Why does every small appliance or useful home electronics item have the BRIGHTEST LEDs in them?
I bought a new fan for our bedroom Sunday. It has 4 speed settings, and LEDs to display which setting you’re on.
Just like every other electrical device in our bedroom, I had to cover the LEDs with electrical tape because they are TOO DAMM BRIGHT. That one light was more than bright enough for me to see in the room with all the lights off.
I can’t sleep well if there’s a lot of light like that, especially blue light, and it’s like every fucking electronics manufacturer used the same extra bright blue LEDs.
All of our power strips have them. Same brightness.
The fans have them.
Don’t even get me started on digital clocks and the plague of bright LEDs that they bring about
Many charging plugs have them built into the plug itself.
Even some fucking light switches have them now!
I have about 6 different things in our bedroom that have electrical tape over their completely unnecessary LEDs.
Why has this become such a common thing? Is this really something most people want? To have a room that is never actually dark even with the lights turned off?
I get to be that guy! I’m so excited!
In power strips, the lights are (in the overwhelming majority of cases) actually a neon bulb! They’re cheaper for that specific purpose because they can be powered directly off of the mains power with a single resistor.
Your point is entirely valid and I bear the same cross, this is just a fun fact you can use to impress colleagues, strangers, and potential lovers, dazzling them with your deep esoteric knowledge of and passion for illuminators in power strips.
Hah, this is what I liked the most about reddit - learning random bits of knowledge about things I knew nothing about. I’m glad to see this happen here too!
Hell yes me too. And it was the top comment.
What’s a reddit?
It was a website from the old times of the internet, where people behind pseudonyms could freely discuss links and texts inside thematic communities.
fun fact: human eyes can actually perceive single photons.
also fun fact: we can shoot single photons.
Electrical tape to black it out.
Painters tape to dim it.
The electrical tape approach is what I did and it did wonders. Went from having a myriad of green and blue LEDs on my fans/portable AC/etc to complete wonderful darkness when I retired for the night. Made a distinct difference in my ability to fall asleep faster at night. I hate having lights when going to bed. Darkness or bust.
Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
I can understand for things that don’t look obviously on, but a fan? C’mon. If the fan starts spinning, I know it’s working. I don’t need a light telling me it’s on.
I don’t seem to find it mentioned: LEDs at night are terrible for your sleep, especially the blue ones. Among other things they suppress the melatonin release.
An article that goes into more detail and provides a citations for further research.
I have a lamp and that has an LED that is on all the time.
Why would a lamp have a permanently on LED? That’s what I get for getting cheap crap from China, rather than premium crap from China.
I used to work in electronics manufacturing. I won’t give my title because it was a shit title and didn’t describe what I did well at all. I think that was on purpose to keep our salaries low.
I engineered final assembly test systems. Like the product fully completed. Most of these devices were commercial in nature.
My man, the testers fucking LOVED LEDs. Because LEDs not turning on correctly always means the device fails.
I hated them, because was really fucking hard to automate testing of LEDs. LEDs emit a wavelength, or combination of RGB. Because of the brilliance of my sales engineers, we used computer vision to automate this testing, NOT sensors. The reasoning? Much denser LED placements.
But guess what happens when your supply chain and manufacutirng is entirely Chinese and your product is designed and prototyped and originally manufactured here? YOU GET THE WRONG FUCKING COLOR CALIBRATED. I’m not shitting you, it was a tiny difference in Red wavelength. Tiny. but computer vision doesn’t read wave length, it reads color.
LEDs make testing easy for humans. If you just need to see them light up? Everything is great. Bonus points for brighter LEDs for faster moving tests. Faster moving tests = more profit. Human testers means you don’t spend money on automated testing and and can quickly repurpose humans to see if an LED is on.
Did testers like blue LEDs more than red? Everything seems to be blue now but red are better for your eyes at night. Idgi.
A soldiering iron comes in handy.
I just remove annoying leds altogether.
Replace them with a resistor?
I usually just remove it and leave the space empty/open circuit.
It’s very very rare that a missing/nonfunctional led will effect the rest of the device. In those rare cases, swap the light emitting diode for a regular diode (though a resistor would probably do fine too).
Why has this become such a common thing? Is this really something most people want? To have a room that is never actually dark even with the lights turned off?
The gradual spread of light pollution has gotten crazy, and people still don’t really notice it. We’re at the point that it’s actually driving insects to extinction. If you look somewhere rural vs. urban the difference in what constitutes “night” is mindblowing, and rural areas are getting brighter all the time themselves.
I’m honestly a bit surprised that we don’t have mandatory dimmers installed in all major buildings that turn off the lights after X hour or x number of hours without any movement.
That, and motion sensors and dimmers on street lights with shades on them to prevent light from being blasted into people’s homes and apartments.
This much light pollution can’t be healthy.
Yah agree with your rant but black electric tape was my solution too.
Alec Watson enters the chat
This kind of low effort comment should have stayed on Reddit.
I guess people here is not familiar with Technology Connections and Alec’s despise of blue LEDs.
A better comment would have been like “this reminds me of Technology Connections’ Alec Watson, he talks a lot about how much he hates blue LEDs. Here’s a video [link]”
It makes the same reference, but provides more context, more content, and a new point of discussion.
not everyone needs to be spoon fed, comments like the one i made start conversations, like it just did
Try closing your eyes next time, that way you can’t see the light
