Do LED bulbs protect incandescent bulbs?
Thoroughly random and probably invalid thought.

I sternly resisted the replacement of incandescents by CFLs because it was done by official force. Incandescents were STOLEN and replaced by poison pods that could kill you.

I don't have a problem with efficiency and energy-saving, as long as it's not commanded at gunpoint. So when LED bulbs came down to a reasonable price (and claimed to be at least partly American-made) I bought two of them. Their real appeal for an old coot is not the slight increase in efficiency but the huge decrease in replacement. As I get older, the process of standing on a chair, taking off delicate glass shades and unscrewing bulbs becomes more accident-prone.

I bought them in March, seven months ago. One LED went in the kitchen and one in the living room ceiling fixture.

Here's the odd part: Since March I haven't needed to replace any bulbs at all. One incandescent is still in the living-room fixture along with the LED, because the LED is directional and the incandescent 'fills out' the room. Previously, the bulbs in that fixture needed replacing every 3 months or so, because it's on 16 hrs/day. Another incandescent in a lamp at the other end of the living room also needed replacing every 4 months, because that lamp is my 'night light'. By now I should have replaced each of those bulbs at least once.



The separate 'night-light' lamp has to be just an unrelated statistical stretch; it's only on when the LEDs are off. But I can imagine a ballast-like action for the incandescent that shares a socket with the LED. Maybe the LED is surging before the incandescent starts to draw current, dropping the voltage briefly.

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Update Jan 6, 2014: Still no replacement. That's 9 months for a pair of bulbs that typically lasted 3 or 4 months before the LEDs were added to the mix.

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Update May 17, 2014: The 40-w bulb that shares a socket with the LED finally burned out today. That's 14 months, turned on 16 hrs/day, totalling about 7000 hours. The desk lamp 40 still hasn't failed.

Update Oct 25: the bulb that shares with LED burned again. 5 months, back to the old pattern. So the hypothesis is also burned out. I just happened to install two extremely good bulbs at about the same time that I switched to the LED!

Labels: coot-proofing, Danbo

  ¶ 6:04 AM