Speaking of LED lighting, a homeowner friend sarcastically stated, “I especially like it when the LEDs start flickering, for then any room in your house can become — a disco inferno.”  From the Latin, “disco inferno” means “disco from hell.”  He said “the new flicking LED, aka ‘lightbulb from China,’ was frantically flashing out ‘SOS’ in Morris Code, just like the last one.”  He explained this:

We enjoy reading, but since I must work days to pay my taxes, our reading is done at night, requiring the use of a lightbulb.  Recently, while replacing an LED light, I noticed the apparent ‘joke’ on the side of the box stating these bulbs last 18 years.  I wondered, ‘I don’t know how they calculate 18 years, as these years aren’t even dog-years, for then the bulb would last a little over two years, as dog years are supposedly seven human years.’ The new LED lightbulbs are trash.  We had an incandescent ABC bulb in our home that burned for 30 years. While it was still burning, I replaced it with a new ‘18-year-lasting’ LED bulb, which now I have found lasts only about six months or less.

An article tried to explain the reason that LED bulbs aren’t lasting as long as they state on the boxes.  It stated one reason is people are using them with non-compatible dimmer switches, and they suggest upgrading to a newer option, whatever that means.

Next, they suggested the lights are getting hot.  They stated this can be due to insulation around the bulb, or too much dust on the bulb.  They stated, “Cleaning your fixtures regularly can help.”

Then the article stated high voltage power surges can cause the bulbs to burn out.  

Showing a picture of wires hanging from the ceiling, the article suggested old sockets and improperly inserted bulbs can impact electricity transfer.

Next, they said too much moisture in the air could cause them to burn out and suggested purchasing a dehumidifier, probably one made in China.

Then they said that your quickly-burning-out bulbs came from a defective batch.

My favorite suggestion in the article was “cutting back on switching lights ‘on and off’ can also help keep your bulbs lasting longer.”  Does this mean we leave the lights “off” since not using the bulbs will make them last longer, or do we cut the lights “on” and leave them “on”, forgetting about conserving energy?

Mentioning these suggestions to the homeowner, he promptly expressed, “I know how to screw in a lightbulb, and most of mine for the past several years have come from a defective batch.”

We can thank the Democrat-controlled 110th United States Congress for their “brilliance” in the destruction of the lightbulb industry in 2007 by requiring the classic lightbulb to have a higher level of efficiency than it can produce, which essentially forced them off the store shelves.  In 2007, Obama campaigned on phasing out all incandescent light bulbs.  What a campaign promise—make America dark again!  In 2012 Obama endorsed laws requiring all screw-based lightbulbs to use 28% less power.  Maybe Obama had a screw loose.  In 2014 an Obama-era regulation, set to take effect January 1, 2020, put in place the last round of energy-saving lightbulb regulations outlined in 2007.

In 2010 the last major U.S. G.E. factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs closed with 200 Virginians losing their jobs, sending more jobs overseas.

President Trump’s first administration attempted to roll back these ridiculous lightbulb regulations, but the Biden administration made incandescent lightbulbs “an illegal product.”

“Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights … are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.”

Speaking of the new fluorescent lights, my homeowner friend also works in industry where he explained that his entire plant changed out their lighting from T12 to T8 fluorescent lighting to comply with new regulations.  He stated all the new fixtures came from China.  A few years after their installation, he said the electrician was taking each new light fixture apart.  Enquiring why these new fixtures were being taken apart, the electrician stated they had found that the Chinese-made transformer gets too hot, needing to be replaced with a new and different transformer.  Furthermore, he stated the new transformers were coming from China.  They had to replace the transformers throughout the whole company.  

Next, my homeowner friend told me he noticed all of the lights looked different.  After a few years of this new lighting in his lab, he witnessed that all of the polypropylene stoppers in his glass flasks were crumbling. In fact, one just disintegrated in his hand, causing him to replace all the polypropylene stoppers with glass stoppers.

Note: Other polypropylene stoppers of the same age inside the cabinet were just fine.  These were not exposed to the new light.

He also had noticed a white snowy-looking substance all over the countertop below a bookshelf.  Pulling a notebook off the shelf, more snow-like substance fell out everywhere.  Opening the notebook, he found it contained plastic sleeves with white plastic edging, which was flaking off.  Again, this white substance was polypropylene.

He suspected the wavelength of light coming from the new bulbs was interacting with things in his lab differently from the previous light waves in the lab.

Researching, he found that light emission from these new T8 lights is entirely different from the older T12 fluorescent lights.  T8 lights use rare earth phosphors to emit light, which consists of four main spikes of intense energy.  T12 light is from manganese and antimony-doped calcium halo-phosphate, whose light emission has a few spikes, but is mostly a smooth broad emission in the visible spectrum, that is not very intense in any one energy of light.  The T12 would be more like sunlight.

He also found that the light from an incandescent lightbulb contained little to no UV.

My friend, the taxpaying homeowner, questioned, “Did anyone do any research looking at the energy of the light that these lightbulbs are emitting and take into account how this high intensity energy might react with things made of plastic, like our computers, and equipment, but even more than that, what is this light doing to the top of our heads?”

Also, what about all the plastic trash and rare earth elements from these “environment-saving” lightbulbs?

So, another big victory in destroying American industry for the Obama administration, the Biden administration, and a Democrat-controlled Congress.  Again, they forgot about the American tax-paying citizens paying government salaries, but they remembered to send jobs and money to China, for “disco inferno” LED lightbulbs.

President Trump, please, make lightbulbs great again!

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.