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.
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.
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.
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.