How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?

I’ve bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said “up to 20,000 hours” which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don’t).

  • FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It wouldn’t degrade from being shut off and on a bunch of times? I know like HDDs can degrade faster if they’re constantly powered off and on.

    Appreciate the feedback. I just tried to answer the question the best I could since at the time most of the replies were unhelpful and rude

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      Mechanical things suffer a lot of stress from turning on/off. But even spinning disk storage turns off automatically if desktop is idle for a certain time, it’s a balance between switch vs continuous operation, they have overlapping kinds of wear and tear.

      Top of mind, you can expect 10k cycles from typical buttons and it’s hard to be less complex than a button. Because metal parts are subject to fatigue.

      Flash based drives would certainly fail faster or slower depending on the number of write bytes over its life.

      Then there’s erosion caused by electrons, which is my biggest suspect for the problems of last generation of Intel CPUs. You have to royally screw up to start selling something that overlooked this.