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?
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.
You can actually buy tinted tape to dim them without completely blacking them out. So you can take your clock from “bright enough to keep your entire bedroom lit” to “just bright enough to read in the dark.”
Found out while watching Technology Connections. Bright blue monochromatic LEDs are one of his biggest pet peeves, and he mentioned the tinted tape off-hand in one of his videos.
Bingo, there it is. Thanks!
I bought some pre-cut led dimming stickers on a sheet. Any new electronics that come into my house get one. As someone who likes to sleep in near complete darkness it’s a must have.
Yep I have a pack of various shapes and sizes for dimming LEDs. You just stick it over the light. Works great
I literally travel with a roll of black electric tape for this exact reason.
No officer, I use it to cover the lights on electronics in my hotel room. Honest!
I mean, just carry a small roll of it, not one that’s like an inch or two wide…
Thanks for reminding me. Gotta pack that for my next holiday.
I have a black pen that can write on plastic. I’ve used that to dim the insanely bright LED on a smoke detector. If you are careful (I wasn’t) then this method looks nicer than putting some tape on a device.
Use cut pieces of sticky notes. It’s the correct width and doesnt look as jank
…or one or more layers of nail polish.
Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
Agreed. I can’t tell when people are driving with their high beams on anymore.
My pet peeve is not just the brightness, but the blueness. These things are fucking blue raspberry slurpee blue. Paired with a very reddish orange turn signal they come up behind me and indicate and I think I’m getting pulled over for a sec.
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This is why I always have the high beans on when driving my 90’s car. I’ve got to fit in with the cool kids (oh and be able to see the road despite the blinding lights coming at me.)
Not sure if you are joking or not. But at times that’s actually what I think about and sometimes even do. If there is a car with too bright lights coming down the road I’ll turn on the high beams because it reduces my ability to see the road otherwise.
Thank you! I’m not the only one!
Electrical tape can be used to black them out.
lmao
Might be some solace in the near future. Pixel Light is becoming a thing, where the car will selectively black out part of the headlight beam for oncoming traffic.
Seriously, I swear I get temporarily blinded at night sometimes.
They installed LEDs in the road lights near me and they had a faulty film cover that turned purple 😆 now they whole highway is light up purple at night!
But they have to be able to see something 20km ahead!
Because they’re cheap and look “modern/futuristic” so shit manufacturers love them. I have also used electrical tape on power strips, chargers, smoke detectors, etc
That and your average electrical engineer will consider an LED useful that signals the device has power.
Most probably then don’t consider where the device is actually used. In a well-lit office space that LED doesn’t annoy anyone.
I have a similar complaint about almost all “gamer gear” having RGB lighting. Why would I want that? I’m not even opposed to the “gamer” aesthetic of a lot of sharp lines and strong colors, I think that can look really good, but when my mousepad has RGB it’s time to blow the whistle and stop all manufacturing until we can figure out what’s going on.
Buying RAM recently and people are reviewing the fucking RGB instead of the performance. Like, WTF are you doing with your life? I managed to find some without gratuitous lighting effects thankfully.
I’ve never liked the RGB thing. Sometimes it can look good (when they’re all set to one color that matches the rest of the build), but 99% of them look tacky. Whenever I get around to building a PC finally, I’m gonna try to have zero LEDs in there. Just something nice and simple and clean.
Right? Sure, keyboards with backlit keys are nice, and why not have them colorful? But pls don’t try to sell me RGB RAM
My hunch is it’s to stand out in influencer videos for a shot at viral marketing.
That’s why I feel old. I don’t want case windows, or RGB. It’s all about the framerate and the score.
But, are you old enough to want a turbo button and LED on your case?
I hate the window, too. Why build a case with aluminium, then add a huge glass window heavier than a full steel case?
I don’t know if this is the right place to complain about this but since it’s LED related… Why are all the automakers putting the brightest fucking LED’s in their new vehicles now?? They are legit brighter then how high beams used to be only a few years back!!
What did we all used to do when headlights used to be slightly yellow??
I miss the days of red LEDs. I understand blue were new and novel at one point but that’s passed.
new AND novel?
also fresh and different!
Our fresh state of the art new innovation, neoBlue© coloured LEDs, using novaBright technology(patent pending) to brighten your days and lead to a fresh and exciting future filled with the latest stunning luxuries.
I’m old.enough to remember when this was literally a news item… For a long time LEDs where red orange and green but the wavelength for blue was tricky. Then in early 90s they finally cracked being able to make blue with cheap materials and manufacturing processes for mass consumption. It would change the world as having r g and b enabled LEDs to be used in displays. So blue LEDs were the ones that won a Nobel prize and was in all the journals and on pop sci TV shows like beyond 2000.
So some of the copy was identical to your post
(Read more here https://medium.com/predict/why-blue-led-earned-nobel-prize-if-reds-and-greens-already-existed-for-decades-d03e31a6fd8f )
It’s different to the eye! See how it’s something you might recognize, but you don’t?
Electrical engineer here who also does hobby projects. I’m with you. I think some of the reason may be that modern GaN-type green or blue LEDs are absurdly efficient, so only a couple mA of drive current is enough to make them insanely bright.
When I build LEDs into my projects, for a simple indicator light, I might run them at maybe only a tenth of a milliamp and still get ample brightness to tell whether it is on or not in a lit room. Giving them the full rated 10 or 20mA would be blindingly bright. I also usually design most things with a hard on/off switch so they can be turned all the way off when not in use.
Of things I own normally I also have two power strips with absurdly bright LEDs to indicate the surge protection. It lights up my whole living room with the lights off. If I had to have something like that in my bedroom, I would probably open it up and disconnect the LEDs in some way, or maybe modify the resistor values to run at the lowest current I could get away with.
I feel like designers have lost sight of the fact that these lights are meant to be indicators only-- i.e. a subtle indication of the status of something and not trying to light a room-- and yet they default to driving them at full blast as if they were the super dim older-gen LEDs from 20+ years ago.
I think it’s a cost thing. It’s cheaper to get these blue LEDs than the old, dimmer green ones, so they buy these instead and change nothing else. It would cost money to change the resistor value, so they don’t bother. Instead they take the same boad, stick the new LED on it, and ship it that way.
I could see that being the case for some things, at least in cases where it is an older design being updated or VE’d. Perhaps some sourcing person changes the LED part number on the AVL and forgets to check with engineering whether the resistor value which goes with it is a sane level of brightness still.
Next level pro-tip: Use a “dot” or dab of dark nail polish to tone down the intensity. It’s more permanent than the tape method but will allow you to see if the LED is on or off so doesn’t remove functionality.
Black electrical tape is usually pretty long-lasting in my book, but nail polish sounds like a good idea too given that it dries pretty quickly
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 have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.
precision flathead screwdriver
Ah yes. Just like my precision printer adjustment mallet.
It’s hard to find a PC case that doesn’t look like a disco.
You actually have to pay a premium to avoid lightshow pc hardware nowadays. If i had to guess, someone over at marketing for these companies figured out that people who want blacked out hardware skew older or professional and are willing to pay.
Or you can just not plug in the LEDs :P
Most of them you don’t have a choice. There are fans that light up when the fan has any power at all. Motherboards have integrated lights. GPUs have internal LEDs…
Sure, you could desolder some of them, but that’s harder.
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.
Yep, its part of why this drives me crazy. I notice a big difference in my sleep when I’m in, say, a hotel that has any of these LEDs in it.
I know your rage.
I ended up buying LED dimming stickers off Amazon and went hog wild on all the devices in the house.
There’s specialty stickers? What do they do that tape can’t?
I also bought dimming stickers. I can’t tell you why everyone uses them, of course, but I bought stickers rather than using tape for a couple of reasons. The main one is that there are some lights that indicate information I still want to get. Our fan has LEDs to indicate current speed, my wireless phone charger has a light to indicate that it detects the phone. That information is good, and I want it! Just not as brightly as the manufacturer wants to give it to me, so I put stickers that dim about 75% and they’re perfect. The other big reason, for me, is that I simply find the stickers more aesthetically pleasing. Even if I want to block the light fully, rather than just dim it, a little circular sticker looks nicer to me than a piece of tape.
Link please!
I’ve been using these, but I’m sure there are many other choices that are just as good!
Thank you!
I recently bought new USB-C cables to use on my nightstand and when they arrived I saw they have an LED ring with a flowing rainbow pattern. Are you kidding me? Just why.
I like having that LED on the end of the cable. I use it to charge my phone in the car and it saves me fumbling around trying to find the end of my cables when I want to charge my phone in the car while driving at night.
Yeah that makes total sense. It’s my own fault for not noticing. I use them everywhere but my bedroom.
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Or how every appliance needs to have an alarming beeeeeeep to alert you its done. Like its cool that you finished sterilizing our babies bottles but it wasn’t really urgent…
Like the coffee grinder which beeps to let you know that the [rather loud] grinding process has finished!
At leat that has a real function. It’s annoying, but it’s a planned annoyance, and sometimes it really is useful so it’s tolerable.
But so many of these LEDs indicate nothing except “this has power,” which is readily apparent 99% of the time because it’s plugged in and the house has power.
My oven sounds exactly like my fire alarm, it’s distressing, the first time I used it I ended up running to the kitchen thinking I was going to find the place burning.
At least my washing machine plays a cute little tune.
At least my washing machine plays a cute little tune.
Is it an LG?
♫
I’m done with the laundry
dirty and stinky old laundry
I’m done with the laundry
what do you want from me now?
♫
My egg cooker competes with my smoke detector on how loud it is
On the other hand, I prefer the beeps over the jingles every appliance has now.
I laugh at those annoying jingles. Our washing machine sounds so pleased with itself when it has finished a load, playing a bright, happy, celebratory song. Pay attention to me! I have completed my assigned task!
One day they are going to be beeping at us like R2D2 providing way too much information.
“Beepity beep beep warble beep boop!” Translation - Dude use tissues, those socks were disgusting.
