--- title: You have been mislead about lightbulbs | daily.dev description: The common narrative that the Phoebus cartel standardized lightbulb lifespans at 1,000 hours purely to drive repeat purchases is misleading. In reality,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/you-have-been-mislead-about-lightbulbs-vkfwbnr9u twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: You have been mislead about lightbulbs | daily.dev og:description: The common narrative that the Phoebus cartel standardized lightbulb lifespans at 1,000 hours purely to drive repeat purchases is misleading. In reality,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/you-have-been-mislead-about-lightbulbs-vkfwbnr9u og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/vkfWBNr9u.png og:image:alt: You have been mislead about lightbulbs og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # You have been mislead about lightbulbs **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The common narrative that the Phoebus cartel standardized lightbulb lifespans at 1,000 hours purely to drive repeat purchases is misleading. In reality, longer-lasting incandescent bulbs are fundamentally worse products: the physics of tungsten filaments means that increasing lifespan requires running the filament cooler, which reduces efficiency, brightness, and color quality. The famous Centennial Bulb in California, often cited as proof of planned obsolescence, barely glows and draws only 4W despite being rated at 60W — likely a manufacturing defect that made it useless for normal use. The cartel's enforcement existed because consumers irrationally preferred longer-lasting bulbs without understanding the efficiency trade-off, creating a race to the bottom. The real lesson is that every manufactured product involves invisible engineering compromises, and lightbulbs are not a good example of planned obsolescence. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 213 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-01). **TL;DR:** The community largely agrees that LED bulb longevity varies enormously by brand, build quality, installation conditions (heat, enclosed fixtures), and era of manufacture — with Philips Hue and early heavy-metal-heatsink bulbs praised, cheap generics and even some name brands (GE, Osram) criticized. There's also a side debate about whether the article fairly addresses planned obsolescence vs. legitimate engineering trade-offs. **Sentiment:** 25% positive · 45% mixed · 30% skeptical **The case for** - Philips Hue bulbs are widely reported to last 7–10+ years with very low failure rates across dozens of bulbs. - Early LED bulbs with real metal heatsinks (circa 2012 L-Prize era) are still running after 10–15 years. - LEDs offer tunable color temperature and dimming features impossible with incandescent bulbs. - Running LEDs at 75% of rated current with proper cooling can extend lifespan to 10+ years. **The pushback** - Cheap and even mid-range LED bulbs (GE, Osram, generic brands) frequently fail within 1–2 years. - Modern bulbs from the same reputable brands are noticeably cheaper and less durable than older versions of the same brand. - Heat in enclosed fixtures is a major and underappreciated killer of LED bulbs that most consumers don't account for. - Filament-style LED bulbs are called universally unreliable due to poor thermal design. - The article is criticized for potentially soft-pedaling the planned/convenient obsolescence argument by focusing on engineering justifications. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters are split between those with excellent multi-year LED experiences (especially Philips Hue) and those frustrated by early failures, with nuanced discussion of heat, power quality, brand quality degradation over time, and the planned obsolescence debate. **Hottest debate:** Whether poor LED longevity is primarily the consumer's fault for buying cheap/incompatible bulbs, or reflects deliberate cost-cutting and convenient obsolescence by manufacturers. **Open questions** - Why do some users report Philips Hue failures within 2 years while others report near-zero failures over 8+ years with the same brand? - Why hasn't a standardized low-voltage (e.g., 24V DC) LED system with external drivers become mainstream for new construction? - Is there a reliable, independently tested source consumers can use to identify which LED bulbs actually meet their rated lifespans? - Have LED bulb quality and longevity genuinely declined as brands cut costs over the past decade? **Highlights** > > Maybe you're just buying cheap poor quality bulbs? If only that were true. Osram is a well-renowned brand so you'd think their - rather pricey - 'high-wattage' (10W) bulbs meant for outside lights here on the farm would last longer than about a year, all in different armatures, all with plenty of cooling (they're mainly used in autumn/winter/spring when it tends to be rather chilly here in Sweden). You'd think cheap bulbs go bad quickly but the cheap 'Biltema' brand bulbs I bought for some rooms just keep on going without marked loss of output. All in all the average life time of a LED bulb seems to be around 2-3 years before it either has dimmed so much that it is no longer usable or it has failed outright. There are exceptions like the mentioned cheap bulbs which are still going strong after about 9 years of close to daily use or those Osram bulbs which fail in about a year or less or the (not mentioned) 'fluorescent tube replacement fixtures' which last less than a year before one of the 4 LED segment strips fails due to a failed LED. I repair these by replacing the failed chip, they work for a few months and then the things fail again. I've used 'efficient' lighting since I bought my first house starting with jam-jar like Philips SL 'bulbs' (compact fluorescent tubes with all the related gizmos packaged in a single replaceable unit) for which I made fixtures out of birch plywood wood, 90° PVC drain pipe bends and E27 sockets because those things were heavy at about 500 grams. None of those SL bulbs had failed when I moved out 6 years later, I still have some somewhere in storage. Later I moved to the lighter PLC version which also tended to last a long time, some of them are still in use here. Then came LED bulbs which were supposed to last for tens of thousands of hours... and I suddenly started to have to think about replacing failed bulbs again. > — [hagbard\_c on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129510) > There's two separate issues where LEDs still have a hard time competing with incandescent bulbs: CRI (really R9 or other deep-red measures, because CRI stats are sort of gamed) and flicker. Most LED bulbs also have poor heatsinks and are more likely to die if kept inverted or in enclosed fixtures. All of these are individually solved problems, you just can't buy a bulb that's an e26 retrofit that satisfies all of them for whatever reason. If LED bulbs actually lasted 10 years, then there'd be 10 year warranties. Yet even the most expensive boutique LEDs (e.g. from YujiLED) are only 3 years at best. > — [krackers on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129443) > You can buy recessed LED cans with remote drivers. It’s not super common, but they exist in commercial installations. The largest LED drivers that I am familiar with are 24VDC/96w which is enough for (12) 8w recessed cans. Individual drivers per fixture allow flexibility with regards to commercial lighting control. The 0-10V dimming signal is sent to the driver, and if you have multiple fixtures per driver, they will all dim together. This behavior can be accomplished with individual LED drivers by wiring the dimming signal in parallel to each driver from the dimming module. Line voltage circuits can handle a lot of fixtures, particularly at 230V or 277V. A 277V 20A circuit can continuously power 554 8w recessed cans or 138 32w 2x4s on a single pair of #12/2.5mm^2 wire. Two of those circuits can power all of the lights in a 20,000 square foot office. > — [quickthrowman on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129949) > While the author mentions that they are not trying to defend the Phoebus cartel, I think they may inadvertently be somewhat misleading in their explanation. What they are saying is, from an engineering standpoint, true. But my understanding of the argument against the Phoebus cartel is that it was using legitimate engineering points as the official justification for profiteering business collusion: that the points were real, but were not the actual reasons for their decisions, or reasonable justification for the particular choices of values they enforced. In doing so, the article perhaps obscures the point that business collusion, I expect, is more often built around legitimate reasoning taken to illegitimate extents and conclusions, than around outright fabrications. > — [cge on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129932) > > Osram Pay attention to the European efficiency rating for LEDs. Anything above B is practically "Dubai LED" class. The common Osram isn't doing good in this category, their LEDs I have seen in retail are rated like E-F. To reiterate: the article fell short on the point of LED efficiency. LEDs are semiconductors, do you know when the CPU is at peak efficiency? Before it hits the exponential voltage/frequency curve. Low voltage -> cooler LEDs -> more efficient light conversion -> easier to cool -> tens of thousands hours of practical lifespan. What does it cost? Like less than a dollar in BOM. What does it cost us? Billions in replaced LEDs worldwide and megatonnes of electric waste, because it is not made to last for "objective reasons": lower price tag in storeshelves aka capitalism and oblivious consumers. > — [PinkSheep on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130056) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49121849) · 66 points · 213 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [LED Interior Lighting Could Compromise Human Visual Performance](https://daily.dev/posts/led-interior-lighting-could-compromise-human-visual-performance-foeb56mmp) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Modern projectors have a bigger problem than lamp life, and nobody's talking about it](https://daily.dev/posts/modern-projectors-have-a-bigger-problem-than-lamp-life-and-nobody-s-talking-about-it-wenj0v3aj) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright](https://daily.dev/posts/fiber-optic-lamp-modified-to-be-scarily-bright-g01yzvav5) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Discovery could lead to brighter, more energy-efficient digital displays](https://daily.dev/posts/discovery-could-lead-to-brighter-more-energy-efficient-digital-displays-7odymrk1z) · MIT News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The lamps in my house](https://daily.dev/posts/the-lamps-in-my-house-ay1jhwhgf) · Fatih Arslan · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#hardware](https://daily.dev/tags/hardware) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/you-have-been-mislead-about-lightbulbs-vkfwbnr9u) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"You have been mislead about lightbulbs","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/you-have-been-mislead-about-lightbulbs-vkfwbnr9u","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/you-have-been-mislead-about-lightbulbs-vkfwbnr9u"},"datePublished":"2026-07-31T03:24:42.588Z","dateModified":"2026-08-01T15:12:51.109Z","description":"The common narrative that the Phoebus cartel standardized lightbulb lifespans at 1,000 hours purely to drive repeat purchases is misleading. 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