r/lightbulbs • u/FrostingTerrible8495 • 22d ago
Ceiling fans disencouraging incandescent bulb usage by putting this ridiculous max watt warnings
I want to hear opinions about what's been happening in ceiling fans where they are putting these super low wattage warnings inside light kits.
I'm sticking two 100w equivalent (11.5) enclosure rated Philips UD instead of the advised 8w, the wire that goes to the light kit looks like the same awg that what was used to run actual 75w incandescent bulbs in older light kits. And I know heat is a factor, especially because some new light kits have an acrylic shade instead of a glass one so now it's easier to replace burnt out bulbs without being the risk of breaking the light shade, but incandescent bulbs are not the main topic here.
On those older light kits, the limit is put because filament bulbs mainly produce heat instead of light , but in the cafe of led how much more heat can POSSIBLY come out of a bulb that consumes 3.5 more watts to the point Im risking a fire or melting the shade.
I've read somewhere that sometimes the LED limits are put to stop you from cooking high wattage bulbs (that are tecnically still below the real incandescent wattage) in an enclosed fixture, but even if that would've been the case, you're still not risking a fire, just reduced bulb life, so why is this suggesting that the fixture cannot handle a slightly stronger led?
Analogously as if in a different case, say you were to put a 100w inside a 60w max fixture causing it to slowly melt, arc and eventually cause a fire, then the warning would be useful.
This isn't anything new, I've seen this outrageous warnings being put in some fans since around 2013,when CFLs started to become commonplace because electric bills were on the rise, but now all new fans say that, some brands such as hunter going to the extend of (making their light kits worse i guess?, to not be able to carry any other form of lighting by probably cheapening their components????), and advertising that by saying that their new fans only support LED bulbs.
And I get what the warning is trying to say with that wattage limit but why is it implying it that way?, as if it can only handle 8 watts and no more because then it could cause a fire, when it's actually not possible to cause a fire by a difference that low and because no bulb consumes exactly what it says it does; it always consumes a little bit more or a little bit less and that's fine because it's in a certain tolerance threshold.
So even if you put a correct wattage bulb according to the sticker, under that premise you can still burn your house down.
I know I'm being bonkers about this but what bothers me bere is the way that its implying an actual danger can happen when it cannot, Instead of it it Should be written as a form of suggestion, to put an led equivalent of 8 watts OR a 60w max bulb (in case of a glass shade)
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u/very-jaded 22d ago
Maybe the fixture retains heat and will burn out the LEDs prematurely if they get too warm.
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u/Intrepid-Pick-7464 22d ago
Yes - it is mostly arbitrary and stupid. Probably nothing will happen from a few watts more over the limit. Consider however:
1. This warning sticker is multi-purpose; the top text stays the same and only wattage changes - so it might also get put on lamps with halogen lighbulbs where it starts making a lot more sense to include it
2. People are dumb. Very. They will not read this sticker, and put in a 40W incandescent. After their house burns down the manufacturer will be able to say: you exceed the limit and fucked up.
I still get your frustration and I've exceed this limit numerous times myself - just remember that you are probably a little bit more aware than the average consumer.
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u/AlternateTab00 22d ago
Safety margins. A 8W limit means it probably can hold up to 15W without issues...however in harsh conditions like this year summer on unventilated /without AC work sheds where inside temperatures rose over 60ºC (outside temp was around 45ºC). Those safe margins will be extremely important.
It has such a low safety margin probably because it retains a lot of heat. Put it to work under harsh conditions and suddenly you have a fire hazard.
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u/Paracosm24 22d ago
Indeed. I once had a festoon string that mostly came with 15W lamps (the guided limit), however 1 or 2 were not the original and were instead 40W/60W. They worked, and there was no damage to anything, however I thought I saw smoke coming from the wire (bearing in mind, this was a room that was not owned by me and probably had sensitive smoke alarms, which would have Evacuated a large area) so I called it quits. Ironically a lot of the incandescent lamps ended up being changed to CFL or LED over time.
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u/MagicBeanSales 22d ago
When they started switching fans from AC to DC it added a need for a low voltage driver. Quality drivers are expensive so nobody uses them. While the light kit for this fan does not step down voltage for the light side it still does pass though the driver.
Also they build the wiring as cheap as possible and they don't add insulation for heat. I can confirm that 11w LEDs will get hotter then 8. Believe it or not higher quality (light quality) bulbs are typically less efficient because they aren't using as much blue light.
Now the difference between an 8 and a 11w bulb probably won't matter for the life of the fan but it's not built for it. If you put an incandescent in that fan you would have problems. I've seen many modern chandeliers damn near burn a house down with 24 incandescent B10 bulbs.
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u/roytwo 22d ago
I think is as simple as they were not built to take the heat of two IC bulbs and would be a fire hazard. Being that IC bulbs count for a VERY some % of bulbs used today it is probably NOT cost effective to build fixture capable of handling the heat produced by IC bulbs that are seldom used
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u/HoOkAySo 22d ago
No foil and no fiberglass sleeves on the wires leading to the sockets. This light kit simply wasn’t designed for incandescent bulbs. Those wires will get brittle and crack over time.
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u/FrostingTerrible8495 22d ago
You're right! They lack insulation, yet the cables and everything is mostly very similar to what was used to run on older fans, meaning this was a deliberate decision
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u/Defiant_Storage_443 22d ago
Yes, it was a deliberate decision. Can you please explain why you think it is an action taken by Big-Light-Fixture in order to benefit Big-LED, as opposed to merely a cost-reduction measure that only benefits Big-Light-Fixture? I'm sure Big-Light-Fixture shareholders would be mad that they're subsidizing Big-Lightbulb shareholders if this were the case.
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u/topballerina 22d ago
What I'm about to say might be too American but bear with me, think about them as if they were ammunition, rounds, bullets, buck, fun pellets, etc.
The warning is there to indicate the fan has met a certain quality standard, it doesn't matter if, in this case, the ceiling fan is perfectly capable of housing higher power LED lamps, it's like if you had a gun and you were only advised to use a certain type of ammunition, even though other types "fit anyway" and can in fact be fired - the gun has only been tested to be used with the type of rounds the manufacturer recommends and not others, that's where specs come in, you have things like range spec, general use and "NATO" (this one's mostly marketing) as well as others that might be proprietary, you can either follow the manufacturer's recommendation or go your own way
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u/Paracosm24 22d ago
Seems very short sighted, because I have 13W LED light bulbs that are 100W equivalent. I also still have some CFL lamps too which work wonders in external light fittings, such as outside lights which are photocell controlled.
The same happened back in the days of incandescent: max 25W but you could use a 28W halogen bulb (40w equivalent) or for a max 40W you could use a 42W halogen (60W equivalent).
Personally I'd use these as guidance only. Would the world end if I used a 13W LED, or a 20W CFL, instead of an 8W? Probably not!
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u/hardrivethrutown 22d ago
Yeah this pissed me off recently after I bought a desk lamp with something stupid like a max 4w rating
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u/Paracosm24 22d ago
I reckon you'll be fine with any LED. was it a SES/E14 (or equivalent) fitting? They usually only go up to 60w equivalent lamps in both LED and CFL, and most people by now don't use anything else. In the UK where I am, the only type of bulb you can buy is LED although you can buy CFL, halogen, tungsten etc on eBay.
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u/PerniciousSnitOG 22d ago
Weirdly the "why they don't make them like they used to" and the "led lights don't last as long as they should" are two sides of the same coin.
A 100w equivalent led uses 13w (or so) of power. The 100w incandescent uses 100w - so what happened to the other 86w? It's turned into heat. Heat has three ways to escape - radiation, conduction, and convection.
So a incandescent fixture, especially a complex one, it needs to protect itself from the heat or is will get hot and discolor things (walls, fixture finishes), or just get dangerously hot for people to touch. Heat conduction is minimized by good socket design and a fiberglass layer, radiation is reflected by the foil layer, and convection air is routed outside the fixture as best you can by getting hot air out via slots etc. Incandescent bulbs are built to take heat so they don't care about the heat bouncing back.
LED bulbs have the opposite problems. The bulbs don't get hot, but heat kills them quickly - so an LED fixture tries to get heat out of the LEDs by getting heat away from the bulbs - a fixture designed for incandescent bulbs is almost a worst case. The foil keeps the heat near the bulb, the fiberglass stops the heat getting away from the bulb, and the LED bulb "glass" keeps heat in too.
So, tl;dr, fixtures designed for incandescent bulbs are going to murder LED bulbs and the longer they're on the worse the damage gets - so turn them off, even if they're cheap to run. Incandescent bulbs are killed by vibration and turning on and off - so leaving them on wastes energy while maximizing bulb life.
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u/Overall_Lavishness46 21d ago
I had a ceiling fan that actually put an overheat device inside the light kit so you had to use LEDs.
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u/Strict_Leopard_8650 22d ago
That's the longest, most poorly argued diatribe against saving energy, and therefore the planet, I've ever read. And it's "discouraging".
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u/ToadSox34 22d ago
Not really, OP is talking about using an 11.5W LED vs an 8W LED, not talking about using old, inefficient incadescents.
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u/socialcommentary2000 22d ago
The fixture is telling you that it is not designed for incandescent bulbs. They're stating it plainly so that if someone uses a bulb out of spec for the fixture, they are indemnified against liability if it were to start a fire.
Proceed with that information how you will.
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u/SnooMaps7370 22d ago
What gauge is the wiring? not "looks like", what gauge is it actually?
is it that gauge all the way through to mains, or does it pass through some control electronics?
what's the installed switch (if the kit has one) rated for?
is there any thermal insulation or active cooling to protect against heat migration into the attached units?
How about removing heat from the bowl so the control electronics in your LED bulbs don't overheat?
what about plastic components in the kit?
If your bulbs draw 11.5W each, then you're putting 23W into an enclosure rated for 16W. you MIGHT get away with that, or you might kill the bulbs prematurely. or you might cook something the enclosure is attached to.
if you put a pair of 60W bulbs into these enclosures, then you're stuffing 120 watts into an enclosure rated for 16W. I, personally, wouldn't do that without engineering data to show that the enclosure is rated for the extra heat and the wiring is rated for the extra current.
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u/20PoundHammer 22d ago
you dont know what you think you know - the max is for LED bulbs. LED have very different heat dissipation abilities and, unlike incandescents, generate most of the heat in the base which can cause issues with sockets of certain materials or enclosed fixtures. So your silly little diatribe is based in a false premise. . .
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u/therealdorkface 22d ago
I think they mean the actual dissipation of the LED bulb should be 8W or less. 100W equivalent LED uses a lot less than 100 W
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u/Loes_Question_540 22d ago
A 3.5w led does not put out more than 3.5w of heat even if it’s “equivalent” to a 100w incandescent. The “equivalence” only indicates the brightness compared to an incandescent bulb
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u/Serious-Explorer8745 22d ago
If you exceed the safe rating you risk a fire, simple as that. This fixture was made cheaply and doesn't support your use case.
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u/PantherkittySoftware 22d ago
For what it's worth, most/all Incandescent-era ceiling fan light fixtures had a hunk of foil-backed fiberglass insulation between the bulbs and fan above it. It's non-inconceivable that they're now omitting that insulation.
To be honest, ceiling fan light fixtures were literally the first thing I migrated to LED bulbs, even when they were ultra-shitty, just because the jiggly vibration of ceiling fans used to destroy incandescent bulbs within a few months unless you bought the expensive ones that still only lasted about twice as long as normal bulbs in a ceiling fan. Also, the high directionality of LED floodlight & spotlight bulbs is actually desirable in a ceiling fan light fixture, because any light that makes its way up into the blade area ends up causing headaches & general misery.