did you know that there are incandescent light bulbs which
can last as long as or even longer than leds?
what the heck?
i found this at the thrift store a while back it's by Feit electric it's their decade bulbs
now they don't make this version anymore but i looked on their website and they do still sell
these decade bulbs in floodlight and flame tip versions just not in the standard
a shape versions anymore but these were their decade bulbs
guaranteed the last 10 years originally sold at bed bath and beyond for 3.99 saves
the replacement cost of 25 standard light bulbs and these are the 40 watt versions
there's more information on the back here it says advanced
krypton gas for extra long life heavy duty 25,000 hour filament multi-filament support
resists vibration heat resistant cement ensures no loose bases and brass base
resists corrosion and it puts out 230 lumens at 40 watts of an average life of 25 000 hours
the trade-off of this extremely long life of 25 000 hours is in efficiency because 230 lumens
is just above the typical output of a 25
watt incandescent light bulb so you're consuming 40 watts of electricity and
only getting the equivalent of around 30 watts of light output out of it
you may wonder what kind of applications there are for these kind of bulbs
well first of all it lists on the box vibration service so these would be useful
for things like garage door openers or industrial environments where there's vibration that would
cause ordinary incandescent light bulbs to burn out quickly
and these are probably from the era when compact fluorescent light bulbs were popular
they were the big new thing in saving energy but there are a lot of applications where cfls
are not ideally suited to such as locations where the light bulb is only going to be used for short
amounts of time such as in a closet or a utility room or a garage i'm sure everybody who has used
cfls have noticed that they take a while to warm up so if the light's only going to be on a couple
of minutes you're going to be spending most of that time not getting its full light output out
of it and that kind of repeated short usage can shorten the life of the electronics in the bulb
and also cfls were not good in extremely cold and hot temperatures i know in cold temperatures
they get dimmer and dimmer and below a certain level they don't light up at all
now that's not such a problem anymore for leds they seem to work okay in the cold
but i definitely wouldn't want to put an led bulb in my attic for example because it gets
quite hot up there in the summer and i don't know if the electronics and an led bulb
would survive that kind of heat whereas there's no problem for incandescent bulbs also for
example in an oven obviously you can't put a cfl or an led in there the plastic would melt
now here's an led light bulb which also claims to last for 10 years but what's the difference
let's look at the fine print it says 10-year rated average life based on engineering tested
and probability analysis where the lamp is used on average three hours per day seven days per week
but these bulbs if we look at the 10-year guarantee says it's based on normal household
use of seven hours per day that's why for 10 years of use guaranteed they say 25 000 hours but this
one that claims to last for 10 years at 3 hours per day if we do the math that's 10 years times
365 days per year times 3 hours per day that's just under 11 000 hours instead of 25 000 hours
there are led light bulbs which claim to last 25 000 hours and they do claim it should last
for 22.8 years but if you look at the fine print here it only has a three year warranty
whereas these bulbs are actually guaranteed to last for 10 years
and also notice this three year warranty is from date of purchase not the date of first use
so if you buy one of these and it ends up sitting on the shelf for three years before you use it
then the first time you try to use it and it burns out right away you're not going
to get your warranty because it already wasted the warranty sitting on the shelf
doing nothing so if you buy led light bulbs expect to get your three years of warranty
out of it you have to intend to start using these right away as soon as you buy them
and with any of these bulbs i don't know how they could
ask you to prove that you're only using it for three hours per day i guess they just take it
on the honor system that if anybody actually cares enough to return one of these for warranty they'll
probably send you a replacement because they figure most people wouldn't bother to do that
so let's take a look at these light bulbs
they have a frosted coating and it has a brass base just as advertised rather basic etch krypton
feit electric 40 watt and on the base here it's stamped in feit 120 volt 40 watt 107. i don't know
if that's a date code maybe 2007 i can't quite see into there to see the shape of the filament
but that's what they look like it's not quite a soft white coating it's more of a traditional
frosted coating
of course i have no viable way of proving that these light bulbs will actually last
for 10 years of use but i have a theory that these might actually just be 240 volt
light bulbs because one way you can get incandescent light bulbs to last
for a very long time is to run them at a lower voltage than what they're rated for
i saw a video by eric wasatonic in which he showed a couple of 250 volt light bulbs that he
has running on 120 volts and he claims he gets between three and five years of continuous use
out of them so if we do the math let's say four years of life times 365 days per year
times 24 hours per day that's 35 000 hours of life out of those light bulbs well within the realm
of 25 000 hours being guaranteed with these bulbs so i think these might actually be 240
volt light bulbs they're just being sold as 120 volt light bulbs to get this long life
so with that in mind i have this step up transformer it takes the 120 volts coming into it
it says 220 volts but if i stick a meter into this very unsafe universal outlet here and switch it on
you can see we're getting 243 to 244 volts out of it
and for a test of what would happen if you took a standard 120 volt light
bulb and run it on 240 volts i only have one regular 40 watt incandescent light bulb left
and i don't want to burn it out just for this silly experiment but i do have these 43 watt
halogen bulbs so i guess that's close enough because i want to have an equal comparison
to these 40 watt decade bulbs so if i take one of these and put it in our lamp
at first i have it plugged into the 120 volt outlet of this transformer
so that's the bulb in normal operation everything is fine
now i have it plugged into the 240 volt outlet
and once this clock ticks over to 7:45 i'll flip the switch and turn it on
oh it burned out right away
now let's take one of these decade bulbs and put it in our lamp
first i'll run it on the normal 120 volts so you can get an idea of how bright it is
now switch over to 240 volts
and when the clock strikes 8:14 i'll turn it on
so
well it should be no surprise that that decade bulb just kept on running on 240 volts
until i got tired of it and shut it off so i really do think those are 240 volt bulbs
sold to run on 120 volts for extra long life
and i also found these bulbs from feit electric they're 60 watt vibration service bulbs
and they claim super long life 14 000 hours at 120 volts and i'm also running this on 240 volts with
my step up transformer it's been on for about five minutes so far and it's very happily and
brightly glowing so i don't doubt that these would also last a very long time on 240 volts
and these days especially if the cheap led bulbs sold at dollar stores and pound stores
they're really starting to cut corners on them resulting in them lasting far less than
their advertised life you may have seen on big clive's channel where he's taken apart some of
those bulbs and you can see they're reducing the amount of leds in the circuit which means
each led that's left gets an increased current going through it and a shorter life
whereas this one has 17 leds in it
this one has just five leds that is going to really push those that's more than a watt per led
so yes you may be using less electricity with an led bulb but especially the
cheap ones they may not necessarily last longer than an ordinary incandescent bulb
well i didn't get it on video but just a couple seconds ago the light suddenly
went out and at first i thought this bulb burned out but i noticed the little indicator
light on the step-up transformer also went out and it looks like my step-up transformer has died
now hopefully it just blew a fuse and i bet if i plug this light bulb back into
normal 120 volts it's going to work perfectly fine
and yes it does so the light bulb outlasted the step up transformer
and yep just as i suspected it blew the fuse well i noticed here the step up transformer
is rated for 100 watts while these bulbs they say at 120 volts they use 54 watts which means
that at 240 volts that's 108 watts so geez they sure don't give you much headroom on that rating
if it's rated for 100 watts and if you put a load of 108 watts on it it blows the fuse
i have no idea what that's going to look like so we're all going to find
out together because that's the beauty of this channel unscripted uncensored
un professional sometimes but what are you going to do