8 years ago
1
For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that's coming to LED bulbs.
In 1924, representatives of the world's leading lightbulb manufacturers formed Phoebus, a cartel that fixed the average life of an incandescent bulb at 1,000 hours, ensuring that people would have to regularly buy bulbs and keep the manufacturers in business. But hardware store LED bulbs have a typical duty-cycle of 25,000 hours -- meaning that the average American household will only have to buy new bulbs ever 42 years or so.
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I've replaced probably 75% of the bulbs in my house with LEDs. Of those, I think 3 have failed...which is a ridiculously high failure rate. So far returning them without a receipt hasn't been an issue because the one time the cust svc person said anything, I said, "Look at the package- "5 year guarantee", they have not been out in the marketplace for 5 years, so it has to still be under warranty" and they exchanged it for me.
Planned obsolescence is just about the epitome of greed. Making sure an item fails so that people have to buy another one. Capitalists are greedy, selfish scum.