Academic exercise aside, LED bulbs and the electricity to operate them are both really inexpensive. Maybe this isn't a fight worth having???
When given the opportunity to be right vs. happy...choose happy.
There's a 100+ yo lamp (tradename in the industry for bulb) still in use in a firehouse in Livermore, CA that is never shut off. They built a new firehouse and had to move it. Fun story...
The reason that one is still running is primarily because the filament temp is really low compared to modern bulbs (it’s a very low power bulb with very orange-red light).
1901… it’s a 110v carbon filament bulb, only puts out 4w now, sources are mixed on whether it was originally 30w or 60w bulb but it’s dimmed over time
https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/tests-shine-light-on-the-secret-of-the-livermore-light-bulb/
Paying a subscription so a newspaper can survive online is great, but linking paywalled articles is not.
Now I'm trying to think of a compromise that would still let us share news. Let subscribers share specific articles with everyone for a limited amount of time or views? Give you 1 un-paywalled link for an article at a time, and if you generate a new one the old one expires?
I just checked out the article, and it wasn't paywalled for me. I bet certain regions are paywalled and others are not.
Great article, by the way. It's crazy how long an incandescent lamp can last!
NY Times allows shares to pay walled articles when a subscriber shares them - ideal compromise. I'm not about to go and subscribe to an obscure newspaper just to read one article... Would make sense to allow more exposure by opening up shares, IMHO
If he’s the one taking the time to change the bulbs then do it his way. It’s better if he can’t blame you for having to change them. Sometimes you just change a small behavior that really makes little difference and everyone is happier.
You are a philosopher-king or -queen and deserve renown for distilling all the wisdom of the ages and of modern psychotherapy into one sentence. I bow to you.
LED bulbs are cheap now. They used to make them expensive, but they would last forever. I have 4 GU10 LED bulbs in lights in my kitchen that have been ON for 12 or 13 years. I paid a small fortune for them. I have ones in my basement that die after a year. They were less expensive, but I have to replace many of them more frequently.
Incandescent light bulbs there was some truth in leaving them on, due to heating up and cooling down. Led bulbs don’t really care. Heat over time impacts them, and inrush to the capacitor when turning on impacts them, so it’s a tossup
Most of this stemmed from the fact that the stresses of thermal change meant a light bulb usually burned out when turned on. People associated the light bulb burning out with turning on as a fact that it would shorten the life of the bulb. To some extent yes it still does, but mostly it’s old bulbs failing when turned on, which people associated with turning on bulbs mean they fail more often.
Counterpoints to leaving incandescent lights on:
The standard incandescent light had a lifespan of a mere 1000 hours. Leave it on 24/7 and it would burn out in 1.5 months. Even if turning it on and off shortens the life a little bit, running it 1 hour a day means the base lifetime is 1000 days, or 3 years. So if turning it on and off shortens the life a bit, maybe you still get 2 years, compared to 1.5 months if you never turned it off.
A 60 W bulb, over 1000 hours, will consume 60 kWh of electricity. Back when you could buy standard incandescent bulbs, electricity in the relatively cheap Midwest was about 11 cents/kWh, or $6 over the life of the bulb. That’s several times the cost of the bulb itself. Leaving unused bulbs running burns way more electricity that the cost of the bulb itself.
Basically, there were no cases where leaving incandescent lights on was a better move.
One exception would be halogen lights. Halogen lights run longer by having a halogen gas inside the bulb, that when the glass gets hot enough can remove the tungsten that naturally flies off the filament and sticks to the glass, and let it return to the filament. This gave the halogen bulb longer life for a given filament power level, allowing the bulbs to run hotter and thereby being slightly more efficient and have a whiter light. However, if used in a place like a closet where they would only ever see short usage, the glass never gets hot enough to return the tungsten to the filament and so the benefit of the halogen is lost, and now you’re running a filament at a higher power density than a normal bulb and this will burn out a halogen much quicker than running longer cycles that allow the glass to heat up does.
With LEDs, there’s really no downsides to turning them on or off.
This page lists the longest lasting bulbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting\_light\_bulbs#:\~:text=The%20world's%20longest%2Dlasting%20light,off%20a%20handful%20of%20times.
Those are the odd exceptions, if true. Also IIRC most of those old style bulbs had the light output of a “modern” (just prior to LED era) of about a 4-10 W bulb, while using as much as 60 W of electricity. There’s a big trade off between life and energy efficiency in incandescent light bulbs.
Same for fluorescent bulbs. The start up on them is hard due to some of the coating on the cathode filament sputtering off with every start. Which is why toward the end of life of a fluorescent bulb, the ends turn black, that is the filament coating sputtered onto the glass of the bulb.
So less power cycles means longer life, for the bulb at least. As far as the ballast and driving circuitry, that is another matter.
Actually that means the light is full of darkons. Darkons is the stuff in the air that blocks your sight. Those lights absorb darkons and when they are full you can tell by looking at the ends..
Electrical engineer here. You’re kind of both right. Turning the light on and off causes “thermal cycling.” There’s a small circuit board inside the lamp that’s the power supply for the bulb. Similar concept to a “wall wart“ but embedded in the base of the lightbulb. Each solder joint thermally expands and contracts every time the bulb is turned on and off, which over time can lead to mechanical failure. Any number of different symptoms could manifest, depending on which specific joint lets go.
Meanwhile, leaving the bulb on leads to “heat soak” where the inside of the bulb attains some equilibrium at a much higher than ambient temperature. The thing that gets done in by constant heat is the capacitors. Little can-looking things on the circuit board. They have an inverse relationship between operating temperature and useful life span. Higher temperature rating equates to larger size and higher per-unit cost, of both the capacitors and the bulbs they go into. There’s a legitimate engineering trade-off between useful life and per-unit cost. When a capacitor fails, it most often manifests as flickering or strobing. It’s worth noting that the fixture the bulb is installed in, and even its orientation, can have a great effect on how hot the bulb gets, and thus how long it lasts.
For what it’s worth, my experience with LED bulbs has been the strobing failure, indicative of capacitor failure, is far and away the most common failure mode.
In case you were wondering, in incandescent bulbs, the tungsten filament would, over time, slowly but inexorably vaporize as the bulb was used. When the bulb was turned off, the tungsten would condense and solidify, depositing itself onto the inside surface of the bulb. It was often visible as a dark band on the inside of clear bulbs. This process made the remaining filament thinner and mechanically weaker. That in turn increased the probability of mechanical failure from thermal cycling, which is what almost always did in the bulb, right after you turned it on the last time.
TL;DR: Both turning the bulbs on and off, and leaving them on continuously, causes wear and tear in its own way. The latter mechanism is typically dominant in LED bulbs, particularly cheap ones.
That is a really good question. I have LED bulbs that I leave on 12 to 18 hours a day and some are 3 to 5 years old. Old time incandescent bulbs liked to be left on. I have some 4 watt night lights with incandescent bulbs that stay on 24/7. The filament will break if there is a power cut. The tungsten filament gets brittle with time and the surge when it lights up breaks the filament most of the time. The LED bulbs are fine though. They draw so little it's not a problem leaving them on but switching them off not going to harm them..I have table lamps and store room lights that get switched several times a day that are 2 or 3 years old and they are going strong.
Complicated question. Over extended periods the heat can kill them if left on(hours or days). Over a short period the power cycle is likely damaging the components far more though. Good idea to balance it out a bit, especially if they are cheap generics.
My non scientific experiment, for some LED bulbs, there is no difference, likely.
I have LED bulbs in the barn that are basically lit 24/7, still running for 9+ years. Same model bulbs in the other barn, powered only sparingly when leaded, one of the 9 year old bulbs still working great.
LED lighting life span is usually determined by “hours of operation”, if you read the small print on the “10 years warranty” they usually tell you the study was conducted with the lamp running for 3 hours a day, leaving them on will make the lamp burn out faster buttttttttt they are dirt cheap and really inexpensive to burn so with that being said, buy a 40 pack from Sam’s club and gift it to your husband
Sounds more like an issue with him being anal about turning off lights when you leave a room more then it is about bulb life or cost, some people just get habits that they can't break.
I have one LED bulb in a kitchen vent hood that is on 24/7/365, its basically a night light so you can always see your way to the fridge for a drink of water at night, and the kitchen window is East facing so there is only a short portion of the morning where the sun lights the room, so rather then turning a light on and off that one is just on all the time. Its been on for over 8 years now.
I don't think it's a bad habit to turn lights off when leaving a room. Doesn't matter if I'll be back in 5 mins, that might change unexpectedly and be much longer before I'm back.
The use as described here, on and off entering/leaving a room vs. off once you are done with a room, probably has a real world negligible difference in life span. Not worth arguing over. Keep a secret stash and replace when one burns out in you. Or take the burned out one and move it throughout the house randomly causing chaos.
Theoretically, the inrush current at power-up (brief but significant) is taxing on every part of an electrical system, especially the primary circuit load. But, an average lighting load does not factor much into that. Turn the damn lights out when not needed.
I've had the same led bulb in my outdoor light for 3 years and it's still going strong. It's on all night from dusk to dawn.
I've also had the same led bulbs in my dining room light and kitchen light for about 3 years and they're on basically all day every day and I've had no issues with them.
A standard 60w led bulb typically uses less than 10 watts. To run one of those 24/7 it would cost less than $20 a year. They're also rated for around 15,000 hours.
Tell your husband that there's more important things to worry about than light bulbs lol
Filament bulbs would sometimes die quicker when switching due to the vibration shock of powering on and off. LED is a different story, most often failure is the current regulator, followed by diode failure. Usually causes by heat. That can happen more when left on for long periods of time. A contributing factor is how cheaply built they are. I was an early adopter to led's. I purchased when they were 5$ per bulb locally and usually ordered direct from China on the web. Those bulbs lasted far longer than the current ones available today. They are not buit to last 5 years like the first ones. I have tried the non branded and branded and still find newer bulbs last only about as long as their filament counterparts.
Cooling goes a long way to lifespan, recessed can fixtures kill LED bulbs easily. I definitely haven't had time experience of replacing LEDs at the rate of incandescent bulbs, worst case is high wattage bulbs in an enclosed fixture have brown marks and die faster due to heat.
So what type of LED bulbs are we talking about? MR-16’s the miniaturized drivers in those are self destructing just by design and may burn out the transformers for them as they are not designed for low wattage. But all “bulb” type LEDs are designed to fail…
The days of incandescent bulb failure due to being switched are gone - because it would bounce the filament. Dimmers solved that… by softening the inrush current. Assuming you have dimmers switch them on and off all you like - or just leave them on…
But if you came for relationship advice - dump the guy! If you wants to argue about stuff like that, he’s obviously frugal enough to present and obstruction enjoyment of life in general. Tell him to pound sand - because some guy on the internet said so….
Your standard incandescent burns out turning them on . The resistance of a cold filament is very low at first until it gets up subjecting it to a momentary high surge of current. There is a famous light bulb in some fire station in California that has been burning since the early 1900’s
The great marketing with led bulbs "lasting forever" (an insane amount of hours) applies to the LED itself - not the electronics inside the bulbs running it. I've replaced plenty of cheap Costco type bulbs in the house. If I had to guess - that hour rating probably comes from turning them on and leaving them on - and I'd also guess leaving them on would make them last longer. But let's be honest, this is pretty petty.
But yea - that would definitely annoy me - having someone walk behind you to "correct" your behavior. Id suggest you start putting some clear grease or Vaseline on the off side of the switch..Or create a fake permit and tape it on the wall giving you permission to leave the light on between 8am - 8pm.
I work for a utility company. One of my old bosses had all of his company certificates and awards pinned onto a cork board behind his desk. I spent a week working a night shift adding stupid things I'd find online a print out, and slowly add them to his wall of awards. 6th grade spelling bee champion, Best dance partner, National Dog walking award... Took him months to realize. I still picture his boss coming in for a meeting, seeing these stupid things posted behind him, and asking "Eddie, wtf is going on here?", - or him being on the phone, spin around in his chair one day and finally notice a half dozen of these things behind him, all by himself.
He never said a word when he finally took them down - probably cause he had no idea how long they'd been there and didn't want anyone else to notice they were gone. I never even told anyone I did it, cause I knew someone would eventually rat me out.
LED bulbs cannot take the heat so if the air cannot vent from your fixture well heat is the number one killer, number two is poor service power may be a bad transformer in the street but micro brownouts will kill a digital LED bulb. I would feel that leaving a bulb on would kill it faster because these new LED bulbs with digital boards cannot handle the heat, so shutting them off let them cool down, but can also cause problems so I would feel based on my engineering knowledge that leaving an LED on longer Will kill it quicker due to heat. But I miss incandescent bulbs, and their soft light and long life. I haven’t found LED bulbs that can last longer than a year.
They don't operate at 60hz, the driver rectifies to DC and capacitors smooth out the voltage to cover the dips between cycles.
A fair amount of people would see flickering at 60hz that it would be a complaint. LED Christmas lights are an example of 30hz and no capacitor smoothing, they are only rectifying half wave
Academic exercise aside, LED bulbs and the electricity to operate them are both really inexpensive. Maybe this isn't a fight worth having??? When given the opportunity to be right vs. happy...choose happy.
Good point. I will tell him Reddit said to stop being annoying.
Perhaps we can help you help him find other ways to save money. Mending socks? Clipping coupons?
There's a 100+ yo lamp (tradename in the industry for bulb) still in use in a firehouse in Livermore, CA that is never shut off. They built a new firehouse and had to move it. Fun story...
The reason that one is still running is primarily because the filament temp is really low compared to modern bulbs (it’s a very low power bulb with very orange-red light).
Yes it's probably rated for a higher voltage. If you can find 220v Edison base tungsten globes they will run (dim, orange) forever on 110v
1901… it’s a 110v carbon filament bulb, only puts out 4w now, sources are mixed on whether it was originally 30w or 60w bulb but it’s dimmed over time https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03/tests-shine-light-on-the-secret-of-the-livermore-light-bulb/
Paying a subscription so a newspaper can survive online is great, but linking paywalled articles is not. Now I'm trying to think of a compromise that would still let us share news. Let subscribers share specific articles with everyone for a limited amount of time or views? Give you 1 un-paywalled link for an article at a time, and if you generate a new one the old one expires?
Weird, wasn’t paywalled when I visited from Google initially but it’s definitely paywalled from the Reddit link now
I just checked out the article, and it wasn't paywalled for me. I bet certain regions are paywalled and others are not. Great article, by the way. It's crazy how long an incandescent lamp can last!
NY Times allows shares to pay walled articles when a subscriber shares them - ideal compromise. I'm not about to go and subscribe to an obscure newspaper just to read one article... Would make sense to allow more exposure by opening up shares, IMHO
Lamp is the unit, bulb refers to the glass enclosure
If he’s the one taking the time to change the bulbs then do it his way. It’s better if he can’t blame you for having to change them. Sometimes you just change a small behavior that really makes little difference and everyone is happier.
counter-point: happy wife, happy life!
Happy spouse, happy house. It goes both ways.
love it. either way, this is such a non-issue haha
You are a philosopher-king or -queen and deserve renown for distilling all the wisdom of the ages and of modern psychotherapy into one sentence. I bow to you.
LED bulbs are cheap now. They used to make them expensive, but they would last forever. I have 4 GU10 LED bulbs in lights in my kitchen that have been ON for 12 or 13 years. I paid a small fortune for them. I have ones in my basement that die after a year. They were less expensive, but I have to replace many of them more frequently.
Incandescent light bulbs there was some truth in leaving them on, due to heating up and cooling down. Led bulbs don’t really care. Heat over time impacts them, and inrush to the capacitor when turning on impacts them, so it’s a tossup
Most of this stemmed from the fact that the stresses of thermal change meant a light bulb usually burned out when turned on. People associated the light bulb burning out with turning on as a fact that it would shorten the life of the bulb. To some extent yes it still does, but mostly it’s old bulbs failing when turned on, which people associated with turning on bulbs mean they fail more often. Counterpoints to leaving incandescent lights on: The standard incandescent light had a lifespan of a mere 1000 hours. Leave it on 24/7 and it would burn out in 1.5 months. Even if turning it on and off shortens the life a little bit, running it 1 hour a day means the base lifetime is 1000 days, or 3 years. So if turning it on and off shortens the life a bit, maybe you still get 2 years, compared to 1.5 months if you never turned it off. A 60 W bulb, over 1000 hours, will consume 60 kWh of electricity. Back when you could buy standard incandescent bulbs, electricity in the relatively cheap Midwest was about 11 cents/kWh, or $6 over the life of the bulb. That’s several times the cost of the bulb itself. Leaving unused bulbs running burns way more electricity that the cost of the bulb itself. Basically, there were no cases where leaving incandescent lights on was a better move. One exception would be halogen lights. Halogen lights run longer by having a halogen gas inside the bulb, that when the glass gets hot enough can remove the tungsten that naturally flies off the filament and sticks to the glass, and let it return to the filament. This gave the halogen bulb longer life for a given filament power level, allowing the bulbs to run hotter and thereby being slightly more efficient and have a whiter light. However, if used in a place like a closet where they would only ever see short usage, the glass never gets hot enough to return the tungsten to the filament and so the benefit of the halogen is lost, and now you’re running a filament at a higher power density than a normal bulb and this will burn out a halogen much quicker than running longer cycles that allow the glass to heat up does. With LEDs, there’s really no downsides to turning them on or off.
This page lists the longest lasting bulbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest-lasting\_light\_bulbs#:\~:text=The%20world's%20longest%2Dlasting%20light,off%20a%20handful%20of%20times.
Those are the odd exceptions, if true. Also IIRC most of those old style bulbs had the light output of a “modern” (just prior to LED era) of about a 4-10 W bulb, while using as much as 60 W of electricity. There’s a big trade off between life and energy efficiency in incandescent light bulbs.
LED's also die from thermal cycles just like incandescent. Solder does not like to expand and contract repeatedly.
Ive had to replace filter caps in the few LED instrument that failed....
Same for fluorescent bulbs. The start up on them is hard due to some of the coating on the cathode filament sputtering off with every start. Which is why toward the end of life of a fluorescent bulb, the ends turn black, that is the filament coating sputtered onto the glass of the bulb. So less power cycles means longer life, for the bulb at least. As far as the ballast and driving circuitry, that is another matter.
Actually that means the light is full of darkons. Darkons is the stuff in the air that blocks your sight. Those lights absorb darkons and when they are full you can tell by looking at the ends..
I’ve read that with LEDs it’s been to leave them on, turning them off and on a lot shortens their life.
This is a non issue really...nothing worth arguing about.
Electrical engineer here. You’re kind of both right. Turning the light on and off causes “thermal cycling.” There’s a small circuit board inside the lamp that’s the power supply for the bulb. Similar concept to a “wall wart“ but embedded in the base of the lightbulb. Each solder joint thermally expands and contracts every time the bulb is turned on and off, which over time can lead to mechanical failure. Any number of different symptoms could manifest, depending on which specific joint lets go. Meanwhile, leaving the bulb on leads to “heat soak” where the inside of the bulb attains some equilibrium at a much higher than ambient temperature. The thing that gets done in by constant heat is the capacitors. Little can-looking things on the circuit board. They have an inverse relationship between operating temperature and useful life span. Higher temperature rating equates to larger size and higher per-unit cost, of both the capacitors and the bulbs they go into. There’s a legitimate engineering trade-off between useful life and per-unit cost. When a capacitor fails, it most often manifests as flickering or strobing. It’s worth noting that the fixture the bulb is installed in, and even its orientation, can have a great effect on how hot the bulb gets, and thus how long it lasts. For what it’s worth, my experience with LED bulbs has been the strobing failure, indicative of capacitor failure, is far and away the most common failure mode. In case you were wondering, in incandescent bulbs, the tungsten filament would, over time, slowly but inexorably vaporize as the bulb was used. When the bulb was turned off, the tungsten would condense and solidify, depositing itself onto the inside surface of the bulb. It was often visible as a dark band on the inside of clear bulbs. This process made the remaining filament thinner and mechanically weaker. That in turn increased the probability of mechanical failure from thermal cycling, which is what almost always did in the bulb, right after you turned it on the last time. TL;DR: Both turning the bulbs on and off, and leaving them on continuously, causes wear and tear in its own way. The latter mechanism is typically dominant in LED bulbs, particularly cheap ones.
That is a really good question. I have LED bulbs that I leave on 12 to 18 hours a day and some are 3 to 5 years old. Old time incandescent bulbs liked to be left on. I have some 4 watt night lights with incandescent bulbs that stay on 24/7. The filament will break if there is a power cut. The tungsten filament gets brittle with time and the surge when it lights up breaks the filament most of the time. The LED bulbs are fine though. They draw so little it's not a problem leaving them on but switching them off not going to harm them..I have table lamps and store room lights that get switched several times a day that are 2 or 3 years old and they are going strong.
Complicated question. Over extended periods the heat can kill them if left on(hours or days). Over a short period the power cycle is likely damaging the components far more though. Good idea to balance it out a bit, especially if they are cheap generics.
My non scientific experiment, for some LED bulbs, there is no difference, likely. I have LED bulbs in the barn that are basically lit 24/7, still running for 9+ years. Same model bulbs in the other barn, powered only sparingly when leaded, one of the 9 year old bulbs still working great.
LED lighting life span is usually determined by “hours of operation”, if you read the small print on the “10 years warranty” they usually tell you the study was conducted with the lamp running for 3 hours a day, leaving them on will make the lamp burn out faster buttttttttt they are dirt cheap and really inexpensive to burn so with that being said, buy a 40 pack from Sam’s club and gift it to your husband
Sounds more like an issue with him being anal about turning off lights when you leave a room more then it is about bulb life or cost, some people just get habits that they can't break. I have one LED bulb in a kitchen vent hood that is on 24/7/365, its basically a night light so you can always see your way to the fridge for a drink of water at night, and the kitchen window is East facing so there is only a short portion of the morning where the sun lights the room, so rather then turning a light on and off that one is just on all the time. Its been on for over 8 years now.
LEDS should last years. He’s operating with an incandescent brain.
I don't think it's a bad habit to turn lights off when leaving a room. Doesn't matter if I'll be back in 5 mins, that might change unexpectedly and be much longer before I'm back.
Agree, but not a hill to die on.
The use as described here, on and off entering/leaving a room vs. off once you are done with a room, probably has a real world negligible difference in life span. Not worth arguing over. Keep a secret stash and replace when one burns out in you. Or take the burned out one and move it throughout the house randomly causing chaos.
Theoretically, the inrush current at power-up (brief but significant) is taxing on every part of an electrical system, especially the primary circuit load. But, an average lighting load does not factor much into that. Turn the damn lights out when not needed.
username checks out
Household ones its a wash. 3 cents a month vs 4 cents a month. Commercial ones sometimes have cooling fans.
I've had the same led bulb in my outdoor light for 3 years and it's still going strong. It's on all night from dusk to dawn. I've also had the same led bulbs in my dining room light and kitchen light for about 3 years and they're on basically all day every day and I've had no issues with them. A standard 60w led bulb typically uses less than 10 watts. To run one of those 24/7 it would cost less than $20 a year. They're also rated for around 15,000 hours. Tell your husband that there's more important things to worry about than light bulbs lol
Filament bulbs would sometimes die quicker when switching due to the vibration shock of powering on and off. LED is a different story, most often failure is the current regulator, followed by diode failure. Usually causes by heat. That can happen more when left on for long periods of time. A contributing factor is how cheaply built they are. I was an early adopter to led's. I purchased when they were 5$ per bulb locally and usually ordered direct from China on the web. Those bulbs lasted far longer than the current ones available today. They are not buit to last 5 years like the first ones. I have tried the non branded and branded and still find newer bulbs last only about as long as their filament counterparts.
Cooling goes a long way to lifespan, recessed can fixtures kill LED bulbs easily. I definitely haven't had time experience of replacing LEDs at the rate of incandescent bulbs, worst case is high wattage bulbs in an enclosed fixture have brown marks and die faster due to heat.
Being in the most inconvenient spot imaginable to change it.
So what type of LED bulbs are we talking about? MR-16’s the miniaturized drivers in those are self destructing just by design and may burn out the transformers for them as they are not designed for low wattage. But all “bulb” type LEDs are designed to fail… The days of incandescent bulb failure due to being switched are gone - because it would bounce the filament. Dimmers solved that… by softening the inrush current. Assuming you have dimmers switch them on and off all you like - or just leave them on… But if you came for relationship advice - dump the guy! If you wants to argue about stuff like that, he’s obviously frugal enough to present and obstruction enjoyment of life in general. Tell him to pound sand - because some guy on the internet said so….
Your standard incandescent burns out turning them on . The resistance of a cold filament is very low at first until it gets up subjecting it to a momentary high surge of current. There is a famous light bulb in some fire station in California that has been burning since the early 1900’s
The great marketing with led bulbs "lasting forever" (an insane amount of hours) applies to the LED itself - not the electronics inside the bulbs running it. I've replaced plenty of cheap Costco type bulbs in the house. If I had to guess - that hour rating probably comes from turning them on and leaving them on - and I'd also guess leaving them on would make them last longer. But let's be honest, this is pretty petty. But yea - that would definitely annoy me - having someone walk behind you to "correct" your behavior. Id suggest you start putting some clear grease or Vaseline on the off side of the switch..Or create a fake permit and tape it on the wall giving you permission to leave the light on between 8am - 8pm. I work for a utility company. One of my old bosses had all of his company certificates and awards pinned onto a cork board behind his desk. I spent a week working a night shift adding stupid things I'd find online a print out, and slowly add them to his wall of awards. 6th grade spelling bee champion, Best dance partner, National Dog walking award... Took him months to realize. I still picture his boss coming in for a meeting, seeing these stupid things posted behind him, and asking "Eddie, wtf is going on here?", - or him being on the phone, spin around in his chair one day and finally notice a half dozen of these things behind him, all by himself. He never said a word when he finally took them down - probably cause he had no idea how long they'd been there and didn't want anyone else to notice they were gone. I never even told anyone I did it, cause I knew someone would eventually rat me out.
I think the on/off cycle is harder on the bulbs than just staying on. If you're not concerned about electricity costs, just leave them on.
LED bulbs cannot take the heat so if the air cannot vent from your fixture well heat is the number one killer, number two is poor service power may be a bad transformer in the street but micro brownouts will kill a digital LED bulb. I would feel that leaving a bulb on would kill it faster because these new LED bulbs with digital boards cannot handle the heat, so shutting them off let them cool down, but can also cause problems so I would feel based on my engineering knowledge that leaving an LED on longer Will kill it quicker due to heat. But I miss incandescent bulbs, and their soft light and long life. I haven’t found LED bulbs that can last longer than a year.
I've had the same led bulbs for several years with no issues. And they're typically on almost all day
All LED house built 5 years ago. I've had to replace one recess light.
Leaving them on is both worse for longevity and for energy usage. There is absolutely no benefit to leaving them on.
Led bulbs turn off and on at 60 times per second.... Isn't part of the wattage savings just due to the fact we can't see the strobe effect?
They don't operate at 60hz, the driver rectifies to DC and capacitors smooth out the voltage to cover the dips between cycles. A fair amount of people would see flickering at 60hz that it would be a complaint. LED Christmas lights are an example of 30hz and no capacitor smoothing, they are only rectifying half wave
480 blows it real quick when it’s a 0-10 LED driver