Still burning after 35 years

These are the LED bulbs I got. Apparently 90+ CRI. No complaints from the family.

Edited to replace a picture.

FEIT also makes an LED household lamp with a built in small battery that gives 2 or 3 hours of use if the power fails.

I read somewhere (pre internet) that lightbulbs made in the communist bloc countries lasted for ages as there was no incentive to give them a shortened lifespan other than to give the workers in the Glorious Soviet Lightbulb Factory something to do.

Could be true, but Iā€™m pretty sure as time went on their quality of manufacturing degraded tremendously as well. As it is easily seen with Soviet era vehicles and weapons the earlier ones were well built with the good manufacturing and quality materials but several decades later the same vehicles/weapons were being made with poor quality materials and failed more often. No incentive works both ways, no incentive to keep producing top of the line products anymore :smiling_imp: .

Freezing pipes you say lol. It was 42 degrees Celsius here yesterday i am happy i changed most of light to LEDs less power usage and less heat. Most of the LED bulbs for sale here are 90+ CRI. I was probably one of the last people to change from incandescent to LEDS i didnā€™t like the CFL bulbs so i kept using the incandescent for a lot longer and the price of LEDs was to high. I have been able to get 1000+ lumen bulbs for under $5 on sale here. Bonus i also get more light output in a 60w socket before it would be around 800 lumen max now i have lights running 1400 lumens. Plus considering that incans may cost $3+ here and on sale comparable LEDS are $5 or $6 each its well worth the investment.

In my house incandescent dont last that long seeing as some lights stay on all night i have seen an improvement with LEDs in life spans.

Incandescent bulbs have advanced slightly they fill the bulbs with different gases to get better life spans and better wattage and use different filament materials.

Sums up how the heat has got me lol!

We have 8 can lights in our kitchen, they had 75 watt halogen bulbs in them when they were put in. They lasted about a year.
8 x 75=600 watts
8x 12=96 watts
so for a little more than one bulb we light the whole kitchen, and actually itā€™s brighter because the 12 watt bulbs I got put out more light than the halogen ones. the cost for the bulbs was about the same. The thing with LEDs is to get decent ones with good color. It is even more so than with flashlights. A lot of off brand ones have bad drivers and crummy leds and give some sort of bad light. Also they have been up there for about 4 years now with zero replacements. One has started to blink on occasion. So between the electricity and the $12 for the bulbs I figure I have saved at least $100 probably more. Of course these are the larger reflector bulbs. My choice had zero to do with any sort of government thing.

Replaced every light in the house last year when local power company partnered with Home Depot . Dropped the price to a buck a bulb .Never realized how many bulbs in a house . I think it was about 75 and I donā€™t have a overly large house. I guesstimate my bill dropped $10-$15 a month .

Weā€™ve done the same. Weā€™ve been in this house for 30+ years. The power bill is now for fewer kWh but more dollars. Pretty much everything that uses power has been replaced with more efficient units, but the cost per Kw has risen more.

Given the choice, I would rather a small electric bill and heat with piped natural gas, I realise not everyone has it but to go from gas>electricity>heat seems rediculous in my opinion when you can just burn gas>heat in a central heating system.

Oh DO NOT even get me started about the electric bills (LOL).

But my primary start to an LED shift was the ā€œLadderā€ lights in the house, in other words the 7 bulbs that require a ladder to change.
Then I swapped all the outdoors floodlights to LED which was cheaper to run AND almost twice as much light as before. I think about the farm I grew up in where we had a 90 watt incan by the back door and youā€™d turn it on and you could still barely see the barn out back so you still walked with a flashlight (Rayovac Sportsman anyone) As I get older and the eyes start to get weaker at night Iā€™m very VERY happy for the improvements in lighting!

Never used CFL's but swapped out quite a few LED bulbs until I discovered that the $1.50 leds from Walmart were the ones I should have been getting as they never seem to fail. All mine that failed in the past were the more expensive GE leds.

I definitely had a bad run of GE bulbs. The Feit ones Iā€™ve been using have all been great so far.

I had such a bad run with GE in general that I refuse to look at any product they have for sale.

Some time ago, it was possible to order online (earlier they were on store shelvesā€¦) Incan bulbs, that were 8,000h-12,000h rated.

I would assume that an 8,000h rated bulb would do pretty long as a night stand lamp, maybe not 35 years but pretty long anyway.

(They have a little worse lm/W ratio than normal incans and a bit more reddish tint. )

Not just the giant hassle of getting the ladder out, but there is always the chance of taking a spill

On the OPā€™s bulb, the touch lamp dimmer is why the bulb lasted so long. First, they always start from the lowest setting onwards, so you effectively have a soft-start for the bulb. Also, IIRC, those dimmers never run at full 100%, so the filaments never get overheated.

I still have 18 year old Panasonic CFLs in my bathroom (the covered sphere bulbs). These days they start off quite dim and take awhile to ramp up to full brightness, but I find that absolutely perfect for turning them on at night or first thing in the morning. I would replace them, but the energy difference between the CFLs and LEDs isnā€™t that great and at this point Iā€™ve become attached to them. To get the same function out of LEDs, Iā€™d have to install a programmable wall dimmer and use dimmable LEDs.

I also have an odd incandescent fixture/bulb thatā€™s still going. Itā€™s an aircraft warning light, like youā€™d find on top of a building. And thatā€™s exactly where it came from. As in, it was delivered to my back yard, still attached to a decent size of roof, by a hurricane. The roof segment was from a mid-rise condo about 1/2 mile away. I was quite amused by this and took a hack-saw to the conduit and was able to extract the fixture from the roof remnant. The red glass globe and incandescent bulb was still intact, so I had to see if itā€™d still light. Sure enough, it worked. And still works. Iā€™ve used it countless times to illuminate things backstage and itā€™s quite a conversation starter.

it is easy to make a long lasting light, if you make it very inefficient, a reddish orange color is a giveaway that this is happening

the ā€˜100 year edison bulbā€™ is like this, very dim orange

wle

The first thing I though of when I read the title of this thread was the tire fire on ā€œThe Simpsonsā€.

Even that got beat.

I still have some Phillips CFLs from the early days when they cost $30-ish apiece.

Itā€™s amazing to me how fast the world has changed.