I was taken aback by how few of the fans had replaceable lightbulbs! In the entire store there were maybe three or four options with a replaceable bulb!
Call me crazy, but a nonreplaceable LED is a complete dealbreaker. I go through so many LED bulbs! I don't know if my electricity is like particularly bad or if that's just normal? The first LED bulb I ever bought (Shout out EarthLED) in 2008 for like $30 is still going strong, but every bulb I buy these days lasts like two years tops.
Anyway, we did not buy a fan.
Lights with non-replaceable bulbs can actually be far better, because they can be designed for their environment. Recessed downlights with built-in LEDs for example can thermally couple the LEDs directly to the metal housing, so the heat can be dissipated into the surrounding air, instead of into the recess.
The only place where this doesn’t happen is in the country of Dubai. Because of national law, lightbulbs sold there are required to have very long lifespans. That’s why there is a world-wide grey market business for taking existing LED lightbulbs apart, snipping off a resistor so that they pull about half the amperage and then putting them back together, and suddenly their lifespan is increased by 10-100x. This is called a “doobie”, after the name of the country. Check out “bigclivedotcom” on YouTube if you want to see this in action.
You will notice this if you buy Philips Ultra Definition bulbs in Dubai, versus the same bulbs sold at the same amount of lumen output from the UK or elsewhere in the world. The “doobie” version has twice as many LED filaments inside, compared to the UK version. Same price, way different life span. Philips is one of the better manufacturers of lightbulbs, and nowhere remotely close to the only one doing this.
With regards to LED light fixtures (ones that don’t allow you to screw in your own bulb), most manufacturers do the same thing. They’re designed to fail early. Who wants light fixture styling that is fifty years old, just because the LED lights inside haven’t failed yet? They want to make you buy new fixtures every couple of years, just like they do for bulbs.
Yes, there are exceptions in both cases. But they are the rare exceptions, not the rule. And if you haven’t studied up on the Phoebus Cartel, you can start with the article on Wikipedia.
Dubai isn't a country. It's a city in the United Arab Emirates.
The Dubai bulb isn't some trick Big Lightbulb doesn't want you to know about, it's an engineering tradeoff: lower current on more filaments gives you higher efficiency and lower temperature but at higher cost and with substantially lower light quality (CRI).
You'll find that after EU energy labeling, there are products available to European consumers that well exceed the specifications of the "Dubai" bulbs. Look for EU energy class A. They often come with a 5-year warranty and rated lifespan of 50000 hours. The "Dubai" bulbs were rated for 25000 hours. You'll also find though that they're substantially more expensive and usually don't have a CRI above 90.
Regarding planned obsolescence, in many cases I can believe that a product will fail earlier than it would if designed for longevity. Rather than planned obsolescence, I believe this is simply a result of being cheap, a consequence of the race to the bottom. If you're buying cheap Chinese fixtures for $10, or cheap Chinese bulbs for $2, you're not going to get a high-quality, long-lasting product.
If you want products that last a long time, buy them and use them properly. If you want bright lights, make sure they're adequately cooled. Consider buying lower-voltage fixtures and bulbs so that you can have a separate power supply and don't put the full ~230V to ~3V conversion in a tiny space.
There was one time I bought some cheap ones from Amazon, and several of them failed within a few months. There was also an LED bulb in the front porch light (so, outside) that lasted around 10 years, despite being outside and used daily. I had several of that same type and that particular one lasted longer than all of the others, where the others were all inside and not installed upside down. So yeah, it varies.
Regardless of all of that frustration, thank the gods we no longer have to deal with CFL
As far as I'm aware, we've got comparable bulbs available in Canada. We've got the Philips 95 CRI ultra definition bulbs and the ultra efficiency bulbs.
The UltraEfficient bulbs seem better-specced than the Dubai bulbs - the standard A19 of the latter is specced for 6W/600 lumen/25k hours at 80 CRI, while the bulbs I can buy at the drug store here are specced for 5W/810 lumen/50k hours at 80 CRI.
I also have Nanoleafs that I have had for about six years and so far no issues. They run for about 12 hours a day on most days.
I am in BC,CA. I gotta take apart my lights and see what they are.
That is abnormal compared to my experience. I have a lot of bulbs in my house between recessed lights, fixtures and lamps, probably 150-200 in total, and in the 5 years I've been in this house I've had, I think, 3 bulbs in total fail.
There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.
There absolutely is. If you have a fan with a light controlled by separate wall switches, you have two hots running to the fixture. Take one, and leave it unswitched always on to the fixture, and use the second switch (or fan controller) and use it as an input to the controller on the fan. Done.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen this implemented anywhere.
This message brought to you by the hours I've spent annoyed by exactly this misfeature in our new bedroom fan. Fanimation does sell a wall mounted remote that can be wired inline with a switch, so at least there's a single point for master power and a remote you can't lose. Unfortunately, there's a noticeable delay between flipping the switch and the light turning on.
I went through this pain when I bought ceiling fans a few years ago. Various manufacturers offer switches or remotes you can attach to the wall but that take batteries - the options for actual wired switches are slim. I ended up with a few hardwired Big Ass Fans wall controllers that work pretty well - but their current-gen wall controls are hardwired bluetooth remotes, which is subpar for something that's connected via wire. (And they cost $210/each, which is pretty egregious for a wall switch.)
What?
Every house I've ever lived in over my many decades of life has had ceiling fans. I've never known one to fail, never known one to be noisy, and never known one to have inadequate power. I've personally installed a couple and know those got wired straight into AC mains power... so unless they have a converter built in, I figure that every ceiling fan I've ever lived with has been AC powered.
Unless you've been working with absolute bottom of the barrel fans (and those fans are worse than I could possibly imagine), this smells like industry propaganda to me.
> There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.
OP is asking for a normal pull chain or switch... one that's attached to the fan housing, not some doodad that's embedded in the wall and needs to be specially wired into the fan electrics. I've been to the houses of a few friends that have had fans controlled with a handheld wireless controller, and I can confirm that that was -overall- way worse than hauling my ass up to pull a damn chain.
It might be that POE power supplies get hot - I've noticed the POE hats for the raspberry pi need a fan
I’ve looked at a product called Bond that seems to facilitate it. But haven’t yet tried it.
I tried changing channels in the remote but that didn't seem to help much. With the second neighbor, the fans were in my living room and their bedroom. We agreed to control fans in shifts (I turned mine off at night).
It's hard to believe it's just a very unlikely coincidence. Maybe the channels are too few or narrow to be useful? How hard would it be to implement some psuedo-UID?
Are you mad? That would cost low-single-digit pennies per unit!!! </pennypinching_bigco_derision>
Things drawing an average of a few hundred microamps while the fan is running. Probably because it's blasting a keep alive packet once a second or so. It does that because a transceiver costs an extra 50 cents.
I wish it caught on to have LED lights powered by a barrel jack DC plug like you have for most electronics. It would be a huge win for longevity. Sure it's not backwards compatible with fixtures designed for light bulbs, but the cases we're discussing here are complete light fixture replacements anyways... The fixture could have a barrel plug that you connect to an inexpensive commodity DC power brick which you then hide away in the ceiling.
I bought some high CRI LED bulbs from some place recommended in an HN post.
It also prevents the user from changing the bulb if they want a different color temperature or better CRI. Most of the built-in lights I see are in the 3000-3500K range, which is cooler the warm white I’ve chosen for the house. If I could swap the bulb it would be an easy fix, but if it’s built in then I’m stuck with it.
A high CRI single color temperature bulb beats them in light quality.
Most people aren’t going to notice, but if you’ve done any work with color, lighting, or photography then the average consumer LED lights feel terrible. They’re mostly blue light with a little bit of other colors to make them appear white to the eye.
"LED bulbs" die because they have to rectify 110VAC (hot) into LEDs (hot) into an enclosure that was designed for incandescents.
In a proper enclosure, with cooling (it's a fan), they will actually live their fully-stated lifetime - assuming the fan's upstream power supply makes it.
A recessed can or “upside down” ceiling fan globe with an open bottom is technically an enclosed fixture since heat rises.
Typically fans with built-in LED downlights are engineered to actually dissipate heat - and they have a much larger area to do it in. Edison-format bulbs are inherently space-constrained.
But in an "old school" hardware, you'd then replace the bulb and get a new "lifetime" out of it, here you have to throw everything away.
An AC motor has basically nothing inside that can fail (maybe the capactitor, but that can be replaced), and can work for a hundred years and more if properly maintained (mostly cleaned).
On average ~6 hours per day (living room with night owls living there), is ~2000 hours per year... 5 years at 10.000hours expected lifetime for the leds, 10 if the stated lifetime is 20k hours... that's not really that long.
Lightbulbs came in sockets because they were meant to fail. First by accident, later intentionally. They were also quite breakable because they were made of glass. LED lights don't have these problems unless they're designed to. Which is the meta-problem - how do you know which ones are planned obsolete?
Forcing an LED system into a lightbulb from factor has quality and cost implications though. A good LED light has a separate power brick inside the enclosure. Which is what you see in these fan lights.
I would hope that at least some of this would get standardized over time
Let me know how the non-replaceable sealed bearing packs in these AC or DC fans fare after 10,000 hours.
In a proper/high-end DC fan, the bearings are failing before any motors or LEDs.
Regardless, in a Big Ass Fans Haiku, the downlight is a completely separate/replaceable module - and it isn't going to fail before the bearings or motor.
Edison screw LED bulbs are the inferior design by every objective measure.
...your AC-powered ceiling fans are failing (or even "just" substantially degrading) after a little under fourteen months? What garbage are you buying?
I’m under the impression at this point that they just do not do well inside can lights. I honestly don’t think the average lifespan is much higher than incandescent in that scenario.
This 120v-using USian has had many fail, and if they don't fail by intermittently blinking and flickering [0], they fail by slowly giving me worse and worse and worse headaches [1]. Unless you choose to count the fact that they were technically still emitting light, I've never gotten the rated lifetime out of a screw-in LED bulb.
[0] ...as all of the ACE Hardware ones did...
[1] ...as all of the dimmable [2] CREE ones did...
[2] These were never attached to a dimmer. At the time, the advice was to get LED bulbs rated for use in a dimmer, as it was believed that that would get you higher-quality construction.
Me - I have the exact same bulbs in my off grid property, and in my on-grid property. On grid, it's about 18 months MTBF. Off grid - it's been seven years and I haven't had to replace a single bulb yet. On-grid our power is anywhere between 205 and 235v, often has spikes up to 260+, and has like 99% uptime. Off grid, it's 230v, day in, day out. Grid power is terrible in most places.
I have this issue as well, of burning thru LED lights.
And of course complains.
But they are technologically informed complaints.
What a testament to the manufacturing advances that have made it profitable to cater to every possible taste, budget, and architectural layout. It’s incredible actually.
This is why my "fancy" lighting fixture is an old track (whose proprietary lights died a long time ago) wrapped with an extension cable with 5 standard sockets on it, and some standard light bulbs in it. We dress it up with ribbons and stuff for the seasons. It doesn't look as nice as any of the things in that article, not even the gaudy and tasteless ones, but when a bulb burn out, I put a new one in and get on with life, I don't throw out an entire fan and buy a new one.
I'm old enough to remember when I was promised LEDs would last approximately forever without having to be replaced.
Don’t waste your time or eyeballs with “driverless” devices. Get a chip-on-board LED, e.g. Bridgelux’s products, along with a matching driver (I like Luminus Devices’ small drivers - they have good startup and dimming behavior).
Aside from usual electrical safety, anyone designing what is effectively a luminaire needs to make sure that the driver matches the LED and that the driver is compatible with the dimmer in use. Matching the LED means that the driver produces an amount of current that that LED’s datasheet data is acceptable and that produces the amount of light that is desired and dissipates an amount of heat that can be managed. And that the LED’s voltage drop at the design current is in range for the driver. These LEDs are constant current devices, so you’re thinking about current first and voltage second. Read the datasheets!
Unfortunately many cheap luminaires are based on modules that are either driverless LEDs (which are terrible due to essentially unavoidable flicker and lack of regulation) or are line-voltage-supplied integrated devices. These are likely to be hard-to-find modules. There may not be room for a discrete driver and separate LED.
In either case, learn to do hot air rework?
Replacing a bulb is a trip to my stash of bulbs in the laundry room, then throwing the old one in the trash.
I don't have time in my life for a fan with non-replaceable bulbs.
Fixing an LED fixture is within my wheelhouse. I can repair them.
I just don't want to.
It seems like a much better use of my time and money to just screw in a different light bulb and forget about it.
But then, the problem is, it depends on the specific fixture. They aren't exactly putting "EASY TO REPLACE LEDS" on the box. I can't climb up to the store display model and start hacking away at it to see if I can get to the LEDs, replace them, and reassemble it correctly.
What I saw last time I was in a store where the fixtures were on eye level looked like a lot of glue, one-way tabs, and LED strips of unknown and custom provenance were being used. I'm not really looking for this sort of experience in a lighting fixture. YMMV and more power to you.
Yep, I remember that when Obama banned most incandescent lights because 'LED lighting is the future and 100 year lifespans blabla'.
Mind you, we used CFLs in the warm season, and incandescent in cold seasons. Incandescents are 100% efficient in cold seasons (heater AND light).
As much as I deign to admit, Trump reversed Obama's ban. And Biden reinstated it. I don't think Trump reversed Biden's reinstatement though. He's been way too busy with wrecking the country for shits and giggles.
But what the LED manufacturers figured out is they could overdrive LEDs and use substandard electronics for driving them. So sure, LEDs are more efficient, but they're the same old burnout cycle that's forced on us.
And we know all of this by the fact that Phillips makes "Dubai Lamps", and you can't buy them at any price. https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
That's resistive heating, which is the most inefficient means of heating. Worse than natural gas or heating oil, and much worse than a heat pump.
Worse than a heat pump, yes, but very arguable whether NG is more efficient. Arguably, NG powering central electric power generation and then used for resistive would be overall more efficient. Central NG will be more efficient and also there’s substantially less opportunity for NG leakage if piping was reduced.
NG is definitely cheaper (at least in the US), but that’s not really related to efficiency or emissions cost.
Also, if you’re in the electric ecosystem, swapping to heat pump systems will obviously be lower overall power in basically every scenario, and it gives an easy transition path unlike NG.
I will say I've had a number of Hue bulbs starting back in about 2018 and have yet to lose one except for a surge that got an unprotected strip. Otherwise, plenty of white and color bulbs have worked steadfast for nearly a decade while costing a fraction in energy. That said, I do miss the warmth of incandescent lighting, but I don't miss replacing bulbs multiple times a year
Except "traditional" it seems.
> In the sky a huge sign appeared, replacing the catalogue number. It said, Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We are not proud.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
All of the stuff available is basically a mix of the elements the author puts on his 8 images on the beginning of the article. Where only 2 of them have fans that can actually vent a room.
So, a ducted fan! That would be a sensible and practical design if your ceiling needed extra thrust for takeoff.
Cheap and stupid goods with threatening auras, indeed. Possibly a step up from the 90s when it was cheap and stupid goods with a Memphis Group primary school aesthetic. Hard to choose.
I had to look that up and found some pretty cool articles. I like that the vapourwave trend from the 2010s created a lot of focus on the different aesthetics of software and everyday things on the internet.
The latter two links are from a dedicated "aesthetics wiki". I tend to like the detailed user-created content on fandom.com wikis, but I loathe the site itself. At least a lot of the fan wikis have moved to wiki.gg, which has a much less intrusive design (speaking of aesthetics).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Group
Before they die, the Maitlands lovingly restore their Connecticut Victorian home and even keep a model of the whole town up in their attic, as if capturing for themselves a bit of the town's bucolic New England charm. When they die, the Dietzes move in, and Delia declares psychotically, "I'll go crazy if you don't let me remodel this house!" With help from the obnoxious Otho she strips away the traditional Victorian trappings and turns the house into a modernist, Memphis-inspired nightmare, forcing the Maitlands to watch in horror as their hard work is destroyed (that is until they summon the title character). In keeping with the movie's structure as a "reverse ghost story" in which the ghosts are nice and the living humans are the horror.
Personally I find Memphis fascinating (though I wouldn't want to live there). I especially appreciate its influence on the design language of Sonic the Hedgehog games, as a complement to the greater variety of slopes, gradients, and curved ramps the early games afforded, to showcase the greater capabilities of the Sega Genesis. (That's really entirely why Sonic exists; some guys at Sega played Mario 3 and figured that they could "do Mario, but better".)
They certainly can, with the right tools. A bag of bulk LEDs imported from China is surprisingly cheap.
Imagine clear blades with each blade displaying cat hairballs spread out on the edges, spinning them above your head. It will harass you, give ammo to your in-laws to harass you, create marital strife (when are you going to clean that?) and then death as you fall off the ladder and break your neck on the coffee table, despite surviving four frontline deployments...
I recommend the author to go and talk to a few women. It's a very demanding request, but I insist on it. Once he understands and internalizes the logic of "my shoes are uncomfortable but they fit my purse", he'll be able to:
1. Understand that different designs have different proportions of practicality and looks, because different customers can have different expectations. I know it's hard to believe, but there are places on Earth besides Arizona, and in some places you only need to turn on the fan once a year gently, all the other days it just hangs there and is visible. Just like a woman won't be putting hiking shoes for an event where she's sitting by the table all day long (men tend to do that).
2. See the concept of "style". It might sound like an outrageous claim, but bear with me: different people like different things! Just because author doesn't like particular design, it doesn't mean that the design is objectively ugly. Shocking, I know. Different people want to build different vibes in their rooms, which is why we have a variety of designs, fitting different styles.
If the author can stomach the idea that there is life outside of Arizona, I'll try an even more radical idea: China exists. Like, really. 1 billion people that aren't Americans. They don't speak English. They don't use Latin alphabet - they actually don't use an alphabet at all! They don't say "Hello, how are you? I'm good, thank you, what about you?". I'd really love the author to spend a few minutes to imagine that. Because my argument is that, even though I have little proof of it, the Chinese might enjoy different ways of having the product presented, and the author is bitching about seeing marketing that was designed by and for the Chinese audiences.
Many times I pass by an ad and I think to myself, "This ad obviously targets American customers but I'm in Europe. Do Americans really think that their culture is the default, universal culture that joins all of humanity?".
LEDs integrated into fans are the worst idea. If they're not bright enough, you're hosed. You generally can't change the color. Just stick to proven fixtures, and let me put my own choice of bulbs in it!
The other problem is just how houses/apartments are designed in the US. You should always have a separate wall switch for fan and lights! Why they couple the two - I can't fathom.
LED retrofit bulbs (Edison screws) are just shit no matter what - your choice will basically almost always be inferior to something that can be integrated into a fan by virtue of the technology.
Down-facing light from ceiling fans is also just bad, even on a $2000 Big Ass Fans Haiku. Central-point overhead lighting is displeasing.
And how many of them can I control with SmartThings, etc?
With my own bulbs, I can have it how I want it. I pick the fan based on the fan's capabilities, and not worry about the light.
> Central-point overhead lighting is displeasing.
No arguments there, but most houses/apartments in the US are built in this brain dead way. When I lived abroad, it was much better. The lights were always on the walls - often opposing walls. This way, light is coming more at an angle downwards, and you can position chairs/beds/couches such that the light is behind you, and if you're reading a book, the pages are being lit up by it.
Replace the entire LED base with a brighter one if you need more lumens. If you do the same with a standard e26 or candelabra bulb setup, you’ll have the exact same issue with bulb longevity. Brighter bulbs stuffed into the tiny enclosures will absolutely cook.
I went to Wayfair and searched ceiling fans and holy moly this space has changed! I thought to myself, "I don't see these when walking through my local bigbox hardware store?" So I went to Lowe's website and fandeliers are an entire category now.
Don’t buy any of these junk fans. Get a normal looking fan, with a quiet DC motor, that takes standard light bulbs with a medium base (e26 in the USA).
Skip modern AC motors, nobody today can seem to build one that doesn’t whomp when it runs. Older AC motors weren’t so cheaply made and don’t usually suffer this problem.
If you have an older fan 25+ years old, you can often rebuild them and end up with a better fan than anything you can buy today.
If you’re building a new house (or doing a rewire) put two light switches in every bedroom, one for the fan the other for the light kit.
If you’re getting a fan with a remote, get one that will let you change the spin direction from the remote.
Get the correct size fan for the room.
Friends don’t let friends buy Hunter Fans, they are all hot garbage. Though they do follow through with their warranties.
I refuse to own a home built after ~2015 due to this and other factors. Electricity on my kitchen island, toilets that can flush human sized shits, and proper lighting fixtures are non-negotiable for me.
Cooper makes the HALO RL series LED can retrofit modules that can be had for $30 with adjustable color temp and dimming capable, with a five-year warranty.
I suggest only buying enclosed rated fixture lamps because they put out less heat and will last longer in an open or enclosed fixture.
1. Almost all are "appified", aka proprietary crappy BT protocol with required corporate spy/app.
2. Non-replaceable LEDs means burnout = e-waste.
3. LEDs are overdriven meaning they're intentionally ran to burn out sooner.
4. Many of the "fans" are indeed blades on a motor. For they blow? Nope. But they do indeed suck.
5. Many are just hideous and garish pieces of garbage. But "in matters of taste, the customer is always right".
Meanwhile, making products for the tasteless: $$$