My wife and I were out recently looking at ceiling fans to replace the one in our dining room, which has committed no crimes, other than having the appearance of being very much from the 1980s.
I was taken aback by how few of the fans had replaceable lightbulbs! In the entire store there were maybe three or four options with a replaceable bulb!
Call me crazy, but a nonreplaceable LED is a complete dealbreaker. I go through so many LED bulbs! I don't know if my electricity is like particularly bad or if that's just normal? The first LED bulb I ever bought (Shout out EarthLED) in 2008 for like $30 is still going strong, but every bulb I buy these days lasts like two years tops.
Yeah, I have so many LED bulbs that are rated at "10+ years". I put all of the lights in my apartment 5 years ago. I'd say the failure rate is 10-20% at this point. The particularly painful one is the downlights under my kitchen cabinets. They require removing the entire probably 30 kg board that I have them mounted in, which requires clamping things up and undoing 6 heavy duty screws, and the whole process of changing one takes about an hour. 2 of the 5 have failed in 5 years. I'm very picky about lighting (only get LEDs with CRI 95+), so I usually am buying the expensive ones.
Same here. We have had outdoor hanging string lights for ~10 years with nice incandescent bulbs that occasionally burn out. I thought I would join the 21st century and started replacing the burned out ones with LED versions. Big mistake. In about 3 years, half of the new LED ones have already failed. Managed to find a new pack of the incandescent ones and so far so good.
Like for most consumer products today, the problem is that when buying LED bulbs you do not know their real quality.
LED bulbs can be designed to live almost forever, but many of them are not designed so, for savings in cost, but the selling price may be poorly correlated with the manufacturing cost.
I have about two dozens Philips LED bulbs (4000 K color temperature and equivalent with old 100 W incandescent bulbs, i.e. 1500 lumen) of the kind that fits in legacy Edison sockets for incandescent bulbs. They were bought more than 15 years ago and all continue to work perfectly fine. I did not have to replace any of them.
Nonetheless, if I would buy today new LED bulbs, even of the same brand, I think that the chances are slim that they will be equally reliable.
In the past, you could rely on the brand of a product to inform you about the expected quality, but today buying any product with a certain brand provides no guarantee that the quality will be the same as for an apparently identical product bought one year earlier.
donatj · · focus · HN ↗
I was taken aback by how few of the fans had replaceable lightbulbs! In the entire store there were maybe three or four options with a replaceable bulb!
Call me crazy, but a nonreplaceable LED is a complete dealbreaker. I go through so many LED bulbs! I don't know if my electricity is like particularly bad or if that's just normal? The first LED bulb I ever bought (Shout out EarthLED) in 2008 for like $30 is still going strong, but every bulb I buy these days lasts like two years tops.
Anyway, we did not buy a fan.
wheels · · focus · HN ↗
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
Gigachad · · focus · HN ↗
adrian_b · · focus · HN ↗
LED bulbs can be designed to live almost forever, but many of them are not designed so, for savings in cost, but the selling price may be poorly correlated with the manufacturing cost.
I have about two dozens Philips LED bulbs (4000 K color temperature and equivalent with old 100 W incandescent bulbs, i.e. 1500 lumen) of the kind that fits in legacy Edison sockets for incandescent bulbs. They were bought more than 15 years ago and all continue to work perfectly fine. I did not have to replace any of them.
Nonetheless, if I would buy today new LED bulbs, even of the same brand, I think that the chances are slim that they will be equally reliable.
In the past, you could rely on the brand of a product to inform you about the expected quality, but today buying any product with a certain brand provides no guarantee that the quality will be the same as for an apparently identical product bought one year earlier.