I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here in the UK we still have light sockets rated for the older incandescent bulbs that needed around 60W. But LEDs are much more efficient. Sometimes you see LED bulbs with absurd things like ‘5W = 60W’ written on them, meaning that it actually uses 5W, but it’s as bright as an old 60W bulb. You basically don’t need to worry about the safety limit of the socket, since the LEDs are way under it. Of course since the socket is rated for 60W you could plug in a 60W LED, which would be as bright as an 720W incandescent bulb.
Which I suspect is what this person did to their poor fridge.
Even then, where the hell did they get a 60W LED? LEDs with those kinds of power ratings are pretty hard to find, and they’re going to be fairly expensive as well.
60W LED bulbs don’t exist because the form factor does not allow them to dissipate heat fast enough to keep LED chips that produce >50 W in heat below 150 °C. Fixtures of 20-100+ watts are available as COB modules that get mounted into work light reflectors where the entire back side is the heatsink. Their driver is very simple, so they are cheap but flicker at double the mains frequency. You can mount one in a fridge with adhesive heatsink compound and unsafe wiring modifications, assuming it fits under the cover if the socket is removed. An alternative is a long low-voltage LED strip wound all around the fridge’s interior several times.
Bulb gets too hot. Put it in refrigerator. Problem solved.
I mean, a 60W COB LED module mounted to the inside wall of a refrigerator will have a more than suffucient heatsink…
This a a 100w LED light, not a 100w equivalent. It’s equivalent to a 1000w bulb. I bought a few to replace some old halogen shop lights.
Yes, I know… E27 1000W bulbs of similar size have indeed existed. However, unlike a $3 5x8 cm 50W mains COB LED module, you cannot mount one in the intended space in common fridges.
BTW, a little story regarding a 500W one: A Czechoslovak photographer needed one but like most heavy equipment in the Eastern bloc, they were never sold to individuals. He visited the factory for an alleged newspaper photoshoot and teamed up with my grandpa and other workers, who hung his desired bulb on his equipment backpack and pretended to sneakily follow him to the gatehouse. They laughed quietly, pointing at the bulb and thus socially engineering the doorman to enjoy the moment and forgo the usual pat-down. Officially, they just told anyone that the bulb had been a dud, which could not have been disproven.
My guess is that the fridge actually used a 20w bulb. A 20w LED is plenty bright.
What’s worse is having dimmable bulbs. A dimmer is required to have the maximum wattage of 120 W or so because there will always be some idiot who decides to put an incandescent bulb in and risks burning the house down.
We could have dimmers a tenth of their size if people stopped being idiots. Instead we need to deal with those massive 4x4x4cm boxes that can’t be fitted into many walls.
If it was actually 200 watts it would probably outpower the heat transfer capacity of the fridge.
If it’s led 200w equivalent then it’s fine.
Those max ratings are for incandescent bulbs
Maybe, but the light only turns on when it’s open, and when it’s open you have bigger cooling issues than the bulb wattage
Thats’s a good point
How would you know?
I pressed the little plunger the door hits when I was about 7.
You were deductive, cool. I was in an more empiricist household. So we shove the smallest cousin into the fridge and locked the door, then we ask him to recount his experience. He confirmed that phenomenologically speaking, the light does indeed appears to go out when you shut the door.
Probably yeah.
(am gonna use European standards here sorry Ameribruvs.)
Also, 200w bulbs that fit into fridge socket? The “40w max” is usually in normal E27 sockets. (The regular light bulb socket.) And the largest lamps for those I’ve seen are around 50-80w, and pretty much always sold as “growlamps”.
Going to 200w you’d need an E40 socket. They’re about twice the size of the “regular” E27 (and E14 is the smaller “candle” socket, that’s like half the diameter of the regular one). Here’s what a 200w bulb looks like and remember that the socket is twice the size of a regular one. That bulb is like ~40cm long.
Idk what socket fridges use though, but I seriously doubt it’s anything close to an E40 size.
100 and 120 watt incandescent lamps were common as well at E27
Common?
If we’re talking just at home, I’d have to disagree. But yeah I think probably fairly commonplace for industrial use maybe?
I don’t recall ever seeing a single one being sold back when I used to be sent out for lightbulbs, because incandescents popping so often were a designed feature and as a kid I wasn’t going into proper hardware stores.
40w and peeeerhaps 60w would be the most common ones, I’d say. Might vary ofc depending on where and who and when. But for like general house use in Finland I’d say those were definitely the most common ones. I’m guessing that’s sort of why lamps have the “most 40w” so that people use at most the 40w incandescent if someone still has those? Because newer ones draw so much less, there’s no need to design the schematics so that it can take 120w when most LED bulbs range from 7-15.
I’m talking 40% of my arse so please do correct me for the mistakes I think I must have made
E27 100w incandescent bulbs were common in the US until the switch to LED. Looks like you can even still buy them, but at this price I’m guessing they’re new old stock that’s been hoarded to resell later: https://www.walmart.com/ip/GE-100-Watt-Basic-Light-Bulb-4-Pack-GE-41034-1710-lumen-A19/150144812
Buuut the European grid runs at 230V, while the American grid runs at 120V (240V enters the home with a +120V and a -120V rail, and most circuits are attached across one of those and a neutral, except for high power appliance circuits).
So our 100W bulbs are the equivalent of 50W European bulbs.
I’m glad everything’s labeled in lumens now.
Oh right, true, forgot about that.
Yeah ours is 230v and high power connections like stoves can utilise up to 480v I believe.
My sauna uses 400v for example.
Lumens are simpler when it comes to lighting, yeah. No more “equivalent to X watts” bullshit from marketing people if the general public understood lumens.
I want to get a sauna, but I’m pretty sure my apartment is too small. I should get a cabin by the fjord so I can go from the sauna to the fjord.
Here they come built-in to pretty much every apartment. Most apartment buildings built after like 1995 have them.
Even small student studios might have one.
I live in one of the worst areas in my city, in what is basically the cheapest available rental apartments. And I have a sauna.
And if your apartment doesn’t have one, the building certainly will and you can reserve it for yourself.
And all houses definitely have saunas.
We have more saunas than cars in Finland.
Sauna to cold fjord water would be great, highly recommend. (Though we don’t have fjords, we do have cold water.)
I bought 100 W lamps in normal stores in Sweden back before leds were as common. Good for light stages when taking pictures.
It’s probably a 25w led though I wouldn’t have thought they would fit in a fridge
If it’s really a 200 watt bulb, which I doubt, it won’t actually pull 200 watts, that’s just what it would pull if it was available but I doubt the fridge will pass that through. It would be a pretty stupid design otherwise.
It will unless a fuse blows, which is somewhat unlikely, they are usually overrated.
Okay but who puts bread in their fridge, what, do you live in a Soulsborne poison swamp level? It’s bread.
Edit: The question was rhetorical, guys. 😅
It lasts a few days longer because I can’t finish 18 slices of bread in 4 days.
Coward
I do sometimes actually. I live alone and don’t use a ton of bread, so keeping it in the fridge keeps it from molding quickly.
It does however cause it to go stale much faster. Better idea is to keep it in the freezer and take out a little bread as needed, then thawing out more as you eat.
Previously frozen bread is awful though.
Eh, if you freeze it carefully it’s fine, I cut and freeze the stuff I bake most of the time
That’s fair - I bake, but my family eats it almost faster than I can make it. Skews my perception of bread.
I see half loaves on the shelf sometimes these days, might be an idea
When I still lived with my parents, they kept bread in a room temperature and we quite often had to toss away moldy ones. When I moved on my own I started keeping it in the fridge and I don’t think I’ve had mold once. I toast it virtually every time anyway so doesn’t really matter. Also it’s dark rye bread which probably keeps differently than one made from while flour
South Louisiana. I put my bread in freezer during the summer or it will be moldy in two days.
You only mean fridge right, not freezer?
Well yeah, you can freeze it no problem. Someone made that point, I’m not arguing
Our cat likes to eat bread and will tear the bag open to get at it. Had to keep it in the fridge.
Also our kitchen had no cupboards with doors. Have since remedied that and now can keep bread in the cupboard.
I do. I don’t have a breadbox (and they are butt ugly) and not wasting cupboard space for a loaf of bread, english muffins, etc.
yeah i dunno, it’s always in the freezer for me
With the right bulb, you can cook straight in your fridge!
I’m really hoping they’re just going by what they see on the packaging at Walmart where lightbulb wattage is shown as an equivalent measurement for lumens and that it’s not the actual power consumption. Fridge lightbulbs should not take as much power to run as an AC unit.
Reminds of when the host of Technology Connections said that he has an electric car that he charges at home and his favorite Christmas lights still double his bill
And if you take off the door you can triple duty it for a heater! Win win win
Go ahead and grab yourself a piping hot carrot from the refurnacerator
Pretty sure the 200 is either watt equivalent or lumen. 200W would fuck up your fridge.
Pretty sure this is just a story and an overexposed or edited photo.
200 lumens isn’t really that bright. I’m still not quite sure what the hell one lumen is based on but it’s not a particularly bright thing.
What OP appears to have there is a “Night Sun” light normally fitted to police helicopters and search and rescue craft.
1 lumen = 1 candela * r^2
Essentially the light of one candle with a specific angle of emission
Midnight snacking countermeasures. This is like setting off a flashbang if opened in a dark kitchen at night.
Yes that’s what it said at the bottom of the image.
You should get the right one ASAP, as the socket might not be able to cope with the power draw and heat.
Probably an led 200w “equivalent”. I feel like it would have already burned out otherwise.
I’m leaning towards they cranked the exposure as refrigerator light bulbs are generally T7 or A15 bulbs and to my knowledge no one makes a bulb that bright in those sizes
Thanks, dad.
Source: am a dad, and this post is ridiculously stupid. Nobody is getting that brightness unless they throw construction lights in there with an extension cord running outside.
I didn’t even know they still made bulbs over 10W.
You should check out some higher wattage ones, I’ve seen up to 300
Maybe it’s because it’s all LED in the EU now, we don’t really do the old tungsten lining or halogen anymore.
When you buy a lightbulb (at least here in the UK) it almost always still has the incandescent-equivalent on it as well as the actual wattage.
People are still used to thinking in old terms that you want 100W for a ceiling lamp and 60W for a table lamp, for example.
So this light in the fridge could be 200W equivalent but not actually 200W consumption.
Thinking about it, lightbulb itself is at this point a ridiculously achronistic term, there’s nothing really ‘bulb’ about them anymore.
how so? They’re still bulb shaped most the time.
You’re right to be fair, a lot of them do retain that shape for purely aesthetic reasons, but it’s not a functional part of the light source any longer.
It’s functional in so far that it does protect the LED elements and makes the device better to handle.
And sometimes acts as a diffuser for the light too, yeah. Just isn’t required for illumination purposes directly.
I mean, they are just small diodes inside, if they have a bulb shape it’s just some plastic to have it be a familiar shape. I’d even argue most new light fixtures these days come in all sorts of shapes, and in my home, for example, I don’t even have a bulb shape.
That’s because my parents bought out all the incandescent bulbs. Something about not making them them like they used to. There are none left.
I think they started marketing them in “equivalent wattage”
I got this one crazy 10k or something lumen bulb a few years back - I set it up in the corner of my room. There were no shadows. Just total darkness to high noon at the equator. I wired it up as part of an alarm clock.
Instead of little squares of LEDs, it was strips of them facing out in a twisty bulb. I want to say it was something like 15 watts
An enclosed bulb with basically no heat sink and no chill is probably not a great design, it didn’t last long. It was cool though
Incandescent bulbs over ~75W are banned in the US now, with a (glaring) exception for heat lamps. There are some shady manufacturers labeling ordinary high wattage lightbulbs as heat lamps to get around the restriction, but you’d have a hard time finding any of those in a big-box store.
Me, scrolling in dark mode:…
This post: Not anymore, chucklenuts!
I’m doing this to keep the kids out
The post made me laugh. On a serious note, those “maximum xxWatts” labels are there because that’s what the wiring in the appliance for that bulb can carry. You can exceed the maximum, but it will likely cause a fire.
A few watts off might be fine, they usually over-build things, so if you get a 45W bulb for a 40W fixture it could be okay, but bluntly, are you willing to risk fire instead of just getting the right bulb?
Not just the wiring but also the housing/shade/cover. They’re rated for incandescent heat output as well as electrical consumption.
