Although full time job, sometimes been asked to repair (like everyone else on this site) electrical /mechanical equipment big or small up to the not so easy washing machines and mig welders. Down to a few items nowadays due to the throw-away attitudes that people have, as items do not cost as much as the older items once did.
The skip sites were valuable to me to hunt for parts as I repaired items for no cost whenever I could. Due to H&S you are not allowed now this past few years to remove anything from a skip site.
The big winner of this new law. "The right to repair " will be of course that big rich company where you can get anything even a small £1 switch in a big cardboard box (and I use them for parts), the loser will be the with hundreds of big vans travelling all over the country for small items.
This is only a small courteous take on this from me, others may have a more generous view.
I don't find this BBC article convincing or appealing to an engineer. I don't doubt that there is a lamp that has been shining for over 100 years, but how many watts does it consume and how many lumens does it output? I'll not hold my breath for an answer to that one.
In general, with filament lamps, life and efficiency are traded against each other. BS 161, now obsolete, was the standard for GLS tungsten lamps, and various competing manufacurers tried to meet it. The 1000 hour life was a workable compromise between life and efficiency. Some uses bought lamps rated at 10 or 20 volts above actual supply rating, to gain extended life, but at the expense of light output and this could be shown to be a false economy unless replacement labour costs were high. Similar arguments could be brought against the 2000 hour "long-life" lamps that some makers produced.
We have moved on to compact source fluorescent lamps, which give both longer life and higher efficiency. Unfortunately they were not as popular as they should have been owing to poor marketing methods and ill-considered legistation to phase out tungsten lamps.
We have moved further to LED lamps. These are becoming widely accepted. It is not all bad news. This is real progress.
Don't assume that the manufacturer has your best interests at heart. The 1000 hour lifespan for GLS lamps was set by a cartel of manufacturers who wanted to ensure a constant stream of customers buying new lamps. Longer life lamps would have been slightly less efficient, but they were simply not offered to consumers for fear that the consumers might buy them.
The new LED lamps we get are also designed to fail. I'm a regular viewer of Big Clive's videos on YouTube. He recently featured the Philips Dubai range of LED lamps. As the name suggests, they are only offered for sale in Dubai, in return for a monopoly agreement from the local government. They are more efficient than the lamps that Philips offer over here, and they are designed to run cooler, so they will last longer. Of course they will cost a bit more, but it is telling that Philips will not even offer them outside the one country where they have made a special deal with the government.
I don't find this BBC article convincing or appealing to an engineer. I don't doubt that there is a lamp that has been shining for over 100 years, but how many watts does it consume and how many lumens does it output? I'll not hold my breath for an answer to that one.
In general, with filament lamps, life and efficiency are traded against each other. BS 161, now obsolete, was the standard for GLS tungsten lamps, and various competing manufacurers tried to meet it. The 1000 hour life was a workable compromise between life and efficiency. Some uses bought lamps rated at 10 or 20 volts above actual supply rating, to gain extended life, but at the expense of light output and this could be shown to be a false economy unless replacement labour costs were high. Similar arguments could be brought against the 2000 hour "long-life" lamps that some makers produced.
We have moved on to compact source fluorescent lamps, which give both longer life and higher efficiency. Unfortunately they were not as popular as they should have been owing to poor marketing methods and ill-considered legistation to phase out tungsten lamps.
We have moved further to LED lamps. These are becoming widely accepted. It is not all bad news. This is real progress.
Don't assume that the manufacturer has your best interests at heart. The 1000 hour lifespan for GLS lamps was set by a cartel of manufacturers who wanted to ensure a constant stream of customers buying new lamps. Longer life lamps would have been slightly less efficient, but they were simply not offered to consumers for fear that the consumers might buy them.
The new LED lamps we get are also designed to fail. I'm a regular viewer of Big Clive's videos on YouTube. He recently featured the Philips Dubai range of LED lamps. As the name suggests, they are only offered for sale in Dubai, in return for a monopoly agreement from the local government. They are more efficient than the lamps that Philips offer over here, and they are designed to run cooler, so they will last longer. Of course they will cost a bit more, but it is telling that Philips will not even offer them outside the one country where they have made a special deal with the government.
