Dear Diary #46: Replaced an LED Light Bulb, The 90s

Dear Diary,

Think my computer is crapping out again. Might be a power issue. I've managed to bypass the crashing problem but when I cold boot the system, it hard resets itself while sitting on the RAM check screen. Was hoping to keep the power supply in the event that I finally upgraded the system, but looks like that's a no-go now.

I keep getting reminders to fill out a "voluntary" survey. It started with emails and then I started getting physical mail. No pressure, huh?

Watching a show highlighting the nineties. I was really looking forward to it because I grew up during the 90s. It's slowly becoming apparent that while I technically grew up in the 90s, I really didn't pay attention to anything or wasn't old enough to appreciate it. Like even the television shows, most of them didn't click. I remember seeing them in syndication and being disappointed that there wasn't something better on. Looking forward more to the show highlighting the 2000s now.

Finally replaced my first LED light bulb. It was an Ikea LEDARE 400 lumen bulb from early 2013. Here's the review from way back when. It didn't even break or stop working. The only problem was that I started hearing a buzzing noise coming from the bulb that I hadn't heard before over four and a half years of use. After turning the bulb off and on, the noise seemed to go away. However, every time I thought I heard a buzz, I had to mute everything and check if it came back. I couldn't really tell because if it did, the noise was nowhere near as loud as the first time I noticed. Not wanting to make a habit of dealing with this, I decided to just swap it out. I had a bunch of spare 400 lumen LED bulbs sitting in a box plus another barely used bulb sitting in a lamp anyway. The replacement was a LEDARE 400 lumen and the old one went in that barely used lamp. Now it'll sit out the rest of its life being driven into the ground at a few hours per year... Here's to another 4+ years.

Looked up my old review for the Ikea LEDARE bulb I swapped out. Wow. I paid CA$ 15 back in 2013 and it was supposedly rated at around 8 watts. Checking in late July 2017, an Ikea LEDARE 400 lumen E26 bulb was CA$ 6.99 on the Ikea.ca website. A similar RYET bulb was CA$ 1.29. I ran some numbers through a spreadsheet to see how many hours I got out of that bulb -- and it's still not actually dead, just may be noisier than I want to deal with. Between 2013 and 2017, my estimate suggested that I got about 18,500 hours with an average of one on/off cycle a day. And it's still not dead, not even sure if the buzz was an actual problem or a random occurrence.

The Ikea LEDARE 400 lumen bulb I used for 4.5 years and counting

Wait, what? I looked up a photo of the LED I swapped out and there was a label on the package noting "20 000 h" in the lower left hand corner. That was likely the rated life expectancy of the bulb. So, that meant I came close to hitting its life expectancy before encountering any problems -- my estimate was 18,500 hours used. At my current rate of use, that may have meant a few more months of life. Now it'll last way longer in a rarely used lamp.

Later.