When I read the headline, I thought the article was about fans (and the attached lights) that mysteriously turn themselves on without the owner doing anything.
This happened to us, and the people we bought the house from had actually bought (but not installed) a new controller. Turned out the problem wasn't the controller at all. Rather, all the houses on the street had been built at the same time by the same company, and most (maybe all) had ceiling fans that came with a remote. Inside the remote and inside the fan was a DIP-switch consisting of four switches, each switch labeled with a 0 and a 1 depending on which way you pushed it. And all probably came from the factory with a 0000 setting.
You guessed it: while ordinarily the controller had a limited range, sometimes (windows open? controller pointed in a certain direction? I don't know) one neighbor's controller would activate someone else's fan. The solution was of course simple: set the DIP switch in our fan and controller to some other setting, like 0101. Since I did that, the poltergeist has been unable to operate our ceiling fans.
That's because what people recognize as LLM slop is mostly high-quality writing in places you don't expect to find one. LLMs write better than vast majority of people at this point.
But also no, they weren't that good in 2024, which is another reason to recognize it's not LLM slop.
It is concerning how quickly people jump to call something AI just so they can dismiss it, but I have noticed there's an insane amount of things that are absolutely not AI slop, maybe a random image is, but the rest of the article looks fine, maybe an LLM helped to fix typos and grammar? (How I use it is I ask it what to fix, then page it again, until I'm satisfied, then I ask what to remove, and so on).
I have AI blind hate fatigue.
Edit:
Heck, a year or two ago, someone accused me of being an LLM here on HN, sir, English is just my second language, I sometimes fumble it organically, thank you very much, I also have a touch of ADD.
I don't use LLMs for my comments, I write the dumbest things I think of and eat the downvotes, I make it a point that if I'm posting comments or writing a blog post, an LLM is only going to tell me suggestions on what to tweak, but for the most part I post raw if its just a comment on a forum.
More like getting downvoted for equating vapid GlobalHomo(TM) megacorp press release/blog post nothingness with "better".
AI is great at saying nothing specific really flamboyantly or juicing up very little substance with a whole bunch of that sort of puffery that's endemic to corporate communication. It is very bad at the subtle pairing of tone and diction with subject matter and audience that humans just do naturally.
Don't thing vapid corporate press release. Think besteller novels and novelists writing essays, think professors of liberal arts showing off their rich vocabulary and ability to bend grammar to their will.
That's the kind of language style LLMs picked on (recent attempts to make their writing more common-people, particularly Claude, notwithstanding), and the jarring/sloppy part is mostly just that you don't expect to see this kind of language in a bug report or commit description or design draft. If you got such response from a person in such context, you'd accuse them of showing off and making communication difficult. But it's not bad English - it's too good English for context.
The story does seem suspicious to me. He said he encountered 98% packet loss when pinging websites, but that means he has sent at least 50 pings. Default ping only does 5. Even if you increase the count, after 20 lost packages wouldn't you have decided the connection isn't up?
Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi. I find it hard to believe that a networking engineer and his son that's also an engineer use the incorrect term?
Depends on the OS. Linux and macOS ping will keep pinging until you ctrl+c. Windows ping
I guess is what you're talking about? Even then, I assume Windows ping has a command-line option to change the default number of pings.
> Even if you increase the count, after 20 lost packages wouldn't you have decided the connection isn't up?
Maybe not? It feels like you're just trying to come up with random excuses as to why this isn't real.
> Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi.
The connection to their house is a point-to-point line-of-sight WiFi link between the house and the author's father's office building.
I've definitely left ping running for hundreds or thousands of pings. That's partly how my roommate eventually diagnosed this weird issue where our wifi would drop packets (or have really highly increased latency) on a suspiciously regular cadence. You could easily see the pattern in the pings once the tool ran for a while. It turned out to be a firmware issue with our router, but we would not have thought too look at that if we hadn't seen the pattern of connection issues.
I’m just going to say your comment re: ping makes 0 sense to me. I sometimes leave ping running in the background for hours to find patterns in connectivity issues.
Re: your other comment. When my dad has problems with the internet, he will say the wifi is not working. And this isn’t incorrect, even if the source of the issue is not happening between the router and his device. Sure, the underlying issue may be something else. But by that logic putting anything but the final root cause in the title would be misleading or “real network engineers wouldn’t do that”, but I would argue that would just be bad storytelling..
My old door bell was a similar design. The problem is going to be to find a neighborhood with a high enough concentration of the same model for it to be entertaining.
This happened in our apartment building too. Eventually we diagnosed this as the root cause but there were many nights when I woke up to a flickering light and my neighbors and I had a good laugh after fixing it.
I installed new ceiling fans in my house. Everything was fine for about a year until one fan kept turning off randomly or the light would come on. It wasn't on the default setting but it was on like the second or third option in the dip switches. The fan controller died about a couple weeks later so I was never sure if it was just acting up or it's death was a coincidence. A new controller was incompatible with the old remote so never had an issue again.
If you live in a 2-d neighborhood the "four color theorem" proves you only need four codes to not share a code with a neighbor, assuming perfect information.
The wikipedia article for the four color theorm discusses higher dimensional life like being in a 3-d apartment building. If you live in a Klein bottle you got other problems beyond ceiling fans.
My wife and I were out recently looking at ceiling fans to replace the one in our dining room, which has committed no crimes, other than having the appearance of being very much from the 1980s.
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.
When an LED bulb dies, it's typically not the LED, it's the electronics driving it. This is worsened substantially by heat. If you have recessed downlights or something, that's close to worst-case for an LED bulb.
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.
Maybe in theory. In practice, the Phoebus Cartel was a real thing, and they limited lightbulb lifespans, worldwide. The same thing exists today, albeit more because companies that sell lightbulbs want to keep selling them, instead of putting themselves out of business. So, many LED lightbulbs are intentionally designed to fail early.
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.
I'm well aware of the Phoebus Cartel. It's not as straightforward as often reported. Have a look at Technology Connections: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY
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.
> Dubai isn't a country. It's a city in the United Arab Emirates.
I learned recently that Dubai is also the name of the emirate. I don’t have a good understanding of the UAE governmental structure, but the Emirates do seem to have their own governments. Maybe it can be thought of as a country in the same way Scotland can be thought of as a country.
The United Arab Emirates is a federal state, like the US or Canada (and notably not like the UK--Scotland is a devolved component of a unitary state, not a member of a federal state). The Emirate of Dubai is thus most closely analogized to a US state or a Canadian province, though I'm not entirely sure off-hand how the power of a UAE Emirate compares to federal subjects in the countries whose politics I'm more familiar with.
Also, Dubai is effectively a city-state, as the vast majority of the population of the Emirate lives in the city itself.
Biggest problem of leds is we have no good standards. Classic screw in bulb makes no sense with LEDs. Other formats usually mean you are screwed when you have to replace. So far LED strips seem the best way. A bit of soldering but you can replace them by parts.
Screw in bulbs make plenty of sense. You are not going to get people to convert to LEDs by forcing them to replace every single fixture in their home. That would be ridiculousmaxxing.
It would be nice to have an updated standard for newer buildings, though. In practice fewer and fewer fittings are using screw-in lightbulbs at all but there's not another standard.
What happens when something does go wrong though? Now, you have to replace the entire thing instead of just simply replacing a bulb. If only we had some other previous existing examples of fancy tech that used non-replaceable parts requiring a full replacement...
The lightbulb that you're throwing away also contains all the same electronics that a larger light fixture does, just in a smaller and less thermally efficient space.
Mounting options that allow larger LED lights allow you to use lights that are more thermally efficient without sacrificing any replaceability. JIS C 8310 mounts for example.
I think they're suggesting a lightbulb equivalent of going from USB-A connectors to USB-C. Replaceable bulbs in sockets that are just as easy to use, but with a smaller profile.
The problem is going from mains voltage to 3.3v means some sort of waste heat. Rewiring the whole house to 12v is one idea I've seen, but again, total house rewire and fixture replacement. In the mean time, it's A9 bulbs with LED electronics going from 120v to 3.3v generating heat. Making cheap electronics means that heat will kill the electronics. Making good electronics at a higher retail price is the solution, but consumers are not educated enough so all they see is sticker shock.
Your comparison of USB-A to USB-C is nonsensical and does not actually acknowledge the issue of why the existing screw in bulb direct replacement have issues
Screw-in sockets are more durable and long-lasting than any replacement so-far, most of which have been replaced again (remember those weird fluorescent mini-bulb sockets?).
12V is too high for your LEDs, you still have the power supply. 12 volts is not near enough voltage for a house. You can get around it with very big wires but copper is extremely expensive. Even in cars, 12 volts is borderline. Trucks are fairly often go to 24 or higher voltage because even at the size of a large truck (semi), higher voltage is an advantage.
Well, we can certainly argue with 110 or 220 is a better voltage for a house. It is quite clear that 12 volts is too low.
Yeah 24VDC or 48VDC would make more sense but tbh you only need to drive the LEDs with it.
At 48VDC you could run 16AWG like 100ft and still be fine as long as the lights pull around 60W or less all together (which works out to ~12 lights on a circuit). And that circuit would only add another ~2W or so in power losses when energized.
That circuit is essentially what power over ethernet does today so you could replace romex with PoE Type 3/Type 4 plenum rated ethernet and it'd be like half the cost.
And if you really want to optimise for losses you could put the switches on the ethernet data line and use that for sensing rather than running the PoE circuit out to each light switch (and then de-energise the PoE circuit when the switches report off). Bonus points in that this would allow you to "reprogram" which light switch controls which circuit without needing to do any re-wiring.
You still have to run Romex everywhere, though. People want to run other things in various rooms. They want the option of turning a bedroom into an office should that make sense. That means they're going to see enough power to run a decent sized computer. TV's and bedrooms are common. Stereo systems. Just me and my wife charging our beds by the phone overnight is going to take a significant amount of the power that you allocated to the room.
And again, your whatever voltage, 48 volts, is way too much for an LED, so we still have a power supply. What's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC? Ultimately, there's not much of a difference, well, you could do a very cheap linear regulator and be horribly wasteful of power, but more likely you're going to be doing a social power supply, which is going to be more complex and have similar efficiency losses. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to know this for sure but I would suspect the power supply in your Ethernet switch and then the second one to get to that your voltage is less efficient than just having a single power supply that goes from regular line voltage to whatever the LEDs need.
You still have to run romex for the other circuits. But it's not hard to run those on a separate breaker. Rooms often have like one and a half 15A circuits each because lighting used to draw so much power but now you can drop it down to one 15A circuit per room and run a single circuit that switches out to the entire house off of one 15A breaker.
> what's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC?
It's already DC. A properly sized buck converter based LED driver is going to have like 80-95% efficiency when the LED is on (and it's trivial to draw no power when off) and they are like 0.25USD per IC.
They are going to have equal or better performance than AC->DC switching mode power supplies because buck converters are already the simplest and most efficient type of SMPS.
It doesn't need to be for the whole house, it just needs to be for the lighting fixtures. Obviously nobody is going to use a microwave or blender on 12V. It's not like our bulbs plug into NEMA 5-15 outlets. Having good DC standard voltages and plugs would be incredibly useful. Don't bother running 12V everywhere, but like after the 120V light switch go to a single controller that then drives the lights for that room. Or have that be in the box with the switch, although that might still have the same kind of cramped heat issue.
And it's not like we need to just stop producing Edison socket styles tomorrow. But let's make sane standards today.
I don't know how it is where you live, but most apartments where I've lived in Paris didn't have dedicated wiring for the lights in the "living" spaces. They had them in the bathroom / hallway / kitchen, but not in the living rooms, for example.
My current apartment has dedicated circuits in the living room and bedroom. But in the living room they're in awkward places.
I always had to resort to multiple lamps that would plug into an outlet so I could place them where I needed them. Running 12 V for the bulbs would require rewiring most of the apartment.
Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
That is fairly typically in the US as well. Most often there is a switch in the living spaces, which controls have the outlet half of a duplex outlet. Plug something into the top (sometimes bottom - there is no standard) and the switch controls it so you can get the lights on/off when you enter/leave the room, plug into the bottom (again sometimes top) and it is always on, perfect for whatever else you have in the room.
Its not like your bulbs are plugging straight into your wall outlets. You've got some kind of lamp fixture that the bulbs screw in to, correct?
Your lamps would still plug into mains, same as they do today. The lamp fixture overall would contain the driver components, hopefully in packaging which lets it manage heat well and have good build quality. But whatever parts do fail routinely should be able to be easily replaced with some kind of standardized socket. It just seems like we're trying to squeeze too much too cheaply into a form factor that's ill suited for the requirements by trying to shove all the driver circuitry into the same envelope of an older Edison A-shape socket style bulb.
This has already kind of been a thing for a while with low voltage halogen lamps. The bulbs themselves aren't made for mains voltage, the lamp structures themselves give the right voltage for the halogen mini bulbs. I've replaced a few bi-pin halogen lights for LEDs with drop-in replacements (especially for outdoor lights), but this same kind of bulb packaging hasn't really been very common for interior lighting from what I've seen.
> Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
> Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
I was talking about the lamp itself. Maybe I used the wrong term? I meant the fixture which holds the wire and expects a bulb. That fixture needs to go into mains, because that outlet may have to also service something else entirely.
Now, sure, usually those fixtures tend to be larger than the bulbs, so they could hold the conversion circuitry. I'd be fine with that. But the commenter I was replying to talked about having an alternative DC circuit for the lights.
Sure, and we can have that too, in the places where the lights are built-in to the ceilings or cabinets or whatever. When we have lights in the ceilings, the fixtures again can handle this specialized LED bulb style. And one might even link several lights into a single DC circuit for all the lights in the room versus having each individual light do its own AC->DC conversions in compromised envelopes.
My vote would be 24v or 48v. You cannot power substantial LED with 3.3v. You’d spend a fortune rolling out ultra-thick gauge wire to avoid pissing away non-trivial amounts of power into heat. Many, many LED strips come as 24v. It’s the perfect balance of wire gauge for the amount of power you’ll be drawing.
I've seen on Amazon packs of 4 bulbs for $7 which is significantly less than the price of a single Hue bulb for $25. While the Hue bulb is "tuneable" white adjustable from cool and warm, the price is 3x for 1/4 of the number of bulbs. Not really sure that counts as marginal. Unless you're marginal is describing the cost to manufacture, but what's that got to do with anything?
I would love to buy an LED bulb that lasts a long time. I thought the reason for their premium price was supposed long lifetime. Mine all last as long as the older bulbs but cost 5X as much. Where can I buy such bulbs in the US?
I have yet to replace any of the LED bulbs I bought at Costco in 2013. I dunno who manufactured them, or what kind of unobtainium they're made from, or whether I will jinx them by talking about it, but they just... Keep on going. Basic Edison screw-ins, from the first generation of bulbs that emitted warm light, that I've used exactly as I would any light-bulb. They weren't really expensive - maybe $2-3 apiece, though I really don't remember - and, I dunno. I hear everyone constantly complaining about their LED bulbs, and maybe they've been enshittified since, but I have absolutely no complaints.
I've been using LED lights for over a decade. Can't say I have replaced any of them.
And nowadays you can get E27 LED bulbs for 75 cents at IKEA, which is cheaper than incandescents ever were. Not sure how they managed that, because it sounds insane.
Similar experience. I'm perplexed at the people saying LED bulbs fail frequently. I have probably 100 of them in service for 10 years or so (basically since Costco began selling them) and possibly one has failed. Memory is hazy but definitely no more than one.
There can be a lot of variation. From what I've seen, I'd say 2-5 years is a typical lifespan for an LED bulb. We have some recessed lights in the kitchen that require brighter bulbs, and those typically last only 1-2 years. But then we also have some other (non-replaceable!) recessed lights that are 14 years old and still work fine.
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.
My Philips Hue bulbs are going strong for just over 7 years now. They are the premium bulb in my experience. I've bought other LED strips using controllers compatible with Hue, but they died where there are obvious burned points all along the strip. We all have different experiences that will counter each other, so it's frustrating to no end on finding trust worthy devices.
Regardless of all of that frustration, thank the gods we no longer have to deal with CFL
I couldn't decide on how to respond to someone saying they like CFL. Literally, I was at a loss of words. My first reaction was coughing into my hand while saying bullshit.
My Philips Hue bulbs are of a similar vintage, and I love them. Literally the first thing I did after moving into my home was removing every single CFL bulb and replacing them with either a Hue bulb or another relatively high quality LED bulb with a high CRI and 3000 kelvin temp.
I also find it hard to believe someone really does like CFLs as much as buttocks describes, and it makes me wonder if they are in fact just trolling.
My kitchen had 8 4' fluorescent fixtures in the kitchen when I moved in, and a couple of them flickered. I didn't bother check ballasts or bulbs and instead I've replaced them with the Hue strips + extenders. I've seen ballast replacements for LED tubes, but at the time did not see Hue compatible so I went with the strips.
Anyone that says they like CFL has to be trolling. Any other answer is just inconceivable to me.
I didn’t realize it was so controversial. Indeed, I have a set of CFL from around 2010 that have about 30 second warm up to full brightness; they look just right behind their lamp shades. I tried replacing these once with LED and the light kind of pierced through the shades and looked harsh.
Reliability engineering is a thing. I had a friend whose research was targeted around getting consumer white goods to work for a specified number of months.
They aren’t designed to fail, they are designed to work around some predictable model during the warranty and extended warranty period.
There's definitely no cartel today, there are wayyy too many manufacturers for that to be a practical reality.
The reason most consumer LED bulbs fail early today is because consumers are low-information buyers who make purchase decisions based overwhelmingly on price and secondarily on aesthetics. The typical buyer has no way to accurately judge the actual design longevity of a bulb on the shelf. Yes, bulbs have lifetime ratings, but even if people bother to read them, those ratings in many places are not well regulated and reflect an ideal scenario that oftentimes is not reflective of real-world use.
The sales success of these race-to-the-bottom bulbs has driven higher quality bulbs off of the shelf at most retailers. You can get well designed long-life LED lighting, but you'd need to step up to commercial/industrial options. There are long life bulbs available, but they generally are designed for uses where they are difficult to replace... because in those use cases a high product price can be justified by lower labor costs to maintain their installation... e.g., bulbs for use high up on a structure, factory lighting, continuous use, etc.
The reason Dubai has better bulbs is simply because they have decided to require it. The reason the US has shit bulbs is because Americans love buying $0.80-1.50 light bulbs. The Dubai bulb is an order of magnitude more expensive. This is a hard sell at Walmart. And the TCO of the $0.87 bulbs on Amazon is still less even accounting for early failures if you are a homeowner who is not factoring in labor costs.
> The only place where this doesn’t happen is in the country of Dubai.
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.
Interesting. I was just thinking I have never had to replace a single bulb in my apartment. I have lived here for five years and the bulbs weren’t new when I moved in.
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.
Just to add some context to the Phoebus Cartel and incandescent bulb lifetime in general, there is an inherent trade off between efficiency/brightness vs lifetime in incandescent bulbs. Longer life bulbs are proportionally less efficient, which can end up costing the user more money in the long run than replacing efficient shorter life bulbs more often. There's no doubt that the cartel was limiting lifetimes for the wrong reasons (profit), but the result for consumers wasn't necessarily the wrong one.
Modern LED bulb lifetime is the result of similar factors: wanting more profit. But I think this is being achieved more through aggressively reducing manufacturing cost rather than planned obsolescence.
Just an anecdote but I had a huge number of LED MR16 bulbs in my house. Bunch of different brands. They were all crap so we replaced every downlight in my house with an LED disk instead. I’ve stopped thinking about light bulbs altogether.
In theory, yes. In practice I suspect a lot of these fixtures are not using integration to achieve better thermal design, they're using it because it makes the product cheaper and lets the manufacturer control the whole assembly.
Maybe they can be designed for thermal management, but very few of them really are. I'm also finding the LED is the most likely failure point, so I prefer to find fixtures with replaceable LED bulbs so I can install the ones I know to be reliable. That way the entire fan isn't junk when the LED dies.
Integrated LED fixtures are usually quite easy to fix when an LED actually fails. Check them all with a multimeter in diode mode and you know which one to replace.
Doesn't the LED going out after 2-3 years make it not only way more expensive (LEDs are easily 10x or more than a regular incandescent light), but also way less energy efficient and much worse for the environment?
These lightbulbs, while using less electricity, use much more energy to produce. And I wonder what with their substrates, if that isn't more difficult to recycle too. I'm not sure, and don't want to judge, but if both every efficiency and recycling are harder, then these bulbs aren't really energy and environmentally efficient.
Not sure if I buy special LEDs, but I have outfit my house with LEDs basically everywhere between 10 and 13 years ago. In that time I had maybe one or two of them die.
Traditional light bulbs have taught us that lights naturally have to be "consumables". That has been far less true for energy saving lamps (of which I have maybe 2 or 3 still left which I planned to replace by LEDs once they die, but they just won't). As far as I can tell, this isn't at all the case for LEDs.
It's much more likely that lamps and ceiling fans made out of plastic break from accidental physical impact or turn ugly due to natural UV discolorization or similar. And probably most will live on until replaced due to changing tastes.
The LED light in my refrigerator died. I tried looking up replacements, and discovered that there aren't any, because "the LED lights have a lifespan longer than the rest of the refrigerator."
Lots of manufacturers are simplifying assembly design by making the lights non-replaceable much like phone manufacturers glued their batteries in. Fewer clips / screws / gaskets / sockets / wires etc.
Of course, the refrigerator model isn't made anymore and probably isn't under warranty.
To be fair, in my refrigerator, this problem was remedied by a cheap motion activated battery powered light, which is cheaper than whatever they would have charged for a replacement light. In other cases like the ceiling fans it's a different story.
Yeah, I have so many LED bulbs that are rated at "10+ years". I put all of the lights in my apartment 5 years ago. I'd say the failure rate is 10-20% at this point. The particularly painful one is the downlights under my kitchen cabinets. They require removing the entire probably 30 kg board that I have them mounted in, which requires clamping things up and undoing 6 heavy duty screws, and the whole process of changing one takes about an hour. 2 of the 5 have failed in 5 years. I'm very picky about lighting (only get LEDs with CRI 95+), so I usually am buying the expensive ones.
Like for most consumer products today, the problem is that when buying LED bulbs you do not know their real quality.
LED bulbs can be designed to live almost forever, but many of them are not designed so, for savings in cost, but the selling price may be poorly correlated with the manufacturing cost.
I have about two dozens Philips LED bulbs (4000 K color temperature and equivalent with old 100 W incandescent bulbs, i.e. 1500 lumen) of the kind that fits in legacy Edison sockets for incandescent bulbs. They were bought more than 15 years ago and all continue to work perfectly fine. I did not have to replace any of them.
Nonetheless, if I would buy today new LED bulbs, even of the same brand, I think that the chances are slim that they will be equally reliable.
In the past, you could rely on the brand of a product to inform you about the expected quality, but today buying any product with a certain brand provides no guarantee that the quality will be the same as for an apparently identical product bought one year earlier.
Optimistic anecdote: My experience with LED bulbs bought at my town's "generally decent quality" hardware store has been rather lackluster. So last week, I instead shopped at my town's "when it has to be good" hardware store. For LED bulbs, they stocked very little except Philips.
Same here. We have had outdoor hanging string lights for ~10 years with nice incandescent bulbs that occasionally burn out. I thought I would join the 21st century and started replacing the burned out ones with LED versions. Big mistake. In about 3 years, half of the new LED ones have already failed. Managed to find a new pack of the incandescent ones and so far so good.
I had a car that had non replaceable light bulbs in the rear blinkers, just a strip of led integrated deeply in the tail light assembly. Of course the blinker died. Replaced the whole assembly. (And replaced the whole car later). Apparently some enthusiasts do disassemble them and replace just the led strip, probably requiring soldering etc. This company had designed cars for about 120 years at that point but still seemed to commit easy mistakes...
> This company had designed cars for about 120 years at that point but still seemed to commit easy mistakes…
Oh take a look at the recall list of any car company in the world and you will find they all make simple mistakes, constantly. Probably a consequence of price pressure at all times. While cars are lasting longer than they used to on average, I feel like it’s been getting worse in some ways with cars lately turning into computers and good car/engine companies lately turning into bad tech companies without that much tech experience who outsource important parts and do lousy integration. And yeah, building assemblies or modules with non-replaceable parts is becoming more common.
Mistakes, or careless at best? I'm thinking of a couple of scenarios I've had in personal vehicles, where I'm positive the design decision was the unreviewed work of some co-op student's summer project.
Case 1: Ford Taurus wagon, my wife calls in a panic because it's blowing all hot air, and the dash is awash in lights. I get her to shut it off, wait a bit, and limp the last few km home. Turns out the serpentine belt goes around a pulley, the center bolt of which is screwed into the engine block. When the bearing started to go, there was friction, and the belt spun the bolt out and it fell off. It could have been reverse threaded, like one pedal on every bike, ever. But no. If it had, the bearing would screech, we'd get it replaced, instead of just silently falling out with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Case 2: Chevy Venture van, where the lights on the rear door all stopped working. Turned out the wiring harness for them ran through this accordion hose at the top, plugged into the bottom of a rain gutter across the top. So as soon as that hose broke its seal with the trough, the whole harness is shorted.
Funny, I have never experienced this sort of stupidity in the Toyotas and Hondas that have followed these last couple American-branded vehicles.
>Funny, I have never experienced this sort of stupidity in the Toyotas and Hondas that have followed these last couple American-branded vehicles.
Which probably use the exact same serpentine belt idler running counterclockwise as your 1990s Taurus....
(There just aren't all that many different idler pulley configurations across the industry at any given time)
This sort of stuff absolutely pales in comparison to the sort of "people used to deride the Germans/French/Italians/British for this sort of engineering" type behavior that has permeated the industry.
>This company had designed cars for about 120 years at that point but still seemed to commit easy mistakes...
120 years of lessons learned undone in 120 college credits.
Automotive engineering is "high" engineering. Like "high" tech it suffers deeply from people trying to implement all sorts of showboaty crap they learned in college without truly grasping the bigger picture and the tradeoffs this will subject the whole system to.
Making the car cheaper to assemble shows up in the numbers today, making it easier to repair shows up in the numbers in subtle ways over the course of decades.
> 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.
> If you have a fan with a light controlled by separate wall switches,
This is common, but it's also not uncommon for only one circuit to be wired. The "clean" qualifier is because even if you have that line, you don't have a common DC ground.
> Unfortunately, I haven't seen this implemented anywhere.
Many Z-wave switches use the three-way traveler line for out-of-band signaling (instead of a traditional three-way switch arrangement.) (Homeseer, Inovelli, etc.) This line will communicate dimming, double taps, etc.
Maybe I'm missing something, but there's no DC wiring in the walls in our bedroom. The default install is a single AC hot, neutral, and ground running to the fixture. We have an extra (unused) hot because the old AC fan had separate switches for the fan and light.
What I'm proposing is taking that unused extra wire, wiring in either a separate AC fan controller, and letting the fan controller in the fan take that as an input (drawing essentially zero current), and adjust the DC output based on it. No DC outside the fan itself (as it is presently), no need to pull another wire. On the downside, now your soft remote and hard AC fan controller can be in disagreement.
We have no Z-wave in the house, but I appreciate the tip.
Yes - doing this is quite ugly, electrically, is all. Dimmable LEDs, etc. do this same thing (with the load supply, not a separate line - you couldn't get away with this on a fan.)
I've only ever been on the software side of the world, so I don't doubt you. It's clearly hackish and might not play nicely with a multi-location switch loop either. I wouldn't be surprised if the NEC has some objections as well :-)
mmm, I don't know if you'd call it clean but I have a late-1990s ceiling fan with a feature they called "fan flick" - turn it on, it comes on at the last selected speed. Want to change the speed? flick the power switch (toggle it quickly) and it changes by one notch. It's tedious, and you only get to change it one direction until it wraps around - but no wireless, no additional wiring, just "short power interruption" as a signal...
> There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.
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.)
> There's no clean mechanism to control a fan's speed in-band on a normal AC wall switch.
There is.
I specifically purchased a Fanco Horizon DC fan as it has an optional physical wall switch which connected to the existing wiring for the fan it was replacing.
The caveat being if you use the wall remote, it's not compatible with the model with built in LED light fixture. This was a non issue for me as wanted to avoid any fan with built in LED light due to when the led panel fails, it'll be extremely difficult to replace vs having independent lights in the room.
I think most DC fans don't support wall remotes because it's cheaper and simpler not to, and provide a remote control instead. It's not a technical issue as you can absolutely find DC fans with wall controllers they are just harder to find.
> DC fans are infinitely superior to AC fans (noise, torque, longevity, etc.), which is unfortunately why this became a thing.
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.
Where are you getting ceiling fans that don't squeak and/or hum? (Or perhaps, what are you doing to maintain them)
I'm pretty anti remotes and apps for things, but it's pretty handy when my spouse can start the fan from her phone in the middle of the night instead of waking me to go turn it on in the middle of the night.
Our current one isn't too loud and it has a nice range of speeds so you can run it without it getting super wobbly. But overall, I still dislike fans. :p
Not op, but we have old, AC ceiling fans that are wall controlled. They run 95% of the time, no maintenance, no squeaks, no nothing. Obviously anecdata, but this is representative of my entire life's experience with AC ceiling fans. I doubt these were either the cheapest fans nor the most expensive, fwiw. I'm sure the prior owner did nothing to maintain them either
I should have been more specific - yes, you can "dim" AC fans and it's purely electrical. "Dimming" DC fans and similar switching loads requires detecting shaped pulses, and is really dirty and not something you want to do.
The ceiling fan in my bedroom was installed no later than 1981 (possibly a few decades earlier) and is utterly silent. On high you can hear the rush of air and thats it.
> Where are you getting ceiling fans that don't squeak and/or hum?
Lowes? Home Depot? Any other reputable, major home appliance store? Where else does one get a ceiling fan? Are you buying yours from Amazon or Ali Express?
I don't know about those reasons, but an AC fan uses ~100W on low and my DC fan uses 5W. You tune out the hum, but the AC fans hum and the DC fans don't.
But I don't think torque or longevity are actual issues with AC fans. Just efficiency and noise.
DC fans don't have the hum, get up to speed faster, etc. They can operate at a far greater range of speeds and still maintain high power output. AC fans operate in a much narrower envelope.
DC is much quieter and energy efficient. Can't comment on the longevity etc
Technology Connections "Ceiling fans: the simple idea we keep screwing up" YouTube video is interesting. The old old fans had oiled bearing baths and overbuilt motors, extremely overbuilt compared to today standards which means they'll probably keep going forever. If you are nerdy and interested it's worth a watch.
> I figure that every ceiling fan I've ever lived with has been AC powered.
Every high-end fan sold today is DC. It's possible that you didn't see the power supply.
> way worse than hauling my ass up to pull a damn chain.
Many people have high ceilings where a pull chain couldn't be humanly reached. Sure, this might work if you have 8' ceilings. Which high-end fans have pull chains?
> Every high-end fan sold today is DC. It's possible that you didn't see the power supply.
a) I did a quick search and noticed that Hunter Fans sells many ceiling fans with AC motors at a variety of price points. [0][1] Do you consider what Hunter produces to be entirely mid-to-low-grade? Or are you doing the Scotsman thing where any ceiling fan that doesn't contain a DC motor cannot be high-end?
b) The manufacturer of the fans in my apartment is "Hampton Bay", which are readily available at Home Depot. If Home Depot hasn't fucked up their product categorization, nearly every fan they sell in the SF Bay Area today has an AC motor. [2][3] Given the price, I'd agree that the ones that Home Depot are selling are not high-end fans, but given that the ones in my apartment have given me trouble-free, zero-noise-other-than-the-whoosh-of-blades-cutting-through-air operation for fifteen years and have done the same for previous tenants for who knows how long, I don't see why I'd want a high-end fan.
c) Remember that I said "Every house I've ever lived in over my many decades of life has had ceiling fans. I've never known one to fail...". I've lived in my current place for ~fifteen years now. Even if the fans had been installed new just before I moved in [4] I'm fairly confident that DC-driven ceiling fans were -if available- an extremely high-end option in the US in 2011. Authoritative information is difficult for me to find, but I see weak indications that they didn't really become A Thing until 2020.
Branded "Hunter" is mid-to-low-end, yes. Big Ass Fans, Modern Forms, Modern Fan Co, Matthews Fans - all are 100% DC. I believe Casablanca (Hunter offshoot, almost all DC) might have some AC fans, but don't quote me. I've had 3 Hunter AC fans fail, all had hums. I use my fans non-stop.
Almost every fan sold at Home Depot (in-store) is on the mid-to-low-end side of things. You'll notice that Home Depot doesn't sell Wolf, Cove, Sub-Zero, Viking, or Gaggenau appliances either.
DC fans were a thing as far back as 2007 (family had some, and they were even cheaper than today's DC fans, though maybe not with inflation.)
If you're in a situation where you have a landlord, the likelihood of your fans being premium is quite low, even in "luxury" apartments. They're a consumable item, and bearings go bad no matter what when you run them non-stop.
> I believe Casablanca (Hunter offshoot, almost all DC) might have some AC fans
Looking at their inventory, they sell twenty six models of fan... sixteen DC and ten AC. You can verify by looking at the numbers next to the "Motor Type" category here [0].
> If you're in a situation where you have a landlord, the likelihood of your fans being premium is quite low... They're a consumable item, and bearings go bad no matter what when you run them non-stop.
Oh I know my landlord doesn't buy anything nice or do anything right. And yet, I've been in this apartment for fifteen years with these nth-hand Hampton Bay ceiling fans that continue to make no sound and have been running non-stop for most of those fifteen years.
Like, I believe you when you claim that that there are fancier fans out there, and it's plainly obvious that bearings are unlikely to last for millions of years, [1] but even if we only consider the past decade and a half of my personal experience with the fans in my apartment, I see no reason to get anything that -based on what you're telling me- is better than mid-to-low end. We don't even need to pile in my other mumble decades of experience to reach that conclusion.
Believe it or not, but there are times where better simply isn't worth it because what's good is so good that you won't notice the difference.
[1] But -for a gut check- go look up how long automotive wheel bearings typically last, consider how very much more harsh the environment they're deployed in is, and consider that it might be possible to design bearings that would easily last decades in an environment that's -in comparison- zero stress.
In two apartments, the remote affected the neighbor's fan and vice-versa. At first I wondered at the fan's erratic behavior, especially switching modes soon after I changed it. Then I guessed the problem and spoke to the neighbor.
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?
Sounds like the old Steven Wright joke about having a switch in his apartment that didn't do anything, he kept turning it on and off and nothing happened. Then a guy in France called him and said, "Cut it out."
You're right, it did. Unfortunately, I tried that without success:
That's what I meant when I wrote, "I tried changing channels in the remote but that didn't seem to help much.", and wondered "Maybe the channels are too few or narrow to be useful?".
My MinkaAirs use 303MHz remotes. No pull chains. This frustrated me so much, last night i got an ESP32-S3 + CC1101 and reverse engineered the signal to the fans to be also control it from Home Assistant. Now, if i lose or break the controller, i can still switch the fans & built-in LED on & off another way. not perfect, but it is in my control.
Probably not anything more complicated than running some kind of signal receiver while clicking each button on the remote and then capturing/replaying it. I highly doubt there's much if any security around the fan remote signals lol.
I did exactly the same thing for a different brand of DIP-switch-addressable remote-control fan back in 2016. It's been wonderful.
It wasn't that hard; I used gnuradio with an SDR to see what the remotes were sending and just pressed buttons and flipped switches until I figured out what all the bits were. There was no encryption whatsoever.
Don't do that! v041 has been compromised upstream by a supply chain attack and big fan doesn't want us to know. You have to use v040 until it has been fixed. Also, used the hacked flashing software because the official version is spyware. Did you even read page 723 of the support thread?? I can give you more info when I am done patching my toaster.
The POE hats for something like a pi convert the high voltage (~48v) down to 5V, so efficiency is going to be generally middling if you don’t spend a lot on the components. I imagine they’re running 80% efficiency or so, which would be an easy 3W of dissipation at peak or so.
This annoys me too. My Casablanca fans have a wall switch which is hard wired to power only for on/off, but the fan and light controls are sent via a radio frequency signal. The most frustrating part of this, is that the RF transmitter inside the wall switch is battery operated. I have to unscrew the wall switch a couple times a year to get to the batteries.
Trust me, it could be worse. When we bought our house, the living room fan was hardwired with no switch. Literally you could only control it directly and hope it did what you asked it to do, there was no way to turn it off without turning off the entire circuit.
I suspect this is a code violation, but considering part of the lighting wiring in the basement had been done with speaker wire and automotive cabling, I don't think compliance was on the top of the previous owner's list.
As someone that designs battery powered RF devices. It's shocking an disheartening seeing stuff like that.
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 just moved into an apartment with ceiling fans made by an austrian manufacturer Globo, one with a broken lampshade, the other with a broken LED module. This was my interaction with them over email about spare parts:
> I have a few questions regarding your products and spare parts:
> - Would it be possible to order a replacement lampshade for this Globo fan and deliver it to [place], [country]? The model is Globo 0350/0351, I have attached a picture to describe the part I need.
> Unfortunately, no—that item is no longer in our product range.
>- Is it possible to order other spare parts, like LED modules for this or other models?
> Unfortunately, no
> - Separately, is the Elina model available with a shorter rod? The ceiling height in the room is approximately 2.6m.
> 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.
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.
It's funny how popular it is to take an extremely durable and long-lived light-generating technology and pair it with the cheapest short-lived power electronics.
To add to that, my advice is to look for LED lights where the AC-to-DC conversion is done by a power brick separate from the lights. Not only does that mean you can replace them separately, but generally these will be much more robust as the power electronics won't be as constrained by size.
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 think the barrel jack would be a bad choice (wear over time, friction having to hold up vertical bulbs) but there’s no reason Edison replacements couldn’t be designed with a socket between the LED portion and the power conversion portion.
Since I switched to fully LED about 7 years ago I haven't had to replace a single bulp. Call me naive but I am the kind of person who would buy a nice looking non replaceable LED solution.
Ask a friend who is an interior designer. There are great fans on the market, but building a quality fan costs money and for whatever reason the walk-in stores don't want to have those, so instead they add baubles to justify a ridiculous mark-up. (Good tell for quality: warranty.)
It's bad power - transients apparently kill LEDs quickly.
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 grew up in Australia and now live in Hyderabad, India. Pretty good chance I’ll be building a house in the next couple of years, and I’m of a strong mind to go off-grid for power for this sort of reason. Appliances and other devices (ACs, fridges, computers, laptops, chargers, even fans and lights) fail at far greater rates than in Australia, and I believe most of that is about power quality (though sometimes it’s about higher ambient temperatures, far more dust, possibly lower component quality). Given how often the power goes out, you want a home inverter anyway, so increasing the battery capacity further and adding solar isn’t such a huge extra cost; and if it reduces appliance failure rates as much as I expect, I genuinely suspect it’ll be cheaper in the long run, even with the grid price being 0.05–0.10 USD/kWh.
Now if only DC wiring and appliances were more common/mature, could possibly drop the “inverter” part altogether. If I were single I’d try more seriously for a full-DC system, but as a married man I’ll probably just stick with everything AC.
Yeah, DC appliances just aren’t worth the hassle IMO - they cost more, more often than not have an inverter hidden inside them, and you pay a fortune for the cabling.
A sensible first step is just a little rack of cheap lithiums (I’m using pylontech) and an inverter charger like a victron multiplus - planning on adding to our on-grid home as it has become tedious dealing with the outages.
I had to replace the light fixture in our kitchen last week. It was a pseudo track lighting setup that I had installed shortly after we bought in 2021. Two of the six LEDs burned out and are of course unreplaceable.
I replaced it with something similar in aesthetics but twice the price, including replaceable LEDs (GU10).
As a side note: replacing a light fixture is mostly easier than I expected except that you need a couple zip ties on hand to keep the new fixture close to the installation site while you attach the wires. Also, wire nuts are miserable and you should use lever nuts instead (check Home Depot).
A lot of comments are trying to defend this by saying a properly designed light could last some amount longer, which is true, but misses the point. These designs couple the light and the fan. That’s an extra failure mode that doesn’t need to exist.
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.
Yeah anything which forces you to use whatever the manufacturer chooses is an instant no from me too. I don't have any fixed lights cooler than 2200 K at home, the standard 3000 K 'warm' white is going to look crappy the majority of the time.
We're in the middle of trying to come up with a nicer lighting scheme for our home.
For the overhead lights in the main area of the house and in the kitchen, we went with 3500k. The kitchen lights are on when preparing food and the overhead lights in the main area are used pretty much only when cleaning.
Task, accent, and decorative lighting are warmer. The specific temperature depends on the purpose of the light.
What I want more of are dim-to-warm lights. For example in our master bathroom, it would be nice to have candle-like light late at night and have super bright (high CRI) coolish light while cleaning or getting dressed. All the best systems though are pretty expensive (Lutron Ketra for example) and not terribly DIY friendly.
Those are generally bad quality because they’ve split the LED budget across twice as many modules.
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.
> 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.
Interesting, I heard that in the beginning of the 20th century they were selling light bulbs which never burn out. Until they realized they would go out of business. Maybe a similar thing happened with LEDs.
Most LED lightbulb manufacturers cut costs on the electronics driving the LEDs, and cheap out on designing good thermal management. It's actually pretty easy to heat-death those electronics.
The LEDs themselves are probably fine, but the driver is dead.
Remote only controls also a common dealbreaker for me that’s become the norm. We went with no light and switch plate controls (no remote but more difficult install) for the fans in our new build.
110VAC "LED bulbs" are not the same thing as the LEDs on a PCB in a DC motor ceiling fan.
"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.
> 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.
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.
> An AC motor has basically nothing inside that can fail
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.
> Let me know how the non-replaceable sealed bearing packs in these AC or DC fans fare after 10,000 hours.
...your AC-powered ceiling fans are failing (or even "just" substantially degrading) after a little under fourteen months? What garbage are you buying?
You can replace parts that don't come in nice detachable sockets.
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 build lights with cob modules with phosphor (bridgelux), and unless I screw up the thermal interface, I get many years out of modules that cost < $5 each. one thing is that the thermal paste is too fiddly for most people, voltage/current tends to drift around and 0.5V is a big difference here. mechanically they tend to use a couple different form factors, but not 100%. the 10 watt units I had been using were bigger than the 15w I use now, and the mounting spacing went from 0.75 to 0.71
I would hope that at least some of this would get standardized over time
My biggest issue is that a lot of them have cheap power supplies with terrible PWM, so they hurt my eyes. So my nightmare is basically finding a nice place to rent and realizing they put all these cheap fixtures in and then I can't spend more than like an hour in the house without feeling like someone is stabbing my retinas.
Chances are that you didn't. You bought an item through Amazon from a vendor in their marketplace.
Being that you're unwilling to name the vendor or brand, or even a proper link... it doesn't seem a rousing recommendation. Is it an affiliate link, I wonder.
I just checked my Amazon order history. It says it was sold by Amazon. When I visit the listing now the 'buy box' isn't Amazon.
We live in San Francisco so there are only a few days a year when we need a fan. Like this weekend.
From my order history:
Prominence Home Saybrook, 52 inch Indoor Farmhouse LED Ceiling Fan with Light, Pull Chain, Three Mounting Options, Dual Finish Blades, Reversible Motor - 51592-01 (Matte Nickel)
Sold by: Amazon.com
Supplied by: Other
$99.22
Most fan lights have the e12 candelabra base, these led bulbs end to fail quite often, even in open fixtures. Look for fans with the e26 base the bulbs will last a lot longer.
The only reason I have a fan with a light in it is because it came with the house. Otherwise, once they both die (one already has) they are coming out and never being replaced.
Led bulbs should last you 20 years. I once lived in a place with dodgy power and led bulbs would burn out - sometimes less than a year. You could also turn the microwave on and see the lights dim.
Interesting; I’ve literally never had an LED bulb die that can remember. I’ve got a bunch of Ikea Tradfri bulbs that are now ~8y old and used daily. (240v here btw.)
I’ve replaced at least a dozen. Multiple brands, ranging from rando amazon brands to name brands like CREE and GE.
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.
> I’ve literally never had an LED bulb die that can remember.
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.
I lived in an apartment where two ceiling fan lights went out, and when I told the management, they replaced the entire fans, explaining that the lightbulb cannot be changed. Wtf bro
Even if you can find one, good luck finding a fan that supports using a separate fan switch in the wall.
I resorted to buying a “smart” fan, pulling credentials for it, blocking it from all internet access, and controlling it exclusively with Home Assistant and the remote control it came with. These things are so flimsy nowadays and I couldn’t find anything of decent quality.
So glad to see this as the top comment and to see this highlighted in the article:
> These fixtures are also revolutionary in that they are extremely cheap in the short run – many of these fans cost under $200 – but expensive in the long rung, as the LEDs usually cannot be replaced, causing the whole apparatus to be thrown away.
A few years ago we had a relatively small pendant lamp (I think there were like 6 or so hanging lights total) over a stairwell that we really liked. It was installed by the previous owners just before we moved in, and about 7-8 years later 2 of the lamps died (not sure if it was the actual LED or just the electronics like another sibling comment mentioned). We were a bit aghast when we got an electrician and he said the only reasonable thing to do would be to replace the entire chandelier.
It's just so ironic how LEDs were supposed to be the "environmental" choice yet they were just another tool for our disposable economy.
For some reason my bedroom overhead switch is near the closet door 10' into the room. I have a remote switch to a wall plug and standing lamp where the normal switch would be.
Early LEDs were fine. Then they overclocked them a bit too much and they just break now. Too much current and so on. You can make a very simple led very bright but it won't last. If you undervolt them instead they are dim but last forever. So the deal is to have many undevolted LEDs. Ofc that is pricier...
His 1-hour videos could normally be condensed into 20 minutes of content, maximum. I think he has mostly good takes (some bad ones), but I’ve ceased watching because he doesn’t know how to make a point in a reasonable amount of words.
I'd say most subscribers to the channel want to watch his snarky ramblings as they are entertaining. I'd say the information provided is secondary to the format and personality.
I for instance don't subscribe because I want to know about old toasters, christmas lights and the internal combustion engine. If that was the case, I'd subscribe to channels specific to that topic. I subscribe to Technology Connections because I like his videos, and if I learn a thing or two along the way, that's a nice extra
This is most YouTubers who get very popular due to having original and opinionated content on niche topics. They tend to identify (perhaps correctly, perhaps not) their idiosyncratic personalities and opinions as the primary cause of their initial popularity and repeatedly double down on it as they grow in popularity. This is also the explicit advice that the vast majority of big YouTubers give to aspiring or up-and-coming YouTubers.
And I’m not advising that they should do anything different! Who am I?! I’m just pointing out that the culture of YouTubers is fundamentally about deliberately subjecting yourself to the most extreme audience capture.
Yes, and longer videos allow for Youtube to insert more ad breaks. For viewers that are Youtube Premium subscribers, the revshare portion that goes to the creator also grows linearly with watchtime.
Additionally, "the algorithm" rewards channels that have a lot of watchtime & retention (because againg, this leads to more ad placement opportunities for Youtube). So if you are able to produce long-form videos that keep the viewers engaged and watching, your videos are more likely to be recommended, which reinforces the popularity of long videos.
Very true. But also, I have seen loads of youtubers that create a variety of things and then suddenly the algorithm rewards them with a video or two getting loads more views and they get fixated on that subject/stlye. It is kind of like rewarding someone at a slot machine, or a cargo cult.
Ben Jordan used to do almost entirely synthesizer stuff, now it is all privacy and security focused because that is what he got rewarded for. NatswhatIreckon, did all manner of comedy stuff like making fun are car shows, he ended up fixated on cooking because one video exploded in views back 2020. Heck, MrBeast used to be a minecraft channel.
In getting rewarded, they tend to lean into that. I don't blame them but also it does mean they become risk adverse at times.
There's something very 2020s about taking two durable, repairable household objects (a ceiling fan and a light fixture) combining them into one visually complicated object, and then making the LED non-replaceable
It’s the same story for basically any part of a home. Faucets, furniture, tubs, windows, doors, floors, lamps, you name it.
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.
I just wish there was some way to replace the LEDs on these things when they inevitably die. And, no matter what large number of years or decades are slathered on the box, inevitably at least one LED panel will blow out three to six months after purchase, nominally still in warranty but good luck getting any service under it, I'm sure. If there was, there could be a place for at least some of these in a house, but the amount of crap that you have no choice but to throw out as soon as the LEDs fry is insane.
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.
Your local inspector may have opinions about this, but you can buy all the components of an excellent LED system from your favorite electronics distributor, e.g. DigiKey.
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.
Yeah. It's not just cost, it's time. If I have to replace the fan, that's a trip to a hardware store, then a half hour (at least) to remove the old and install the new and get it wired correctly, so that it works and doesn't burn my house down. Then I have to take the old one apart far enough to fit it into the garbage can.
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.
I mostly think the problem with these things is not the replaceability of the LEDs but the hideousness of the fixtures. This (and the fact that the fans will obviously perform very poorly) is the reason not to get the fans pictured in the article.
LEDs mean that the light itself is cheap so you can basically ignore energy usage concerns.
Generally, I think it is better to have:
- multiple dimmer sources of light instead of a single bright central light
- shades to diffuse the light (or lights pointed at walls or ceilings) instead of having bright point sources
- some ability to adjust brightness (eg reasonable quality dimmable LEDs)
- replaceable ordinary-looking bulbs from a reputable source (if you have 10 bulbs, it will be sad if one fails and you can’t get a similar looking bulb with a matching brightness and temperature)
- lamps, potentially wired up to light-switches for the room, which can provide light closer to where people will be and from better directions (eg maybe you sit somewhere where you can’t or don’t have a nearby wall-mounted light so a lamp can provide good light for reading). This also works in rented accommodation where one has less control over built-in fixtures.
- general considerations as to the purpose of the room (eg brighter cooler directable ceiling-mounted spotlights are more useful in a kitchen than a drawing room)
- sparing use of can lights (though this can be difficult if ceilings are low)
> I'm old enough to remember when I was promised LEDs would last approximately forever without having to be replaced.
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.
> 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.
> Arguably, NG powering central electric power generation and then used for resistive would be overall more efficient.
It depends on the particular furnace or NG generator in question, but if you take the best case for each, then this does not appear to be true.
The most efficient combined cycle NG plant is around 65% efficient, without considering transmission losses. The most efficient NG furnace is 90+% efficient.
I’m not sure that’s easily quantifiable. Yes, thermal efficiency of modern NG furnaces can be ~95% or whatever… but you can also run multi stage heat capturing NG power plants that have very high overall efficiency too. Not 95, but at 60-70%, it’d be a potential wash in terms of emissions if leaks are ~10% (especially considering how much worse unburnt NG is as a leak vs when it’s burnt).
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.
> 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.
Maybe... I've got a NG furnace now and am looking at adding a heat pump, and even with a pretty expansive budget, I'm struggling to make the numbers work on actually removing the furnace entirely vs. doing heat pump + furnace. (And the near-impossibility of upgrading my home service past 100A makes it extra complicated if I want to electrify everything.)
I’m not making the argument for total amortized cost. I’m just talking about per energy unit cost, specifically in terms of CO2 or emissions.
If the evaluation is total lifetime cost to you, using the equipment you currently have almost always wins out. Same with purchasing more efficient hvac and such: the cheapest/lowest efficiency hvac is almost always the most cost effective. That tide could turn with sharp increases in NG or electric prices… but it hasn’t historically been true for many years.
What do you mean by "inefficient"? 100W goes into the bulb and the same 100W go out. Energy remains in the room. How is it different to burning gas to get the same 100W? Or am I missing something?
A 100 Watt light bulb consumes 100 Watts. It emits 100 Watts. That's 8,190 BTU every 24 hours, and it is perfectly efficient at doing this.
At $0.1745 per kiloWatt hour, it costs $0.419 to produce those 8,190 BTUs.
A natural gas furnace at 90% efficiency, meanwhile: Yeah, 10% goes right out the pipe and is lost.
But if natural gas costs $1.346 per therm, then producing 8,190 BTUs of useful heat costs closer to the realm of $0.123.
One thing costs about 42 cents. The other thing costs about 12 cents. 42 moneys is more than 12 moneys. :)
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I might opine that the most cost-efficient way of dealing with an incandescent light bulb is usually to immediately replace it with an LED bulb, and then landfill the old thing even though it still works.
4-packs of 100 Watt-equivalent LED bulbs are $12.97 at Wal-Mart, or about $3.24 per bulb. If it's the heating season and natural gas is being used at 90% efficiency, then replacing the incandescent pays for itself in about 300 hours of use. The LED will then continue to work and save money for thousands of additional hours.
In addition to what the other commenters say about electricity generation, heat pumps are more than 100% efficient. So using an incandescent bulb as a resistive heater loses there too.
For the most efficient kinds of natural gas power plant (combined cycle), around 35% of the energy (from burning NG) is wasted.
Compare that to a modern NG furnace, which can be 90% efficient or more.
So if you just want heat, burning the NG directly is generally more energy efficient than burning NG to boil water to drive turbines to generate electricity and then converting that electricity back to heat via resistive heating.
I don't care much on the politics of it all because I do think a lot of it is silly, especially with how profit-motivated companies will still find a way to profit.
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
I know how to solder tiny parts and big parts, and I'm actually pretty good at it. I can generally take complex things apart non-destructively and reassemble them without damage. I can use a meter. I understand how electronic components work, and I even find pleasure in using them.
I can safely troubleshoot and repair or replace a power supply.
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.
> The sea was purple. The beach they were on was composed of tiny yellow and
green pebbles - presumably terribly precious stones. The mountains in the
distance seemed soft and undulating with red peaks. Nearby stood a solid silver beach table with a frilly mauve parasol and silver tassles.
> 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.
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.
> a normal fan that for some reason has a border around it
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).
The movie Beetlejuice (1988) contains within it a sort of aesthetic manifesto from Tim Burton, in which he rails against the passing of traditional architecture under the wave of Memphis modernity.
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".)
most forget, but fan blades need cleaning. any plastic blades, specially the clear one will look like cat vomit.
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...
they need cleaning when not used, so obviously need to wipe them after winter when hot temperatures are coming (some people claim if you reverse the air flow they can be used even in winter, can't agree with this opinion although it should work in theory), but if used frequently/regularly from spring until autumn it makes no sense to clean them, just wipe them before first seasonal use
I must disagree. I normally clean my fans before switching spin directions. Our living room doesn’t get good circulation compared to the rest of the house and so the fan is on a low setting pretty much 24/7. I was thinking the same as you, it’s been moving like non stop since last time I switched directions, how much could have collected? A lot apparently. Once it stopped and I switched directions and turned it back on- dust went everywhere. I had to vacuum the entire room and couches. Learn from my mistake. Moving fan blades does not mean clean fan blades.
This kind of reminds me of the “Island” situation on Magic: the Gathering cards. An island is a piece of land, surrounded by water. However, due to 30+ years of needing to draw new versions of islands, Wizards of the Coast has expanded what it means to be an island, ending up with things that are… not that: https://imgur.com/a/xVnyP
> To be fair all of those islands are awesome and mega pedant time
They are awesome cards, but they're not islands. I think ultimately Richard Garfield made a mistake calling the blue basic land "Island", instead of something a bit more general involving water. But it seems like WotC's art department decided to pretend he did anyway, and so we get these cards called "Island" even though they're not. Which is funny to notice, but doesn't actually affect anything, so that seems like the right solution.
> Fun fact: Venice is, in fact, an island, and every block in venice is an island, and venice is an archipelago
I agree that was a weird complaint—yes, Venice is definitely an archipelago. I guess when you're on a rant, sometimes you overstep.
Modern product selection is so fascinating to me. We can somehow cater to super niche tastes at reasonable prices. This has somehow also led to a decline in well-made, basic products.
I wonder if that's due to social media having made the visual aspect of things more important?
I always see people complaining about failing LED lamps. It’s almost always because people are using lamps rated for open fixtures in enclosed fixtures. If it’s not a table lamp or standing lamp, it’s likely an enclosed fixture. A recessed can with an open bottom is considered an enclosed fixture, and so is an open-bottom chandelier globe.
I suggest only buying enclosed rated fixture lamps because they put out less heat and will last longer in an open or enclosed fixture.
Many retailers only sell open fixture lamps. And you need to read the fine print on the packaging to know that. Most consumers have no idea that this is even a thing.
A few years back, I replaced all the bedroom light fixtures in my condo with fan/light combos. It has been getting hotter in SF, and I thought fans might help during the limited number of hot summer days. I didn’t have room for both a fan and a ceiling fixture, so I went with combo units.
I actually ended up with one fan that looks exactly like the enclosed one (I had limited clearance and needed something small). It works fine as both a light and a fan. If the bulb goes out, I can just replace the whole thing (it wasn’t that expensive).
For the other one, I bought something higher end bc I had enough clearance to go with larger blades (44” Minka Aire Light Wave). The light is a plug-in module, so if it goes out, I can find a replacement (assuming they still make the module).
Overall, these combined units aren’t perfect, but they let you add a fan without needing to add more wiring. The one thing to be careful of is to make sure your electrical boxes are fan rated.
Slightly related. I'm building a house in India and I'm a big fan of locally controller home automation (without cloud). I have used home assistant in multiple homes, so I'm sticking with it. Everything is being automated with knx. The pain point right now is, there are no knx fan controllers, at least not in India. Wherever I can not use knx (such as tower fans, robot vacuums or de-humidifiers), I use Xiaomi because most of their products can be controlled on a local-only wifi connection. So when looking at smart ceiling fans, my first goto was Xiaomi, but they don't have any (at least not in India). So I ended up ordering a ZigBee fan controller for Alibaba to be used with a regular dumb fan.
Growing up in Texas, I have always had a fan up and running. When living in apartments and houses that didn’t come with them I’ve put them up (likely breaking a stupid lease rule). At this point I’ve installed dozens of fans and have enough strong opinions on ceiling fans that I could write a lengthy blog post on the subject.
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.
Yes, I need a recommendation, too! I'm currently living with loud A/C-noise fans and need to swap them out for something better, and I don't know where to look.
I wanted to buy a ceiling fan last year, and just gave up.
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.
> Just stick to proven fixtures, and let me put my own choice of bulbs in it!
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.
I have led retrofit screw bulbs in all my fixtures. They're the right color temperature and brightness. We replaced them years ago and have only had one go bad. Why are they shit?
Poor cooling, poor light emission, poor longevity. Philips Dubai lamps aren't bad in this line, but Feit, Philips' normal products, etc. have high failure rates when installed in most enclosures (fans, cans, tight sconces, etc.)
You're not wrong - but what do I do when the light is not bright enough (hint - almost all of them are not bright enough for my needs)?
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.
> You're not wrong - but what do I do when the light is not bright enough (hint - almost all of them are not bright enough for my needs)?
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.
you're telling me I can find a replacement for the LED base?
When I looked, the fans were all listed as having irreplaceable bulbs. That is one of the complaints in the article.
> 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.
LED bulbs shouldn't cook. I'm not talking incandescent, but LED bulbs. I use them all the time. They last a decent amount of time.
> you're telling me I can find a replacement for the LED base?
Depending on which one you mean in the article… the super gaudy ones with extremely custom light fixtures would be hard. The basic led based that have crazy fan blades? Yeah, no problem.
Here’s an example (there’s a million like this in a variety of sizes, lumens, and color temps, just the first example I found on Amazon):
https://a.co/d/0aP9nKdJ
> LED bulbs shouldn't cook. I'm not talking incandescent, but LED bulbs. I use them all the time. They last a decent amount of time.
But they do. They’re obviously not as much heat as incandescent lights, but if you’ve ever felt an LED bulb after it’s run for awhile, they’re typically too hot to touch. And fan enclosures are very harsh environments: no airflow and fully enclosed typically.
But it is interesting you menition enclosed. All my rooms that don't have fans have the bulbs fully enclosed in a ceiling fixture. They last a decent amount of time.
> (Well, OK, the base may be - where the connection is. Will need to test out).
Usually that's the hottest part. And it's also the area most likely to be damaged by the excess heat: the power electronics
> Ah, that explains your stance. I definitely don't want fans that have them enclosed. Something like this is fine:
That example would be considered to be considered an enclosed luminary, actually. The bulbs are facing downward and the backside is enclosed by the glass/plastic globes which trap heat. You'll get more airflow than the fully enclosed ones... but it's still much worse than an open air bulb (or, bulbs where the bulbs face upward), and the place where you screw the bulb into the socket is going to be the hottest point since convection causes the heat to travel upwards.
Also, generally, the more modern designs have an enclosure because it spreads light out with the diffusion of the globe. You can use ring LEDs or other various patterns more easily that way.
> The problem is almost all the LED fans can’t be controlled with a second switch.
The problem is coupling the light source with the fan. Ceiling fans should not supply light. Period. As I said in another comment, in other countries, you have separate fixtures for these. No one buys a fan with light fixtures. It's stupid.
It’s not stupid. The combo is very nice and convenient. I like the combo, just not the coupling of power. Light fan combos have been around forever and have worked fine for many decades.
It's convenient if you like a light overhead. But if you've lived in places where the light is more at an angle (top of a wall, pointing down at an angle), you won't want to go back.
I guess they exist, but living in different states, I've yet to find an apartment/house that has light fixtures (pointing downwards at an angle) on a wall.
Heck, you could loosen the "angle" part - I still haven't found one.
While I admire the humor of the article, the overall vibe feels like the author simply cannot imagine that practicality isn't the only requirement when it comes to design, and on top of that, thinks that American marketing is the only god-approved style of marketing.
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?".
Kate Wagner is the creator of the viral blog McMansionHell, which roasts the world’s ugliest houses from top to bottom, all while teaching about architecture and design. [...] Kate prefers the pronouns she/her or they/them. - https://mcmansionhell.com/about
> Sometimes new design phenomena slip past even those of us who are most in tune with the happenings of the built environment.
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.
As someone taller than 6 feet, I am never comfortable around ceiling fans. Some of these fans, though, leave uncomfortable behind and embrace absolutely terrifying, regardless of how the ceilings might be.
I bought a ceiling fan last year for my bedroom (the best investment in Europe; do it while you can). It was surprising hard to find a good normal one.
You will actually need to dig deep and order from some shady websites to get one in regular wood with a regular shape.
how is it hard? I went to local price comparison site, sorted by lwoest price, scrolled until I saw ordinary design I like, this all took me like 20 seconds
though I have ceiling fans in every habitable room already like 10 years (Westinghouse, it was just cheapest model with similar design (different lamp shade) as link above bought in Hornbach or Obi), tried 1st year in new flat without AC, but before 2nd summer installed AC everywhere, great combo to make AC more energy efficient, the best investment in Europe would be AC, no ceiling fan will help you alone when it's 35-40C in shadow
ceiling fan is great low cost easy to install investment for short term temperatures between 25-35C in shadow, for something like 33-35C+ for more than one week it's useless though
I don't really get the anti-AC fetish in some parts of Europe
>I don't really get the anti-AC fetish in some parts of Europe
It's mostly just bitter renters. Floor units suck, and you can't get the awesome window units that people in America have, because vertical sliding windows are uncommon. If you own your own property, the best investment you can get would be a mini-split AC/heat pump. Not only does it cool you in summer, but it provides very cheap heating in the winter.
if by floor units you mean portable AC, you should know there are already models like Midea PortaSplit, which is basically portable split AC with flexible hose, you can use it on window or on balcony, of course need to deal with gap in the window/door somehow (people here in Czechia solve it with traditional portable units with having special hole in glass pane)
This was something that, and this probably comes as no surprise for the ones in the know, Technology Connections youtube channel has noted, the preference for form over function https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWdCqpXB7A
The bigger issue I see in new construction is that all the recessed fixtures are replaced with flat LED modules that are not serviceable.
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.
They are serviceable in the sense that you simply replace them when they fail. Given that they cost so little now and have a service life of decades, it's more cost effective than a traditional fixture. Older fixtures with LEDs jammed into them were always an interim solution, and more prone to failure simply because of the design.
I have to wonder what people are eating that leads to the toilet problems I hear complaints about. Do you not have enough fiber in your diet? I'm a 47 guy and I can't remember the last time I clogged a toilet.
We built our place in 2017 in Philadelphia, and our kitchen island has electricity. We did get non-servicable LED ceiling lights. It took 10 years before one of them started to blink. Rather than wait around for all of them to fail, I replaced the entire house with newer, slimmer LED lights, for less than the cost of a fancy floor lamp. The new ones let you select brightness and color, and were a breeze to install, and run much cooler, temperature wise.
I don't miss having to change light bulbs, and upgrading the lighting one a decade is a trade-off I was willing to make.
Maybe off topic, but I think part of the problem is toilet paper. Sure, maybe some people are out there dropping 5 Curic logs every couple of days. But I've more commonly seen (Disclaimer: Low sample size here, I just grew up with a large family and little privacy) people take an arm's length of toilet paper, wad it up into a rather large ball, and use it for one wipe. Repeat several times until clean. Then hit the flush lever and walk away. There is no courtesy flush. There's only a naive hope, and perhaps a prayer, that it all goes away. If the toilet clogs? That's a sign there is a problem with the toilet. They do not think the problem might be them.
What do you mean? I’d much rather pay $30 for a separate LED driver and LED module that will last x0,000 hours and comes with a five year warranty instead of crappy LED lamps that last a few thousand hours.
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 had 3 big ass fans in one of my offices and when I would turn them on full speed, i would make sure people weren't under them. It was a cool party trick but fans at speed can be a little distracting.
Probably not at those sizes. The company has been around for a long time with products that appear to fill a need, particularly with livestock cooling. Their fans are designed to move a high volume of air at a low fan speed. The ones I have seen in person around here in warehouses and manufacturing shops are very quiet. And very big.
the designs shown by op are wayyy out there. the ones i've grown up with were much more spartan in comparison. just having any lights, forget the ones used for actual lighting, remains a foreign concept to me. these ones look like the lighting and looks have higher priority than the core function.
for me just having a brushless motor and a remote was good enough lol. maybe smart home functionality nowadays perhaps.
Funny thing... if we decided to add a ceiling fan to our apartment (we never would - we loathe them) we would have to commission an engineering study to make sure it doesn't affect our neighbors. The sound, the resonance... if we just put one in and the neighbors could hear it we'd have to remove it.
Modern fan company .. I’ve take a few of them apart. They’re built from a different era — really thought out and quality build. It’s just a rare product that when you get your hands on it, you appreciate the craft and engineering that went into manufacturing it.
Don't underestimate the ability to make it very difficult to non-destructively reach the actual LEDs in many of these devices in the name of being small or "stylish."
It's rarely the actual diode which failed. It's normally a part of the driver circuit. So you need to non-destructively disassemble the device (quite challenging in a lot of designs), then have at least basic EE skills and tools to diagnose what is actually going wrong, and then once again some basic soldering skills.
> A bag of bulk LEDs imported from China is surprisingly cheap.
Like a lot of repairs it's not the parts that cost it's the time of even somewhat skilled local labor to repair.
We've been buying fans for our home reno, and the selections get super thin once my absolute position of "NO FING REMOTES" is factored in.
I do not see wireless remotes for ceiling fans as a good idea. I especially* do not see wireless remotes for ceiling fans as a good idea when the remote is intended to be the ONLY WAY TO CONTROL IT.
Surprised this isn’t the top comment. Great video. TLDR fans have changed look but only gotten worse and the best fans are using 100 year old design that you have to oil every year
I was in the Costco this weekend waiting in line to get a vaccine and decided to look up. I was amazed at the warehouse sized ceiling fans they have. They are huge.
There's a company based in Kentucky named Big Ass Fans that makes a lot of these. I talked to them at a job fair about 15 years ago, at least at the time they were writing a lot of software for motor controllers, etc. in house. Sounded pretty interesting.
I thought I would enjoy owning a house and doing upgrades and what not. Everything was 10x the work, less possible than expected, more expensive than you could imagine. Then your ceiling caves in, the water heater dies at exactly 10 years, the pollen clogs the pool pump you never use.
Cars are way more fun but the return on investment sucks.
I was in this market recently. What happened is that China flooded the market with all sorts of designs that don't fit the conventional fan 'template' that Westerners grew up with.
These fans with integrated LEDs rarely publish their CRI or have a good one if they do so I dismissed them.
I've been thinking about installing a ceiling fan in my UK victorian home. Those in the US may not be aware, but ceiling fans are really not common in the UK. So it's been rather difficult to find one.
But really what annoys me the most is that they seem stuck in the 90s. Even the really expensive ones come with crappy white remote controls. Why aren't they just coming with a Matter/Thread chip so I can control them from my Apple Home?
What's worse is that the LEDs in these have absolutely horseshit drivers, often noticeably flickery, can't be dimmed at the switch, I even tried to wire an inline potentiometer to one which claims it had a dedicated connection for a dimmer and still junk.
Phillips' Hue line tends to be somewhat expensive and nothing amazing to look at, but they're at least not the dodgy nonsense you can find on Amazon and Wayfair.
Our current stage of capitalism where retailers are just dumb hosts for garbage is very annoying... this is true of everything from ceiling lights to food delivery. There are enough degrees of separation involved now that no one holds each other accountable for poor quality anymore. You open a return and it either ends up in a landfill or shuffled on to the next sucker.
The idea that a fan is also a light is totally alien to me.
If you're into nice lighting, central light from the center/top of the ceiling is another no-no. I.e. the article's domain "mcmansionhell.com" kinda fits this.
I.e. one can read the critique on ceiling fans also as a critique on eye-cancer-causing central ceiling light fixtures. Rotating blades attached or not.
On that note, we installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom to aid with the constantly hotter European summmers.
All fans we looked at were either (a) also a lights and (mostly)/or (b) ugly as hell.
Finally we remembered seeing a beautiful art-deco fan in a retaurant in Italy, a year before, and photographing it at the time. Google image search found the product; boy was it expensive.
The blades are heat-pressed plywood using old/original molds, from the looks of it. [1]
Curiously the Spanish company behind it, Faro, were also among the few fans we had found browsing that we liked.
But they were all very minimalist and for that room we needed something a little bit 'more'; but w/o crossing the kitsch threshold.
Also from the European perspective: basically every room has a light fixture in the center of the ceiling. When you then eventually see the light and want to put in a ceiling fan, that transition is substantially eased by a ceiling fan that also has lights. If it doesn't, you have to work on lighting the room in some different way
But those central ceiling lights are already pretty bad, and strapping them below rotating blades only makes thing ten times worse, even ignoring the optics of the fan itself. If you put in some effort you can do much better with a fan like yours and separate lighting. It's however not entirely surprising that the majority of the market caters to the quick fix of a light-fan combo
This happened to us, and the people we bought the house from had actually bought (but not installed) a new controller. Turned out the problem wasn't the controller at all. Rather, all the houses on the street had been built at the same time by the same company, and most (maybe all) had ceiling fans that came with a remote. Inside the remote and inside the fan was a DIP-switch consisting of four switches, each switch labeled with a 0 and a 1 depending on which way you pushed it. And all probably came from the factory with a 0000 setting.
You guessed it: while ordinarily the controller had a limited range, sometimes (windows open? controller pointed in a certain direction? I don't know) one neighbor's controller would activate someone else's fan. The solution was of course simple: set the DIP switch in our fan and controller to some other setting, like 0101. Since I did that, the poltergeist has been unable to operate our ceiling fans.
>The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining (predr.ag) 1147 points by bonyt on April 1, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 325 comments
But also no, they weren't that good in 2024, which is another reason to recognize it's not LLM slop.
I have AI blind hate fatigue.
Edit:
Heck, a year or two ago, someone accused me of being an LLM here on HN, sir, English is just my second language, I sometimes fumble it organically, thank you very much, I also have a touch of ADD.
I don't use LLMs for my comments, I write the dumbest things I think of and eat the downvotes, I make it a point that if I'm posting comments or writing a blog post, an LLM is only going to tell me suggestions on what to tweak, but for the most part I post raw if its just a comment on a forum.
AI is great at saying nothing specific really flamboyantly or juicing up very little substance with a whole bunch of that sort of puffery that's endemic to corporate communication. It is very bad at the subtle pairing of tone and diction with subject matter and audience that humans just do naturally.
That's the kind of language style LLMs picked on (recent attempts to make their writing more common-people, particularly Claude, notwithstanding), and the jarring/sloppy part is mostly just that you don't expect to see this kind of language in a bug report or commit description or design draft. If you got such response from a person in such context, you'd accuse them of showing off and making communication difficult. But it's not bad English - it's too good English for context.
Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi. I find it hard to believe that a networking engineer and his son that's also an engineer use the incorrect term?
Depends on the OS. Linux and macOS ping will keep pinging until you ctrl+c. Windows ping I guess is what you're talking about? Even then, I assume Windows ping has a command-line option to change the default number of pings.
> Even if you increase the count, after 20 lost packages wouldn't you have decided the connection isn't up?
Maybe not? It feels like you're just trying to come up with random excuses as to why this isn't real.
> Also this story is about problems with the connection of their house, not the wi-fi.
The connection to their house is a point-to-point line-of-sight WiFi link between the house and the author's father's office building.
Re: your other comment. When my dad has problems with the internet, he will say the wifi is not working. And this isn’t incorrect, even if the source of the issue is not happening between the router and his device. Sure, the underlying issue may be something else. But by that logic putting anything but the final root cause in the title would be misleading or “real network engineers wouldn’t do that”, but I would argue that would just be bad storytelling..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848415
It doesn't matter if two houses have the same identity as long as the remote in one doesn't reach the fan in the other.
The wikipedia article for the four color theorm discusses higher dimensional life like being in a 3-d apartment building. If you live in a Klein bottle you got other problems beyond ceiling fans.
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.
I learned recently that Dubai is also the name of the emirate. I don’t have a good understanding of the UAE governmental structure, but the Emirates do seem to have their own governments. Maybe it can be thought of as a country in the same way Scotland can be thought of as a country.
Also, Dubai is effectively a city-state, as the vast majority of the population of the Emirate lives in the city itself.
Mounting options that allow larger LED lights allow you to use lights that are more thermally efficient without sacrificing any replaceability. JIS C 8310 mounts for example.
Your comparison of USB-A to USB-C is nonsensical and does not actually acknowledge the issue of why the existing screw in bulb direct replacement have issues
Screw-in sockets are more durable and long-lasting than any replacement so-far, most of which have been replaced again (remember those weird fluorescent mini-bulb sockets?).
Well, we can certainly argue with 110 or 220 is a better voltage for a house. It is quite clear that 12 volts is too low.
At 48VDC you could run 16AWG like 100ft and still be fine as long as the lights pull around 60W or less all together (which works out to ~12 lights on a circuit). And that circuit would only add another ~2W or so in power losses when energized.
That circuit is essentially what power over ethernet does today so you could replace romex with PoE Type 3/Type 4 plenum rated ethernet and it'd be like half the cost.
And if you really want to optimise for losses you could put the switches on the ethernet data line and use that for sensing rather than running the PoE circuit out to each light switch (and then de-energise the PoE circuit when the switches report off). Bonus points in that this would allow you to "reprogram" which light switch controls which circuit without needing to do any re-wiring.
And again, your whatever voltage, 48 volts, is way too much for an LED, so we still have a power supply. What's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC? Ultimately, there's not much of a difference, well, you could do a very cheap linear regulator and be horribly wasteful of power, but more likely you're going to be doing a social power supply, which is going to be more complex and have similar efficiency losses. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to know this for sure but I would suspect the power supply in your Ethernet switch and then the second one to get to that your voltage is less efficient than just having a single power supply that goes from regular line voltage to whatever the LEDs need.
You still have to run romex for the other circuits. But it's not hard to run those on a separate breaker. Rooms often have like one and a half 15A circuits each because lighting used to draw so much power but now you can drop it down to one 15A circuit per room and run a single circuit that switches out to the entire house off of one 15A breaker.
> what's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC?
It's already DC. A properly sized buck converter based LED driver is going to have like 80-95% efficiency when the LED is on (and it's trivial to draw no power when off) and they are like 0.25USD per IC.
They are going to have equal or better performance than AC->DC switching mode power supplies because buck converters are already the simplest and most efficient type of SMPS.
And it's not like we need to just stop producing Edison socket styles tomorrow. But let's make sane standards today.
My current apartment has dedicated circuits in the living room and bedroom. But in the living room they're in awkward places.
I always had to resort to multiple lamps that would plug into an outlet so I could place them where I needed them. Running 12 V for the bulbs would require rewiring most of the apartment.
Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Its not like your bulbs are plugging straight into your wall outlets. You've got some kind of lamp fixture that the bulbs screw in to, correct?
Your lamps would still plug into mains, same as they do today. The lamp fixture overall would contain the driver components, hopefully in packaging which lets it manage heat well and have good build quality. But whatever parts do fail routinely should be able to be easily replaced with some kind of standardized socket. It just seems like we're trying to squeeze too much too cheaply into a form factor that's ill suited for the requirements by trying to shove all the driver circuitry into the same envelope of an older Edison A-shape socket style bulb.
This has already kind of been a thing for a while with low voltage halogen lamps. The bulbs themselves aren't made for mains voltage, the lamp structures themselves give the right voltage for the halogen mini bulbs. I've replaced a few bi-pin halogen lights for LEDs with drop-in replacements (especially for outdoor lights), but this same kind of bulb packaging hasn't really been very common for interior lighting from what I've seen.
> Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
I was talking about the lamp itself. Maybe I used the wrong term? I meant the fixture which holds the wire and expects a bulb. That fixture needs to go into mains, because that outlet may have to also service something else entirely.
Now, sure, usually those fixtures tend to be larger than the bulbs, so they could hold the conversion circuitry. I'd be fine with that. But the commenter I was replying to talked about having an alternative DC circuit for the lights.
Amazon is a tough place to buy stuff like that due to fakes.
You make a good point though, I probably spend more time thinking about light bulbs than the average person. :)
And nowadays you can get E27 LED bulbs for 75 cents at IKEA, which is cheaper than incandescents ever were. Not sure how they managed that, because it sounds insane.
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
I also find it hard to believe someone really does like CFLs as much as buttocks describes, and it makes me wonder if they are in fact just trolling.
Anyone that says they like CFL has to be trolling. Any other answer is just inconceivable to me.
They aren’t designed to fail, they are designed to work around some predictable model during the warranty and extended warranty period.
The reason most consumer LED bulbs fail early today is because consumers are low-information buyers who make purchase decisions based overwhelmingly on price and secondarily on aesthetics. The typical buyer has no way to accurately judge the actual design longevity of a bulb on the shelf. Yes, bulbs have lifetime ratings, but even if people bother to read them, those ratings in many places are not well regulated and reflect an ideal scenario that oftentimes is not reflective of real-world use.
The sales success of these race-to-the-bottom bulbs has driven higher quality bulbs off of the shelf at most retailers. You can get well designed long-life LED lighting, but you'd need to step up to commercial/industrial options. There are long life bulbs available, but they generally are designed for uses where they are difficult to replace... because in those use cases a high product price can be justified by lower labor costs to maintain their installation... e.g., bulbs for use high up on a structure, factory lighting, continuous use, etc.
The reason Dubai has better bulbs is simply because they have decided to require it. The reason the US has shit bulbs is because Americans love buying $0.80-1.50 light bulbs. The Dubai bulb is an order of magnitude more expensive. This is a hard sell at Walmart. And the TCO of the $0.87 bulbs on Amazon is still less even accounting for early failures if you are a homeowner who is not factoring in labor costs.
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.
Modern LED bulb lifetime is the result of similar factors: wanting more profit. But I think this is being achieved more through aggressively reducing manufacturing cost rather than planned obsolescence.
Operative word here is "can".
These lightbulbs, while using less electricity, use much more energy to produce. And I wonder what with their substrates, if that isn't more difficult to recycle too. I'm not sure, and don't want to judge, but if both every efficiency and recycling are harder, then these bulbs aren't really energy and environmentally efficient.
Traditional light bulbs have taught us that lights naturally have to be "consumables". That has been far less true for energy saving lamps (of which I have maybe 2 or 3 still left which I planned to replace by LEDs once they die, but they just won't). As far as I can tell, this isn't at all the case for LEDs.
It's much more likely that lamps and ceiling fans made out of plastic break from accidental physical impact or turn ugly due to natural UV discolorization or similar. And probably most will live on until replaced due to changing tastes.
Lots of manufacturers are simplifying assembly design by making the lights non-replaceable much like phone manufacturers glued their batteries in. Fewer clips / screws / gaskets / sockets / wires etc.
Of course, the refrigerator model isn't made anymore and probably isn't under warranty.
LED bulbs can be designed to live almost forever, but many of them are not designed so, for savings in cost, but the selling price may be poorly correlated with the manufacturing cost.
I have about two dozens Philips LED bulbs (4000 K color temperature and equivalent with old 100 W incandescent bulbs, i.e. 1500 lumen) of the kind that fits in legacy Edison sockets for incandescent bulbs. They were bought more than 15 years ago and all continue to work perfectly fine. I did not have to replace any of them.
Nonetheless, if I would buy today new LED bulbs, even of the same brand, I think that the chances are slim that they will be equally reliable.
In the past, you could rely on the brand of a product to inform you about the expected quality, but today buying any product with a certain brand provides no guarantee that the quality will be the same as for an apparently identical product bought one year earlier.
Oh take a look at the recall list of any car company in the world and you will find they all make simple mistakes, constantly. Probably a consequence of price pressure at all times. While cars are lasting longer than they used to on average, I feel like it’s been getting worse in some ways with cars lately turning into computers and good car/engine companies lately turning into bad tech companies without that much tech experience who outsource important parts and do lousy integration. And yeah, building assemblies or modules with non-replaceable parts is becoming more common.
Case 1: Ford Taurus wagon, my wife calls in a panic because it's blowing all hot air, and the dash is awash in lights. I get her to shut it off, wait a bit, and limp the last few km home. Turns out the serpentine belt goes around a pulley, the center bolt of which is screwed into the engine block. When the bearing started to go, there was friction, and the belt spun the bolt out and it fell off. It could have been reverse threaded, like one pedal on every bike, ever. But no. If it had, the bearing would screech, we'd get it replaced, instead of just silently falling out with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Case 2: Chevy Venture van, where the lights on the rear door all stopped working. Turned out the wiring harness for them ran through this accordion hose at the top, plugged into the bottom of a rain gutter across the top. So as soon as that hose broke its seal with the trough, the whole harness is shorted.
Funny, I have never experienced this sort of stupidity in the Toyotas and Hondas that have followed these last couple American-branded vehicles.
Which probably use the exact same serpentine belt idler running counterclockwise as your 1990s Taurus....
(There just aren't all that many different idler pulley configurations across the industry at any given time)
This sort of stuff absolutely pales in comparison to the sort of "people used to deride the Germans/French/Italians/British for this sort of engineering" type behavior that has permeated the industry.
120 years of lessons learned undone in 120 college credits.
Automotive engineering is "high" engineering. Like "high" tech it suffers deeply from people trying to implement all sorts of showboaty crap they learned in college without truly grasping the bigger picture and the tradeoffs this will subject the whole system to.
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.
This is common, but it's also not uncommon for only one circuit to be wired. The "clean" qualifier is because even if you have that line, you don't have a common DC ground.
> Unfortunately, I haven't seen this implemented anywhere.
Many Z-wave switches use the three-way traveler line for out-of-band signaling (instead of a traditional three-way switch arrangement.) (Homeseer, Inovelli, etc.) This line will communicate dimming, double taps, etc.
What I'm proposing is taking that unused extra wire, wiring in either a separate AC fan controller, and letting the fan controller in the fan take that as an input (drawing essentially zero current), and adjust the DC output based on it. No DC outside the fan itself (as it is presently), no need to pull another wire. On the downside, now your soft remote and hard AC fan controller can be in disagreement.
We have no Z-wave in the house, but I appreciate the tip.
Yes - doing this is quite ugly, electrically, is all. Dimmable LEDs, etc. do this same thing (with the load supply, not a separate line - you couldn't get away with this on a fan.)
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.)
There is.
I specifically purchased a Fanco Horizon DC fan as it has an optional physical wall switch which connected to the existing wiring for the fan it was replacing.
The caveat being if you use the wall remote, it's not compatible with the model with built in LED light fixture. This was a non issue for me as wanted to avoid any fan with built in LED light due to when the led panel fails, it'll be extremely difficult to replace vs having independent lights in the room.
I think most DC fans don't support wall remotes because it's cheaper and simpler not to, and provide a remote control instead. It's not a technical issue as you can absolutely find DC fans with wall controllers they are just harder to find.
How did it work electrically? This is what I mean by "clean."
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.
I'm pretty anti remotes and apps for things, but it's pretty handy when my spouse can start the fan from her phone in the middle of the night instead of waking me to go turn it on in the middle of the night.
Our current one isn't too loud and it has a nice range of speeds so you can run it without it getting super wobbly. But overall, I still dislike fans. :p
I should have been more specific - yes, you can "dim" AC fans and it's purely electrical. "Dimming" DC fans and similar switching loads requires detecting shaped pulses, and is really dirty and not something you want to do.
Lowes? Home Depot? Any other reputable, major home appliance store? Where else does one get a ceiling fan? Are you buying yours from Amazon or Ali Express?
But I don't think torque or longevity are actual issues with AC fans. Just efficiency and noise.
DC fans don't have the hum, get up to speed faster, etc. They can operate at a far greater range of speeds and still maintain high power output. AC fans operate in a much narrower envelope.
That's not something I've ever cared about.
Technology Connections "Ceiling fans: the simple idea we keep screwing up" YouTube video is interesting. The old old fans had oiled bearing baths and overbuilt motors, extremely overbuilt compared to today standards which means they'll probably keep going forever. If you are nerdy and interested it's worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWdCqpXB7A
Every high-end fan sold today is DC. It's possible that you didn't see the power supply.
> way worse than hauling my ass up to pull a damn chain.
Many people have high ceilings where a pull chain couldn't be humanly reached. Sure, this might work if you have 8' ceilings. Which high-end fans have pull chains?
a) I did a quick search and noticed that Hunter Fans sells many ceiling fans with AC motors at a variety of price points. [0][1] Do you consider what Hunter produces to be entirely mid-to-low-grade? Or are you doing the Scotsman thing where any ceiling fan that doesn't contain a DC motor cannot be high-end?
b) The manufacturer of the fans in my apartment is "Hampton Bay", which are readily available at Home Depot. If Home Depot hasn't fucked up their product categorization, nearly every fan they sell in the SF Bay Area today has an AC motor. [2][3] Given the price, I'd agree that the ones that Home Depot are selling are not high-end fans, but given that the ones in my apartment have given me trouble-free, zero-noise-other-than-the-whoosh-of-blades-cutting-through-air operation for fifteen years and have done the same for previous tenants for who knows how long, I don't see why I'd want a high-end fan.
c) Remember that I said "Every house I've ever lived in over my many decades of life has had ceiling fans. I've never known one to fail...". I've lived in my current place for ~fifteen years now. Even if the fans had been installed new just before I moved in [4] I'm fairly confident that DC-driven ceiling fans were -if available- an extremely high-end option in the US in 2011. Authoritative information is difficult for me to find, but I see weak indications that they didn't really become A Thing until 2020.
[0] <https://www.hunterfan.com/collections/ceiling-fans-without-l...>
[1] <https://www.hunterfan.com/collections/ceiling-fans-with-ligh...>
[2] <https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Ceiling-Fans/Hampton-Ba...>
[3] <https://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Ceiling-Fans/Hampton-Ba...>
[4] ...I know how my landlord operates and they absolutely were not. Plus, why would you replace something that's working fine and never breaks?
Almost every fan sold at Home Depot (in-store) is on the mid-to-low-end side of things. You'll notice that Home Depot doesn't sell Wolf, Cove, Sub-Zero, Viking, or Gaggenau appliances either.
DC fans were a thing as far back as 2007 (family had some, and they were even cheaper than today's DC fans, though maybe not with inflation.)
If you're in a situation where you have a landlord, the likelihood of your fans being premium is quite low, even in "luxury" apartments. They're a consumable item, and bearings go bad no matter what when you run them non-stop.
Looking at their inventory, they sell twenty six models of fan... sixteen DC and ten AC. You can verify by looking at the numbers next to the "Motor Type" category here [0].
> If you're in a situation where you have a landlord, the likelihood of your fans being premium is quite low... They're a consumable item, and bearings go bad no matter what when you run them non-stop.
Oh I know my landlord doesn't buy anything nice or do anything right. And yet, I've been in this apartment for fifteen years with these nth-hand Hampton Bay ceiling fans that continue to make no sound and have been running non-stop for most of those fifteen years.
Like, I believe you when you claim that that there are fancier fans out there, and it's plainly obvious that bearings are unlikely to last for millions of years, [1] but even if we only consider the past decade and a half of my personal experience with the fans in my apartment, I see no reason to get anything that -based on what you're telling me- is better than mid-to-low end. We don't even need to pile in my other mumble decades of experience to reach that conclusion.
Believe it or not, but there are times where better simply isn't worth it because what's good is so good that you won't notice the difference.
[0] <https://www.hunterfan.com/collections/casablanca-ceiling-fan...>
[1] But -for a gut check- go look up how long automotive wheel bearings typically last, consider how very much more harsh the environment they're deployed in is, and consider that it might be possible to design bearings that would easily last decades in an environment that's -in comparison- zero stress.
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?
That's what I meant when I wrote, "I tried changing channels in the remote but that didn't seem to help much.", and wondered "Maybe the channels are too few or narrow to be useful?".
Are you mad? That would cost low-single-digit pennies per unit!!! </pennypinching_bigco_derision>
I’ve looked at a product called Bond that seems to facilitate it. But haven’t yet tried it.
It wasn't that hard; I used gnuradio with an SDR to see what the remotes were sending and just pressed buttons and flipped switches until I figured out what all the bits were. There was no encryption whatsoever.
It might be that POE power supplies get hot - I've noticed the POE hats for the raspberry pi need a fan
I suspect this is a code violation, but considering part of the lighting wiring in the basement had been done with speaker wire and automotive cabling, I don't think compliance was on the top of the previous owner's list.
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 have a few questions regarding your products and spare parts:
> - Would it be possible to order a replacement lampshade for this Globo fan and deliver it to [place], [country]? The model is Globo 0350/0351, I have attached a picture to describe the part I need.
> Unfortunately, no—that item is no longer in our product range.
>- Is it possible to order other spare parts, like LED modules for this or other models?
> Unfortunately, no
> - Separately, is the Elina model available with a shorter rod? The ceiling height in the room is approximately 2.6m.
> Available only in the specified length
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.
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.
Ask a friend who is an interior designer. There are great fans on the market, but building a quality fan costs money and for whatever reason the walk-in stores don't want to have those, so instead they add baubles to justify a ridiculous mark-up. (Good tell for quality: warranty.)
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.
Now if only DC wiring and appliances were more common/mature, could possibly drop the “inverter” part altogether. If I were single I’d try more seriously for a full-DC system, but as a married man I’ll probably just stick with everything AC.
A sensible first step is just a little rack of cheap lithiums (I’m using pylontech) and an inverter charger like a victron multiplus - planning on adding to our on-grid home as it has become tedious dealing with the outages.
I have this issue as well, of burning thru LED lights.
I replaced it with something similar in aesthetics but twice the price, including replaceable LEDs (GU10).
As a side note: replacing a light fixture is mostly easier than I expected except that you need a couple zip ties on hand to keep the new fixture close to the installation site while you attach the wires. Also, wire nuts are miserable and you should use lever nuts instead (check Home Depot).
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.
For the overhead lights in the main area of the house and in the kitchen, we went with 3500k. The kitchen lights are on when preparing food and the overhead lights in the main area are used pretty much only when cleaning.
Task, accent, and decorative lighting are warmer. The specific temperature depends on the purpose of the light.
What I want more of are dim-to-warm lights. For example in our master bathroom, it would be nice to have candle-like light late at night and have super bright (high CRI) coolish light while cleaning or getting dressed. All the best systems though are pretty expensive (Lutron Ketra for example) and not terribly DIY friendly.
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.
Interesting, I heard that in the beginning of the 20th century they were selling light bulbs which never burn out. Until they realized they would go out of business. Maybe a similar thing happened with LEDs.
The LEDs themselves are probably fine, but the driver is dead.
"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.
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?
They are also substantially more quiet (silent) where every Hunter fan from $150-$550 had terrible hums. YMMV.
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
I bought some high CRI LED bulbs from some place recommended in an HN post.
Being that you're unwilling to name the vendor or brand, or even a proper link... it doesn't seem a rousing recommendation. Is it an affiliate link, I wonder.
We live in San Francisco so there are only a few days a year when we need a fan. Like this weekend.
From my order history:
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.
I resorted to buying a “smart” fan, pulling credentials for it, blocking it from all internet access, and controlling it exclusively with Home Assistant and the remote control it came with. These things are so flimsy nowadays and I couldn’t find anything of decent quality.
> These fixtures are also revolutionary in that they are extremely cheap in the short run – many of these fans cost under $200 – but expensive in the long rung, as the LEDs usually cannot be replaced, causing the whole apparatus to be thrown away.
A few years ago we had a relatively small pendant lamp (I think there were like 6 or so hanging lights total) over a stairwell that we really liked. It was installed by the previous owners just before we moved in, and about 7-8 years later 2 of the lamps died (not sure if it was the actual LED or just the electronics like another sibling comment mentioned). We were a bit aghast when we got an electrician and he said the only reasonable thing to do would be to replace the entire chandelier.
It's just so ironic how LEDs were supposed to be the "environmental" choice yet they were just another tool for our disposable economy.
https://youtu.be/_KWdCqpXB7A
And of course complains.
But they are technologically informed complaints.
I for instance don't subscribe because I want to know about old toasters, christmas lights and the internal combustion engine. If that was the case, I'd subscribe to channels specific to that topic. I subscribe to Technology Connections because I like his videos, and if I learn a thing or two along the way, that's a nice extra
And his research is original.
Not a book report cribbed from Wikipedia.
So does YouTube. It rewards longer videos both monetarily and algorithmically.
This is why there's been so many videos over the last few years that are just barely over 20min or just barely over 60min.
The result is video essays that could be 5min that are padded out to 20min.
And I’m not advising that they should do anything different! Who am I?! I’m just pointing out that the culture of YouTubers is fundamentally about deliberately subjecting yourself to the most extreme audience capture.
Additionally, "the algorithm" rewards channels that have a lot of watchtime & retention (because againg, this leads to more ad placement opportunities for Youtube). So if you are able to produce long-form videos that keep the viewers engaged and watching, your videos are more likely to be recommended, which reinforces the popularity of long videos.
Ben Jordan used to do almost entirely synthesizer stuff, now it is all privacy and security focused because that is what he got rewarded for. NatswhatIreckon, did all manner of comedy stuff like making fun are car shows, he ended up fixated on cooking because one video exploded in views back 2020. Heck, MrBeast used to be a minecraft channel.
In getting rewarded, they tend to lean into that. I don't blame them but also it does mean they become risk adverse at times.
- the algorithm rewards it
- livelihood is parasocial community that is helped by length
- creatives seek challenges; ambition becomes length
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.
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.
LEDs mean that the light itself is cheap so you can basically ignore energy usage concerns.
Generally, I think it is better to have:
- multiple dimmer sources of light instead of a single bright central light
- shades to diffuse the light (or lights pointed at walls or ceilings) instead of having bright point sources
- some ability to adjust brightness (eg reasonable quality dimmable LEDs)
- replaceable ordinary-looking bulbs from a reputable source (if you have 10 bulbs, it will be sad if one fails and you can’t get a similar looking bulb with a matching brightness and temperature)
- lamps, potentially wired up to light-switches for the room, which can provide light closer to where people will be and from better directions (eg maybe you sit somewhere where you can’t or don’t have a nearby wall-mounted light so a lamp can provide good light for reading). This also works in rented accommodation where one has less control over built-in fixtures.
- general considerations as to the purpose of the room (eg brighter cooler directable ceiling-mounted spotlights are more useful in a kitchen than a drawing room)
- sparing use of can lights (though this can be difficult if ceilings are low)
In either case, learn to do hot air rework?
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...
Those initiatives were legislated during the Bush administration in 2007.
They were rolled back some during Trump's first term, in 2019.
Restrictions were re-introduced under Biden, in 2022.
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.
It depends on the particular furnace or NG generator in question, but if you take the best case for each, then this does not appear to be true.
The most efficient combined cycle NG plant is around 65% efficient, without considering transmission losses. The most efficient NG furnace is 90+% efficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced-air_gas
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.
Maybe... I've got a NG furnace now and am looking at adding a heat pump, and even with a pretty expansive budget, I'm struggling to make the numbers work on actually removing the furnace entirely vs. doing heat pump + furnace. (And the near-impossibility of upgrading my home service past 100A makes it extra complicated if I want to electrify everything.)
If the evaluation is total lifetime cost to you, using the equipment you currently have almost always wins out. Same with purchasing more efficient hvac and such: the cheapest/lowest efficiency hvac is almost always the most cost effective. That tide could turn with sharp increases in NG or electric prices… but it hasn’t historically been true for many years.
A 100 Watt light bulb consumes 100 Watts. It emits 100 Watts. That's 8,190 BTU every 24 hours, and it is perfectly efficient at doing this.
At $0.1745 per kiloWatt hour, it costs $0.419 to produce those 8,190 BTUs.
A natural gas furnace at 90% efficiency, meanwhile: Yeah, 10% goes right out the pipe and is lost.
But if natural gas costs $1.346 per therm, then producing 8,190 BTUs of useful heat costs closer to the realm of $0.123.
One thing costs about 42 cents. The other thing costs about 12 cents. 42 moneys is more than 12 moneys. :)
---
I might opine that the most cost-efficient way of dealing with an incandescent light bulb is usually to immediately replace it with an LED bulb, and then landfill the old thing even though it still works.
4-packs of 100 Watt-equivalent LED bulbs are $12.97 at Wal-Mart, or about $3.24 per bulb. If it's the heating season and natural gas is being used at 90% efficiency, then replacing the incandescent pays for itself in about 300 hours of use. The LED will then continue to work and save money for thousands of additional hours.
Compare that to a modern NG furnace, which can be 90% efficient or more.
So if you just want heat, burning the NG directly is generally more energy efficient than burning NG to boil water to drive turbines to generate electricity and then converting that electricity back to heat via resistive heating.
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
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.
> 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
Except "traditional" it seems.
https://www.amazon.com/Hunter-inch-Indoor-Ceiling-Light/dp/B...
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
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Memphis_Design
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Memphis_Jr.
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".)
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...
> is Venice an island or is every block in Venice an island? Is Venice an archipelago?
Fun fact: Venice is, in fact, an island, and every block in venice is an island, and venice is an archipelago: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TfbkNvrLU55E9n9KA
They are awesome cards, but they're not islands. I think ultimately Richard Garfield made a mistake calling the blue basic land "Island", instead of something a bit more general involving water. But it seems like WotC's art department decided to pretend he did anyway, and so we get these cards called "Island" even though they're not. Which is funny to notice, but doesn't actually affect anything, so that seems like the right solution.
> Fun fact: Venice is, in fact, an island, and every block in venice is an island, and venice is an archipelago
I agree that was a weird complaint—yes, Venice is definitely an archipelago. I guess when you're on a rant, sometimes you overstep.
I wonder if that's due to social media having made the visual aspect of things more important?
I suggest only buying enclosed rated fixture lamps because they put out less heat and will last longer in an open or enclosed fixture.
I actually ended up with one fan that looks exactly like the enclosed one (I had limited clearance and needed something small). It works fine as both a light and a fan. If the bulb goes out, I can just replace the whole thing (it wasn’t that expensive).
For the other one, I bought something higher end bc I had enough clearance to go with larger blades (44” Minka Aire Light Wave). The light is a plug-in module, so if it goes out, I can find a replacement (assuming they still make the module).
Overall, these combined units aren’t perfect, but they let you add a fan without needing to add more wiring. The one thing to be careful of is to make sure your electrical boxes are fan rated.
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.
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.
Poor cooling, poor light emission, poor longevity. Philips Dubai lamps aren't bad in this line, but Feit, Philips' normal products, etc. have high failure rates when installed in most enclosures (fans, cans, tight sconces, etc.)
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.
https://mcmansionhell.com/post/829127919552151552/what-is-go...
you're telling me I can find a replacement for the LED base?
When I looked, the fans were all listed as having irreplaceable bulbs. That is one of the complaints in the article.
> 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.
LED bulbs shouldn't cook. I'm not talking incandescent, but LED bulbs. I use them all the time. They last a decent amount of time.
Depending on which one you mean in the article… the super gaudy ones with extremely custom light fixtures would be hard. The basic led based that have crazy fan blades? Yeah, no problem.
Here’s an example (there’s a million like this in a variety of sizes, lumens, and color temps, just the first example I found on Amazon): https://a.co/d/0aP9nKdJ
> LED bulbs shouldn't cook. I'm not talking incandescent, but LED bulbs. I use them all the time. They last a decent amount of time.
But they do. They’re obviously not as much heat as incandescent lights, but if you’ve ever felt an LED bulb after it’s run for awhile, they’re typically too hot to touch. And fan enclosures are very harsh environments: no airflow and fully enclosed typically.
It may depend on the bulb, but while warm, most of the ones I use aren't too hot to touch.
(Well, OK, the base may be - where the connection is. Will need to test out).
> And fan enclosures are very harsh environments: no airflow and fully enclosed typically.
Ah, that explains your stance. I definitely don't want fans that have them enclosed. Something like this is fine:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Hampton-Bay-Rockport-52-in-Indoo...
But it is interesting you menition enclosed. All my rooms that don't have fans have the bulbs fully enclosed in a ceiling fixture. They last a decent amount of time.
Usually that's the hottest part. And it's also the area most likely to be damaged by the excess heat: the power electronics
> Ah, that explains your stance. I definitely don't want fans that have them enclosed. Something like this is fine:
That example would be considered to be considered an enclosed luminary, actually. The bulbs are facing downward and the backside is enclosed by the glass/plastic globes which trap heat. You'll get more airflow than the fully enclosed ones... but it's still much worse than an open air bulb (or, bulbs where the bulbs face upward), and the place where you screw the bulb into the socket is going to be the hottest point since convection causes the heat to travel upwards.
Also, generally, the more modern designs have an enclosure because it spreads light out with the diffusion of the globe. You can use ring LEDs or other various patterns more easily that way.
The problem is coupling the light source with the fan. Ceiling fans should not supply light. Period. As I said in another comment, in other countries, you have separate fixtures for these. No one buys a fan with light fixtures. It's stupid.
Reading lamps don't exist in those places.
Heck, you could loosen the "angle" part - I still haven't found one.
I mean, sure, you can always wire it.
They move a lot of air. They’re quiet. You can move them around if needed. You can take them with you when you move. No installation costs.
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?".
They use Latin alphabet. For typing in Chinese
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.
You will actually need to dig deep and order from some shady websites to get one in regular wood with a regular shape.
cost around 50EUR here in Czechia
https://stropni-ventilatory.heureka.cz/trio-reality-r6659203...
though I have ceiling fans in every habitable room already like 10 years (Westinghouse, it was just cheapest model with similar design (different lamp shade) as link above bought in Hornbach or Obi), tried 1st year in new flat without AC, but before 2nd summer installed AC everywhere, great combo to make AC more energy efficient, the best investment in Europe would be AC, no ceiling fan will help you alone when it's 35-40C in shadow
ceiling fan is great low cost easy to install investment for short term temperatures between 25-35C in shadow, for something like 33-35C+ for more than one week it's useless though
I don't really get the anti-AC fetish in some parts of Europe
It's mostly just bitter renters. Floor units suck, and you can't get the awesome window units that people in America have, because vertical sliding windows are uncommon. If you own your own property, the best investment you can get would be a mini-split AC/heat pump. Not only does it cool you in summer, but it provides very cheap heating in the winter.
I believe the term is "Schadenfan", the misfortune fan
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.
We built our place in 2017 in Philadelphia, and our kitchen island has electricity. We did get non-servicable LED ceiling lights. It took 10 years before one of them started to blink. Rather than wait around for all of them to fail, I replaced the entire house with newer, slimmer LED lights, for less than the cost of a fancy floor lamp. The new ones let you select brightness and color, and were a breeze to install, and run much cooler, temperature wise.
I don't miss having to change light bulbs, and upgrading the lighting one a decade is a trade-off I was willing to make.
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.
Hate these new BLDC fans!
for me just having a brushless motor and a remote was good enough lol. maybe smart home functionality nowadays perhaps.
They certainly can, with the right tools. A bag of bulk LEDs imported from China is surprisingly cheap.
> A bag of bulk LEDs imported from China is surprisingly cheap.
Like a lot of repairs it's not the parts that cost it's the time of even somewhat skilled local labor to repair.
I do not see wireless remotes for ceiling fans as a good idea. I especially* do not see wireless remotes for ceiling fans as a good idea when the remote is intended to be the ONLY WAY TO CONTROL IT.
Yes, those are some crazy fans.
https://youtu.be/_KWdCqpXB7A
Meanwhile, making products for the tasteless: $$$
Cars are way more fun but the return on investment sucks.
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".
These fans with integrated LEDs rarely publish their CRI or have a good one if they do so I dismissed them.
But really what annoys me the most is that they seem stuck in the 90s. Even the really expensive ones come with crappy white remote controls. Why aren't they just coming with a Matter/Thread chip so I can control them from my Apple Home?
Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at the birds, but why would I want one more point of failure in something that should be simple?
Phillips' Hue line tends to be somewhat expensive and nothing amazing to look at, but they're at least not the dodgy nonsense you can find on Amazon and Wayfair.
Our current stage of capitalism where retailers are just dumb hosts for garbage is very annoying... this is true of everything from ceiling lights to food delivery. There are enough degrees of separation involved now that no one holds each other accountable for poor quality anymore. You open a return and it either ends up in a landfill or shuffled on to the next sucker.
If you're into nice lighting, central light from the center/top of the ceiling is another no-no. I.e. the article's domain "mcmansionhell.com" kinda fits this.
I.e. one can read the critique on ceiling fans also as a critique on eye-cancer-causing central ceiling light fixtures. Rotating blades attached or not.
On that note, we installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom to aid with the constantly hotter European summmers.
All fans we looked at were either (a) also a lights and (mostly)/or (b) ugly as hell.
Finally we remembered seeing a beautiful art-deco fan in a retaurant in Italy, a year before, and photographing it at the time. Google image search found the product; boy was it expensive.
The blades are heat-pressed plywood using old/original molds, from the looks of it. [1]
Curiously the Spanish company behind it, Faro, were also among the few fans we had found browsing that we liked.
But they were all very minimalist and for that room we needed something a little bit 'more'; but w/o crossing the kitsch threshold.
[1] https://faro.es/en/collection/cuba-old-gold-ceiling-fan/
But those central ceiling lights are already pretty bad, and strapping them below rotating blades only makes thing ten times worse, even ignoring the optics of the fan itself. If you put in some effort you can do much better with a fan like yours and separate lighting. It's however not entirely surprising that the majority of the market caters to the quick fix of a light-fan combo