Ten-Year Lightbulb

Being deep in commercial / industrial lighting, one of the key selling point is return on investment (ROI) and benefits of significant energy savings over multiple years. With LED lights, which additionally are equipped with Bluetooth Network Lighting Controls (NLC), these benefits are super obvious. The ROI, depending on where you live (=what are your electricity prices), is between one and three years. Then everything that comes after are your savings. Not counting the better light quality.

And while nobody expects even a modern light fixture to last forever, a ten-year lifetime is something naturally assumed. Warranty periods for industrial light fixtures are also somewhere between five and ten years. And it would not be a surprise if they lasted much longer. And they do. After all it is all solid-state, no burning tungsten wire in a glass bulb.

Enter consumer lighting products (typically: LED light bulbs) and the situation is entirely different. Light bulbs struggle to live even through their one or two year warranty period. They start to flicker then go on and off and then do not turn on at all. And I am not talking about no-name generic bulbs. I have personally gone through a number of different form factor products from leading lighting brands and they all share the same unreliability issues. Working from two months to a year and then - flicker, on/off flashing and finally darkness.

The worst thing here is - the CFLs are banned, as are the incandescent bulbs. And consumer LEDs, while being expensive, break faster than the old true "bulbs" with burning tungsten wire inside. There certainly are some designs / modes which do last long. I still have the original Philips HUE set I bought back in 2012 and they do not show any signs of ageing. As you would expect from good solid state lighting products. But then I have this big "electronic waste" bin full of light bulbs which died in a matter of months.

I'm not an expert in design / longevity of lighting products. As the commercial / industrial market shows, LED longevity is not an unsolvable problem. But probably the profits from pushing very short living (and perhaps price-competitive) products into consumer's hands are much higher than making long lasting (and consequently more expensive) ones. In the end, unless you are Apple, it is super hard to sell a more expensive product which - by the initial looks - is identical to the more expensive ones.