Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for July 06, 2024

Some parrots can live for 75 years; I hope that Pig never brings one home for a pet.

My heirs will inherit incandescent bulbs that I’ve never used.

Big whoop! I have a compact fluorescent that has been on for at least ten years, maybe more.

Hold on LED bulbs are plastic, they don’t go KSSH!!

What they don’t tell everyone is that if you’re going to switch to LED bulbs, you also have to budget in the new fixtures as well. You can’t use the existing fixtures with the LED bulbs, apparently.

Outliving a rat is not a huge length of time.

I’ve had to replace a lot of so-called long life LED’s.

LED lightbulbs fail too often. They flicker on/off after a year or so. Bulb companies may still conspire.

Google “Phoebus cartel”

What they no tell you is that some of em bulbs will starts blinking after some time.

I have lots of old bulbs replaced by LEDs, laying around, why, do not know!

That’s true. Rats only have four or five years.

They are not perfect, but they use WAY less power than incandescent bulbs and operate much cooler. You see a sticker on a fixture that says the maximum wattage bulb you can use, that’s because of the heat it generates and too much heat can cook the wiring in the fixture. With LEDs, that’s not an issue.

For all who state the LEDs go out after a year, you’re using a cheap brand.

I use Phillips. Those cheap unknown brands at meggalow mart are garbage, it’s the power supplies or bad soldering that die not the LEDs themselves.

I have one setup in the basement running all the time, 60w illuminance 7w power. It finally died 8+ years later, at least 8,762 hours. An incandescent won’t last that long. That is the only LED I have replaced in my home.

For me, the 3-way incandescent only lasted 3-6 months, since the lowest level would burn out. I haven’t replaced one yet.

You can’t get incandescent bulbs where I am anymore. The LEDs are BULBS now, though, not that luminescent coil. I didn’t buy them until I had to, because I was in that Old-Man-Doesn’t-Like-Anything-New phase. I have to learn to ignore that.

But it’s environmentally friendly!

As usual, Pig will be disappointed… I have to admit that I’m buying way fewer LED bulbs than I used fluorescent ones. And I’m paying a lot less for electricity. And the quality of the light (of the good ones) is way better. But 100,000 hours of life… My estimate is 10 years of half-life for the good top-of-the-line ones, something above 5 years for most of them, and one year (if you’re lucky…) for the cheap ones.Avoid the old brands that sound “good-quality” but are obsolete and abandoned. Those are the worst! Stromberg-Carlson, Zenith, etc. Fun fact, who remembers those names these days?? :D

BTW don’t ever do that with a CFL bulb or you will breath in a lungful of mercury.

But it won’t fit in the harp of your beloved old lamp with a burned out incandescent 3-Way bulb. AND you can’t find replacement 3-Ways at Lowe’s or Home Despot. Hello, Amazon?

Except for some decorative bulbs, I’ve used up all of my indoor incandescent and CFLs. I still have some outdoor spots, they do work better in cold weather.

It’s super dangerous to step on shattered glass.

Does Rat know that pigs live longer than rats? :D

Incandescent bulbs could have laster much longer but it wasn’t a sound business plan so programmed obsolescence was introduced so they’d break often enough. So there is no reason LED bulbs will last as long as they potentially could. Otherwise you wouldn’t buy replacements and that would be bad for the companies selling them.

One of the reasons I hate that we have to buy those expensive bulbs. I often drop them.

Incandescent bulbs can last a long time too:

en.wikipedia.Org/wiki/Centennial_Light

that’d be mean if you gave them burned out ones!

I only use LED lights now.

Problem here is LEDS are plastic, not glass. Nice try, Mr. P.

Don’t worry, Rat, they don’t last that long.

They say that but I find three years is the max.

This raises a question: Has it ever been confirmed how old Rat is? Does he have a typical rat’s lifespan, or that of a human? These are the deep PBS lore-released questions that keep people up at night.

We’ve never had an LED bulb last longer than a regular bulb.

I haven’t had a single LED last more than ten years, and most have been more like five.

Rare to have a 16 year LED last a year! Just an expensive scam not backed by facts.

We made a less expensive choice for the roof on our deck, after the first one quoted would “last thirty years” but we won’t.

Everything we buy now is likely the last one in our lifetime – car, couch, bathroom fixtures, refrig, range, etc…

Guess what, rat. The bulb is also brighter than you are.

If the bulb is “guaranteed” to last X number of hours and it dies sooner than that, how exactly do you prove that when you try to get your money back from the manufacturer?

Like the bulb, Rat has no filament between his ears.

The LED bulbs they installed in the bathroom at work don’t last more than a few months. Probably because they find the cheapest Chinese crap on the shelf to install and the motion sensors keep turning them on and off.

The Livermore Fire station bulb was first lit in 1901. Since then, the bulb was moved to Station 1 in 1903, survived a renovation there in 1937, and finally, in 1976, was transferred to its present site in Fire Station 6 in California with a full police and fire truck escort. And yes! The 122-year-old Centennial lamp is still burning all along.

I could find no update for 2024 but if it had gone out I’m certain there would have been.

We live in a town that has the longest known continuously burning light bulb. It’s a carbon filament bulb that’s in a fire station. It dates back to the 1880s or so.

If ever a comic character deserved to be fed rat poison…

I have a whole tote full of bulbs that were free/free with rebate when incandescents went out of style.

I was a pretty active coupon-er then, and “rolled” my store money (like CVS extrabucks) into rebates to cash out – and it seemed there were light bulb offers all the time.

They’ll probably change the technology again before I run out.

Unfortunately, they don’t last any longer than the 99 cents incandescent bulbs!

I’ve still got a few CFLs running.

Mine seem to average 3-4 yrs.

Rat, stop it. You’re jealous of a lightbulb!

that is a lie! they do not last that long at all . most of mine have lasted 4 yrs at best

I fail to see the world coming to an end if we use the wrong light bulb