Incandescent light bulbs are officially banned in the U.S.::America’s ban on incandescent light bulbs, 16 years in the making, is finally a reality. Well, mostly.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know what kind of crap LED light bulbs you get in the US but here in Europe to to get a CE mark (required to be able to import them into the EU) a model has to have less than 5% failure rate within (if I remember it correctly) the first year, last 10,000h at least (and have been tested for it, which is quite funny because the test requires having the thing always on for months), turn on within a second, lose (due to burn-in) less than a few percent (forgot the number) brightness within the first 6 months and a bunch of other requirements including stuff like color fidelity.

    About a decade ago I actually looked into starting a business importing those things from China and still tody have several samples from back then still working fine (and that’s also why I know the CE mark requirements for LED light bulbs).

    More in general I’ve been using LED lamps for even longer and even back in the day when they were more expensive those things paid for themselves in lower power costs, and often do so quite fast (a couple of months) when used to replace incandescents, plus the rate of failures is now pretty low.

    (When I first replaced all my lightbulbs with LEDs, way back when they weren’t even as efficient as now, the fall in the electricity bill was very noticeable)

    Oh, and the price of those things at the factory has been less than $1 for ages, so stores trying to sell those for more than $2 have huge markups and you’re better of avoiding those places and getting them from hardware stores and similar (or just buy online).