this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
163 points (90.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36183 readers
1127 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?

I've bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said "up to 20,000 hours" which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don't).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] NerfHerder@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Just Google "how to increase my fire risk to save $2 on a new LED". Should be a how to guide or two out there.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Some people like tinkering. Big Clive has a series of videos on Dubai led bulbs. The government mandates that the bulbs be extra efficient and last extra long, so they are built with more filaments driven at a lower current. They run cooler and last longer. You can do a similar thing with American bulbs if you're handy with a soldering iron.

Honestly, with how poor many of these things are mass produced, opening them up yourself is practically a personal form of quality control. Whether you modify it or not I bet it's less likely to die prematurely or burn your house down than those of a regular person who doesn't open them 🤷‍♂️

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No, shorting a dead LED in a series chain of 10-20 will NOT burn your house down, it's barely a difference to the driving circuit. Unless you're buying knockoffs, there is a fuse in the base that will blow at like 0.5 A, no matter what you do to the circuitry. However, the other chips will likely not last much longer than the first dead one (unless you dooby the bulb, see below), so it's not worth doing, and a poorly reattached plastic globe can come off and expose mains voltage. If all chips are OK, you can cut it open to check the inductor between smoothing capacitors and replace it if it has failed open circuit, or short it if you accept a little extra flicker and/or electrical noise.

I've seen power supply boards of LED bulbs that literally burned themselves down to the crisp (never in ones that I modded) but the housing contained the fire thanks to its heat-dissipating design.

In many bulbs, you can adjust the value of a current-sensing resistor (usually one or two in parallel, about 2-30 Ω) to make your own "Dooby" lamp with lower power and way longer life. Of course, you need to know something about electronics.

What can burn your house down is still using incandescent and halogen bulbs. You may lay a piece of paper on top of a lamp and it can fall in when moved by the hot air, touching the bulb...

[–] tired_n_bored@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Well I've done it just twice, I don't even remember what I did, I just soldered things that seemed broken.

I'm not al electrical engineer whatsoever but the heat unglued the cover of the bulb exposing the circuits so I was like "lemme try"