Planned Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is not a new concept in the lighting industry. Vance Packard's book The Waste Makers written in 1960 tells of the engineer working for GE in the 1930's who suggested a way of increasing sales of flashlight lamps by increasing their efficiency and thus shortening their lifespan. By the 1950's it had become common practice to deliberately design products to fail sooner in order to sell more products.

The lighting industry has stagnated to the point where most of the new innovations are little more than rehashing old products into new packages. Take CFLs for instance. Here we have a "New" product based on 70+ year old technology that was first designed for use in factories during World War II. Fluorescent tube lighting was installed to allow factories to operate 24 hrs a day turning out war materials. Now along comes all the major light bulb companies with Government incentives telling you to replace your old incandescent lights with the "New" CFL bulbs designed to save energy. Is saving energy a good idea? Yes! Is the CFL the best way to save energy? No!

Fluorescent lighting was terrible back in the 1940's and it still is terrible today. You can even check on the planned obsolescence of most CFLs by reading on the packaging and see how long it is designed to last. The package on my desk gives a 9 year warranty. Sounds pretty good until you get out a magnifying glass and read the fine print. Based on 3 hours average use per day. So if you have a place the light is on 24 hours a day the best you can hope for the lifespan of the CFL light is a little over 1 year. Think you can get the manufacturer to warranty the bulb? Good luck.

Now we again have a "New" technology for lighting. Light Emitting Diode lighting itself is based on an old technology that has been in use since the late 1960's. We all grew up with LED lights. They are the little colored lights in every piece of electronic equipment you can think of from the green lights on the front of my computer back to the first VCR machine my Dad purchased in the 1970's. So why is LED lighting considered "New"? The ability of producing White light. It was not commercially viable to produce white light until about 3 years ago.

LED lighting when engineered correctly will move away from the planned Obsolescence paradigm. Correctly working with the technology instead of over driving the diodes should allow you to have an LED light capable of lasting for over 10 years.

But do you know what the problem with most of the lights you find on the internet really is? You guessed it, planned obsolescence. We have seen a flood of lights come onto the market that were not designed to last more than 1 to 3 years. I think most of the lights may even be more of an unplanned obsolescence than planned obsolescence. And the companies selling fluorescent lights are loving it. They still have a huge stockpile of fluorescent lights and want John Q Public to think LED lights are just a waste of money and keep buying the CFLs. After all, you the customer are the one thing the major companies do not plan to make obsolete.