made several successful ones so ended up back at Post Office Telephones developing Electronic Telephone exchanges. Some people had more luck. Look up LEO (Lyon's Electronic Office) the first computer used by businesses (from 1951). Developed be a cake company but used by the likes of Ford Motor Company.

[@coloradostrong]

I run a Dollar Tree 100 watt LED in a lamp on an end table 24/7. I generally replace it just about every 3 years. My microwave light burned out, and Amazon wanted $20 for a LED replacement for it. So, I bought 2 of the Dollar Tree 100 watt bulbs, cut the plastic globe off from it, and wired the LED "plate" in place of the sorry little incandescent bulb that was in there. I have the brightest microwave in town when it's turned on.

[@Nyquil98]

It would be cool if you did a video on the current state of LED bulbs. Namely the cheap ones, I saw the (many) videos that BigClive has posted on modding those bulbs to make them more efficient and last longer. I was having so many cheap LED bulbs die after only a few months of non continuous use that I got fed up and modded every lightbulb I regularly use down to about half power (still a plenty useable light output, especially in multi-bulb light fixtures). I haven't had a single one of those die yet more than a year later. On that limited sample size it sure feels like LED bulb manufacturers are guilty of planned obsolescence, or at the very least false advertising of run time.

[@frankwilson2607]

I had our GE - branded LEDs die on me in the last four years... when all the other 14 - year - old CFLs in my house are still working fine - so some bean counter has seemingly engineered fairly reliable fail modes into 'em. Grrrr....

[@chrisanderson2368]

I agree. I'd love to see a breakdown of quality led vs cheapo led.

[@imnotamechanic3491]

Same here, I run 4x 10w filament style Asda LED bulbs at around 3.5w (so total 14w). It's noticeably brighter than the 4x 8w bulbs running full power which started dying out well within a year! My dining room runs a standard 8.6w LED at 2.5w, it's not terribly birth, but if I put a 14w in it runs at 3.5w which I found too bright! My kids have 3w bulbs running as nightlights with a tiny capacitor dropping them so low my meter (which will read at 0.1w!) shows it as zero, they're brighter than the dedicated 1-2w night lights they used to have (and a much nicer colour). My bathroom has a 14w bulb running at 0.9w, it emits no heat, so I would be surprised if it didn't last a couple of decades.

[@antimaga856]

Your comment and this video reminded me of the Phillips 'Dubai' LED bulbs, deigned to last much longer than regular LEDs.

[@MrDuncl]

@@antimaga856 You can now buy the Dubai style bulbs here in the U.K. They are expensive compared to the alternatives though. Back to normal LED bulbs, when they were down to about £8 each I bought Philips ones for the lounge. With six filament bulbs I was having to change a bulb every 166 hours. The LED bulbs all failed after three to four years all developing annoying flickers when hot. Calculations showed they had paid for themselves though. In my bedroom I still have a 13W Philips L Prize style bulb going strong. However, it is really big and heavy with over half the surface area being heatsink.

[@brycedelany8211]

A part of the equation you missed is in commercial applications like in a theatre. I work at a large theatre in Australia and they need to employ two people for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week just to keep up with all of the blown bulbs. Usually around 5-10 per day. For them the extra energy cost is more than worth it if it meant less staff hours to replace all the lightbulbs.

[@ipodhty]

I assume this happened before leds?

[@brycedelany8211]

@@ipodhty we have Leds in hallways and changing rooms and that sorta place, but conventional in the actual theatre as house light because they fade so nicely.

[@ComMcNeil]

@elfrjz not so sure, as I would assume the pay is abysmal

[@Goalsplus]

Oh no! I'm Australian and now I'm worried about jokes about this.

[@Kerithanos]

@elfrjz Hope you like heights

[@thoreberlin]

Thank you! I'm an engineer, and i've been trying to convince people of the positive effects on efficiency of the bulb cartel standard for years without success. Not that this video is gonna change that. But it feels good to know that there are at least other people out there able to understand that.

[@hydrolifetech7911]

I myself was a faithful of the evil light bulb cartel planned obsolescence conspiracy theory until this video lol! Sorry for all the vexation our moronic group have put you through over the years 😂

[@rodrigoaranda7029]

I wonder if he can check nylon socks. Its another hot topic for programmed obsolesence video

[@kennethmiller2333]

Corrupt intentions can have positive outcomes just as pure intentions can have disastrous outcomes.

[@thoreberlin]

@@kennethmiller2333 i don't think the intentions behind finding that standard where corrupt. Otherwise it wouldn't have been such a good compromise. That was real engineering optimization. Keeping prices high was the evil part of the cartel. I guess bulbs where at least twice as expensive as they would have been with a free marcet.that has probaply gotten more to a factor of 5 over the years.

[@Toksyuryel]

@@thoreberlin tbh even with the price fixing the total cost to the buyer was probably still lower because of the energy savings

[@nzofficer]

Thanks. Now I understand how running 2 cell bulbs in 5 cell maglites in the eighties worked. Gave us awesome bad guy spotters for 30 minutes or so.

[@andljoy]

In my view this has started to happen in LED bulbs too. Lots of bulbs over drive the LEDs to a crazy level.

[@hammerth1421]

In cheap Chinese LED bulbs, the "driving circuit" only consists of a current-limiting resistor and a capacitor which eliminates flicker. It works well enough for a few months but then it inevitably becomes e-waste.

[@sihamhamda47]

My home still has one of the LED lamp from nearly 10 years ago and still going strong today, while recent LED bulbs are failing in less than 3 years

[@genderender]

Cheap LED drivers are the most annoying part of LED bulbs. We have basically perfected the bulb, yet these cheap drivers from even decent brands basically makes it no better than CFL or halogen when it comes to cheap bulbs

[@Konarcoffee]

Seems more of a side effect of using the cheapest components possible and pushing them to their limit to sell the given product for the highest possible price

[@EoRdE6]

I only buy GE LEDs these days, too many bad experiences with other brands of bulbs using questionable drivers that die in a few weeks

[@Borsting89]

I am growing more and more impressed by this channel. Really well informed and entertaining. I always thought that the history about the bulb cartel standard was all about money, greed and planned obsolescence. Your video made me think again. Thanks!

[@EE7A]

i dont think this guy has made a single video that i watched in full and regretted my time in doing so.

[@jacquesblaque7728]

Conscious thought is always well worth the effort. It becomes easier with practice, too.

[@pong9000]

Sure, a corporation is not a human being with human values. Neither is a tunnel boring machine or a political party. Keeping this in mind we can steer such dumb machines for our purposes.

[@centuryhelix8727]

In aviation, older airplanes were using 12v systems whereas newer planes use 24v systems. It’s always funny when someone accidentally installs a new light bulb that’s rated for 12v into a 24v airplane. It is very very bright, for a very short time

[@bwofficial1776]

Someone above you had the exact same thought, same words and all. Crazy how two people can think the same exact thing.

[@residentmusician]

I put a 12v battery in a 6v motorcycle 😂 poof

[@mrxmry3264]

i had a phone charger for the cigarette lighter socket of a car. one day i plugged it into the cigarette lighter in a truck, and it went BANG! - literally.

[@anonymousarmadillo6589]

Airplanes use 400hz 110vac don't they?

[@mrxmry3264]

@@anonymousarmadillo6589 AFAIK they also use 24V DC.

[@JimTheZombieHunter]

Watching you overclock those poor things reminded my of a Popular Electronics article from the 60's using an incandescent bulb as a flashing beacon. I never built it, because I was a bit dubious as to the article's claims of brilliance and longevity. I wonder if I still have that particular issue. Very informative and entertaining video .. as usual. I know that you were primarily focusing on household lamps, but I can attest to the fact that certain automotive bulbs have become .. "crappier". I've owned the same truck for 35 years, and it takes a LOT of marker bulbs (I think type 941?). In the 90's I rarely replaced a marker, but when I rebuilt the truck in 2006 I decided to replace all of the yellowed bases/lenses, and so put in all new bulbs. Then noticed I couldn't go a week without one or two dying, each blackened and sputtered. Closer inspection revealed that the Dumet seals have been omitted! The cluster takes the same lamp .. 7 or 8 of them total - they are all 1984 original. Hmm. The footage of the filament failing then joining was absolutely epic!!! That had to take some work. But now the rabbit hole calls. We've all seen a bulb fail at the flick of the switch in a brilliant supernova of white. I need to know why.

[@kbjerke]

"Percussive maintenance." LOL! Who hasn't done that! *VERY* captivating video, thank you. And I use my Kill A Watt meter on ALL sorts of projects/tests. Great little unit. Thanks, and best wishes!

[@adamdevereaux2459]

Great video! I totally agree this nuance is important & illustrates that many companies are often balancing lots of trade offs & nothing is as simple as people say. Also My local community owned utility still literally gives out free LED light bulbs. They hand them physically out at the office.

[@arthurdent8086]

Brilliant! Watched Matthias experiment with fans, and Alec with incandescent bulbs ... and Big Clive's LED hacks! Who knew household appliances could hold such fascination?

[@MrDuncl]

I'm surprised that you didn't comment on the way the 2500 bulb has far more filament supports. They increase its life but sink the heat away away from it so it runs cooler and is less efficient. Decades ago here in 240V land I got so fed up of Chandelier bulbs blowing I bought some long life ones which had the same construction and dinner light.

[@jeffm2787]

Bravo on pointing out that many LED bulbs are being built to sub standard quality. I've replaced many as they sucked down far more power then they should have, ran stupid hot, etc.

[@renakunisaki]

They can also be pretty scary when they fail. With an incandescent bulb you'd get a bright flash and slight "pip!" sound and that was it. I've seen LED bulbs fail with a violent POP and spark and smell of smoke, a couple times...

[@MrKrabs-mz9zj]

@@renakunisakisounds like they’ve been overvolted, it’s no different than accidentally plugging a higher voltage barrel connector into an electronic rated at much lower that so happens to accept the same sized jack

[@michaelbuckers]

You mentioned 6 months bulb change interval and I suddenly realized that it's something I never do in my house. When I got it 10 years ago I've installed LED lamps everywhere (those were some hella expensive light fixtures to illuminate the house with I'll tell you what). One of them was defective and burned out slowly within in a couple of years, though I never cared to replace it because each room has like 10 of them. But the rest of them are still shining as well as on the day I first turned them on, seems like I won't need to replace these for at least another decade. And of course the power bill economy! All these LED lamps put together consume as much power as a couple of incandescent bulbs.

[@urkerab]

When I moved into my current home its hallway was illuminated by six 40W incandescent bulbs. I have no idea how the previous occupants were not annoyed that one bulb would fail every month. Naturally I quickly replaced them with LED equivalents.

[@dtibor5903]

Same thing here, LED bulbs from 2014 still working fine, only 2 failed

[@JonathanPaz]

I'm thinking about the Veritasium video on this same subject and it makes me thankful that you get most of your support from Patreon. I'm very happy to be one of them :)

[@bornach]

And he wasn't tempted into following Derek Muller's penchant for clickbait titles and thumbnail: "ACTUAL CONSPIRACIES - this is why we can't have nice things"

[@Tangent360]

Great explanation for light bulbs. I personally believe your point on cost-cutting explains most other things that are pointed to as examples of "planned obsolescence". The vast majority of consumers don't research even large appliance purchases and pick one out in store where the only info you have is the price and the features list. Manufacturers long ago figured out that selling the same features as your competitor but costing $50 more because you used higher-quality parts only led to way lower sales. If you want higher quality you have to do actual research and then vote with your wallet.

[@madmanmapper]

The advent of the tungsten filament (tantalum too, I guess) around 1913ish, in my opinion, is what really kicked off the electrical revolution. These light bulbs made the same amount of light as carbon filament bulbs, at about half the wattage. At a time when electricity was mostly used for lighting and little else, almost overnight power companies around the world suddenly were selling half of their product. Prices of kWh's came down, more people could afford electricity, more appliances were sold, and here we are. Would be cool to hear you talk about this.

[@randacnam7321]

Tantalum predates tungsten by a few years, but undergoes electric field grain boundary effects that severely degrade tantalum filaments when run on AC. The real big thing was ductile drawn tungsten around 1911. Before that, tungsten had to be mixed with binders that were then burned out after the filaments were formed. The resulting filaments were so obscenely brittle that even putting the lamps on their sides could break their filaments from the tension. The only reason sintered filament lamps even survived as a commercial product were that they were more than thrice as efficient as carbon filament lamps.

[@madmanmapper]

@@randacnam7321 Apparently tantalum lamps were so efficient that people would run them on AC anyway, despite their high cost and very short life. Electricity was expensive back then!

[@stephentaylforth4731]

Back in the day, 60s / 70s I was into photography and you could buy bulbs which looked and worked like ordinary light bulbs but were intended for photography lighting. Intensely bright and didn't use much power but they burnt out pretty quickly.

[@okaro6595]

Yes, there were 100 hour bulbs and two hour bulbs.

[@johngaltline9933]

If you go back just a little further you also run in to the single use, magnesium, flash bulbs. They were still pretty common in to the 60's.

[@chadhanna]

Projector bulbs had similar short lives. Filament size was also a factor.

[@tappel0]

The longevity vs. energy efficiency in lightbulbs is funnily enough totally reversed in LEDs. LEDs are (up to a point) more energy efficient when they're being underrun, also when underrun, they produce less heat and fail way less frequently. I regularly buy cheap plastic LED bulbs and lop off a current ajdustment resistor to make the originally 8,5W bulb into a very energy efficient 2,3W bulb (Big Clive has videos on this technique).

[@kkobayashi1]

His video on Dubai lamps is relevant too.

[@Lauren_C]

I see this with some of my nicer flashlights, and the effects tend to vary depending on the LED. The Nichia E21a is happiest inside an amp, though efficiency rapidly drops off after an amp. In a D4V2, the 9 amp driver (little over 2 amps apiece for four LEDs) puts out approximately 20-25% more lumens, than with the standard 5A driver. Some LEDs, such as Cree’s XHP line, tend to respond a lot better, and you can shove a ton of current through them before going well past the efficiency curve (6A for the 3v variations is the spec for XHP 50.3), while being able to take substantial heat. Special note on the Luminus SBT-90.2 LED, which can handle a monstrous 20 Amps, and can kick out over 5000 lumens. For perspective, a 55w halogen headlight hits around 1100-1300 lumens, with high beam bulbs around the 1600-2000 lumen range.

[@alasdair4161]

About 25 years ago I purchased a 25 quantity box of 5 watt railway signal bulbs. They were originally used in the boom lamps used at level crossings. I fitted a cluster of three into two gate post lamps on my property that run all night every night and have done so for 15 years now, with no failures. I have the timer set to do 9 hours so they have just passed 50,000 hours... I doubt they will ever fail as the filaments still look dull grey and there is no evidence of tungsten emission on the glass. They are rated at 10V and I am feeding three in series 28V so each is getting around 9V with a little voltage drop in the cables. Obviously not designed to fail as they are in a safety critical application.

[@MrCarlsonsLab]

Enjoyable video, and very well spoken Alec! Another thing that lowers incandescent bulb life is a thing called "filament notching." This is especially bad when bulbs are operated from a DC supply, IE: automotive bulbs, pilot lamps, ETC. This was issue was "somewhat" rectified (pardon the pun) with Rhenium Tungsten filaments. Take care!

[@Ironic1950]

Halogen bulbs fixed that problem, as the tungsten iodide was decomposed onto the thinest, hottest part of the filament, meaning tungsten was deposited in those locations. For it to be hot enough to work, the glass envelope had to confine the iodide close to the filament, which would melt ordinary soda glass, so fused quartz was used instead, as it has a much higher melting point, hence 'quartz-halogen' bulbs.

[@amarissimus29]

I don't think that warranted an apology. And if you did intentionally make that dubious pun, half of the people on here can't spell, are oblivious to homophones, or are functionally illiterate so it's lost on them anyway. Pun with Pride, and don't let anyone stigmatize you for being a member of a comically marginalized group.

[@darksu6947]

​@@amarissimus29How be the weather up yonder on yer high horse? It's not polite to make fun of the mindless hoard.

[@Muonium1]

@@amarissimus29 uh, I don't think you're responding to the comment you think you are.

[@Lethgar_Smith]

Years ago my dad got a hold of a box of traffic signal light bulbs. He installed them around the house and I think some of them lasted like 10 years.

[@geraldh.8047]

Did he install them in the red light district of the house or in the green zone?

[@jrrarglblarg9241]

@@geraldh.8047 🤣😂🤣👍

[@egerlachca]

I wonder how much power they drew?

[@ghost307]

Most traffic light bulbs are rated at a higher voltage than they're fed by. In the US they use 130v light bulbs on a 120v circuit. Industrial control equipment used to regularly use 230v pilot lights in a 120v circuit and they would last for literally decades.

[@martin_soerensen]

I remember that bulbs for industrial use would usually be rated for 240V although the nominal voltage was 220V (now 230V). So much longer life but worse efficiency. When you buy halogen car bulbs you also have a choice between long-life bulbs and ones with much greater light output. I prefer the best light and don't mind replacing them that more often.

[@ManWithBeard1990]

On the subject of having to make stuff out of tungsten, yeah, it really is an annoying material to work with. I needed to make a shaped electrode out of tungsten wire once. The material is so hard it ruins your pliers, it's brittle so it likes to break if you bend it too far, and the weird thing about the material I got was that the wire likes to split along its length. Considering what our metal supplier wanted for it (about 70 euros per meter of 0.3mm wire IIRC), it was expensive every time it went wrong, which was frequently.

[@revdach]

The most funny thing for me, as russian, that in Soviet Union we had lightbulbs that worked for decades. And things like irons, fans, kettles were indestructible too. I've worked in garbage sorting utility base, and we just prayed the God when we catch soviet iron or socket. For example, in modern sockets there are some plates that as thin as paper and made of some scrap metal with least copper. While soviet had half a centimeter wide plates, made of bronze. And in lightbulbs this foundamentality was also.

[@vibingwithvinyl]

I would assume the "long life" bulbs made sense in places where replacing the bulb was difficult, ie. high ceilings etc. edit: as mentioned later in the video

[@SeanCMonahan]

And in appliances like ovens where the waste heat of the bulb's inefficiency isn't actually wasted.

[@voussoirnet]

22:30

[@ghost307]

They also have 'rough service' incandescent bulb for use in garage door openers and other things that vibrate.

[@johngamble5270]

Yes. My parents had a 200 Watt bulb in their garage, in a socket that was only reachable with a tall and rickety ladder. A long life bulb was very practical in that situation.

[@danielcarter305]

Makes you wonder if the bulb got brighter the higher the temperature in the oven got.

[@danielcarter305]

Alan, I have an 15,000 watt airport beaken incandescent light bulb and the filament is quadruple coiled. It's very interesting to look at, and makes you wonder how it was produced.

[@TheTyisawesome]

Who makes those bulb?

[@shadowcween7890]

​@@TheTyisawesome The airport beacon store

[@volvo09]

A channel "photonicinduction" has run some lamps with such crazy power ratings. What a cool bulb. I'd like to find one some day for a mantle piece.

[@Treblaine]

​@@shadowcween7890 thank you Detective Drebin.

[@danielcarter305]

​@TheTyisawesome LOL...actually I found in a an electronic supply store, and it was produced by GE. It even came in the same corrugated cardboard sleeve as 60 or 100 watt bulbs come in...lol

[@jackdunne6152]

This is officially the first time I've seen percussive maintenance fix a broken light bulb. That, my friend, is how you know you're good at what you do!

[@dembro27]

I used to shake them to hear if the filament was broken, but always after removing them. Never thought to just smack one while it was socketed.

[@PeterPanarchy]

I've used it to "fix" lights on an old car but I'm guessing that was more about the contacts where the harness plugs in than the filament on the bulb.

[@NuclearFisshin]

I have been using that bulb at the fire station story as an anecdote for ages. And even during the intro i woke up to the fact that it must not be very bright. Much like myself for using it as an example. :P I also got me rethinking the already impractical idea of having vacuum insulated walls for sound. It would be terrible for heat insulation. Aside from being completely practically impossible. Thank you. :)

[@soggycracker5934]

It was nice, being able to buy compact CFL bulbs that lasted about ten years or so. Finally, after about a decade, the LED bulbs are catching up. When incandescent bulbs were still common, we preferred the longer life 50 watt bulbs.

[@happyogre]

I stopped using cfl's shortly after they came out. I have seen too many burn out in a glory of fire. After seeing flames and smoke come from a lamp, it's not hard to see what kind of fire hazard they can be. I wonder about the transformers in the LEDs, but so far all I hear is a quick snap and the bulb dead.

[@jasonriddell]

@@happyogre the "self ballasted" CFL's of the 2000's were mostly garbage but the PL lamps without a built in ballast and relied on a ballast built into the fixture were and are far MORE reliable as the fixture is worth FAR more then the bulb retail but NOT much MORE to manufacture so MORE profit for better ballast

[@xponen]

​@@happyogre typically, condensation/water enter CFL lamp circuit and will short it. It had gap/holes on the base, insects accumulate on the base of the lamp (due to UV attraction), or moisture fall onto it thru the holes at the base, especially if it's facing up (like on light stand).

[@soggycracker5934]

@@happyogre I don't mind the LEDs, but I just want to be able to not think about bulbs. On the rare occasions I see a pack of the good CFLs, I snatch them up. The only place I WILL NOT use them, is in the shop. There I still use incandescent. It's a safety thing. Fluorescent and LEDs flicker and can make a spinning machine appear to be off. Very danger.

[@bwseventytwo]

I want to see a video about modern LED bulbs. Manufacturers love to tout the lifespan of the actual LEDs, but neglect the reliability of the conversion circuitry, which is almost always the failure point in an LED bulb.

[@jrharbortproductions]

Yep, the lifespan rating of LED bulbs is based on the specification of the LED chips themselves. They don't like to mention how much they're overdriving them and cooking them to an early death.

[@n.shiina8798]

yep. a lot of LEDs were driven to its max. rating without having proper heat dissipation in mind. i have a couple LEDs exploded its capacitor because of the heat while other have one or two LED chips cooked to death

[@Argedis]

bigclive has taken apart tons of LED bulbs with explanations of the components

[@codemiesterbeats]

Agreed... They have similar issues in automotive LED lighting systems. In automotive I think they should make the 'drivers' replaceable. I have had more home LEDs fail than I can count... Even name branded ones. Also I think they should be required put the "don't run in an enclosed fixture" more prominently on the package. Because in a wonderful twist of fate one of the more common light fixtures in American homes is the "boob light" I have thought of a few ways to convert them into a more open fixture but haven't settled on a good design.

[@emptylog933]

I now current mod my led lights by removing the lower resistance tuning resistor. Light output is much the same and current draw/heat generation is significantly lowered. Started doing this after getting annoyed by early failures.

[@jamess1787]

Your channel videography is unreal. I never thought I'd watch a video this long on incandescent light bulbs. Thanks TC! 🎉

[@garrettkajmowicz]

It's ... enlightening.

[@edwardnedharvey8019]

Great video. You know what drives me crazy? The prevalence of "maintenance free" light fixtures, especially flush mount. They're designed to last 10yrs, which sounds pretty great, until you realize you need to hire an electrician (or know enough to twist household wires together yourself, in a junction box), and you have how many, probably at least 10 lights in your house. So if you used all "maintenance free" lights, you'll need to change one, on average, once a year or so.

[@mytimetravellingdog]

but if they were installed at the same time as is likely they won't be on average every 10 years they'll probably all fail in the 9-11 year period meaning you probably will want to replace them all when the first one goes because otherwise you'll have to get an electrician out 10 times in a relatively short period of time. But they are stupid things.

[@edwardnedharvey8019]

@@mytimetravellingdog if it's new construction, you might have all the lights installed at the same time, but it's quite common for people to replace one fixture, or one room at a time in their house, ongoing

[@Urza9814]

They're "designed" to last 10 years...in ideal conditions. I`ve seen "ten year" bulbs fail in less than one. Airflow around the bulb, humidity (if near a bathroom or something) or local climate can dramatically change that lifespan. As will the duty cycle -- you use the lights in some rooms a lot more than others. So you could install all ten at the same time and still have one fail every year. LED lights should damn near last forever. Usually it's the power supply that fails, and usually that's because they run the power supply very close to its physical limits because making it more durable costs money. But that also means any small variation from those test conditions can push it over the edge into failure. These lights *could* be great, but that would not be profitable...

[@noyb7920]

This is also true for RAID arrays (used to multiply disk capacity and provide some data security by saving the data across multiple drives) A drive with a Mean Time Before Failure of 100,000 hours will usually last around 100,000 hours. An array of 36 similar drives will have one fail on average once a month or so of continuous use. It's not a simple division, as due to probability, it's worse. Source: Was system admin of such an array, and really wished the people who set it up in the first place had split the array instead of using all the drives for one logical storage area. (So did they after the first few months once the drives started failing) The storage space? You can now get similar levels of capacity on microSD cards, though the transfer speed from the area was much much faster. Also, TechConn has done a video about those "disposable" light fixtures like you're talking about.

[@noyb7920]

@@mytimetravellingdog Designed for "10 years longevity" is based on average lifespan of bulb design, it's very unlikely for them all to fail at around the same time (within the same year). If they did, that was definitely through planned obsolescence.