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?

  • Brad Ganley@toad.work
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    1 year ago

    I get to be that guy! I’m so excited!

    In power strips, the lights are (in the overwhelming majority of cases) actually a neon bulb! They’re cheaper for that specific purpose because they can be powered directly off of the mains power with a single resistor.

    Your point is entirely valid and I bear the same cross, this is just a fun fact you can use to impress colleagues, strangers, and potential lovers, dazzling them with your deep esoteric knowledge of and passion for illuminators in power strips.

    • Russianranger@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • I'm Hiding 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        Especially when they’re in one of those God-ugly American Pickup Trucks with headlights that are right at eye level for anyone in a normal car. Even being followed by a forty year old Mack semi isn’t nearly as bad, because they’ve at least got sealed beam headlights.

        • linuxFan@lib.lgbt
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          1 year ago

          “… one of those God-ugly American Pickup Trucks …”

          Why’d you say American Pickup Trucks twice?

          I kid, but really those things are hideous. The front end looks like a Baleen whale feeding.

      • thatgirlwasfire@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Depending where you are, the bright bulbs help spot deer. Though if you are in the suburbs that might not be really much of a problem

      • valek879@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.)

        • Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Saigonauticon@voltage.vn
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    1 year ago

    I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it’s a cheap way to show the state of a system.

    The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There’s no specific amount of current that produces light that’s bright enough in a lit room, but isn’t too bright in a dark room.

    I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I’m in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won’t think of specifically doing this.

    Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

    All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I’ don’t like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there’s a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.

    • sndrtj@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      I love lemmy for bringing back the old informative internet like this comment.

  • serpineslair@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am so happy with my new keyboard in every way apart from the fact that the num pad light etc. is blue and SO BRIGHT to the point where it is almost blinding to look at directly from above, and it lights up my ceiling blue at night, like pointing a torch. I guess it’s a sign of quality or whatever but I think it is a tad unnecessary to be that bright. I may end up covering it with a few layers of transparent/tinted tape.

  • busturn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m a bit late and maybe someone already mentioned it, but go onto amazon and order the cheapest darkest car window tinting film. I have it on all of my leds and it makes it a lot more bearable.

  • Willer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    fun fact: human eyes can actually perceive single photons.

    also fun fact: we can shoot single photons.

  • damnYouSun@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I also get frustrated with how ubiquitous they’ve become. I want darkness in my house at night, I don’t like LEDs winking at me from all over the place and I hate placing electrical tape over them but there are few options that aren’t permanently damaging.

  • LDRMS@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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??

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, there used to be regulations on this stuff, because you kind of just end up in an arms race.
      Pretty much the only reason you’d want brighter headlights, is so that if someone blinds you with their bright headlights, you still see things behind that.

      • LanyrdSkynrd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We’re also in a big vehicles arms race. I’m always telling people about how big vehicles cause more kids to get run over, more pedestrians to die, more damage in accidents, etc. The most common response from giant vehicle owners is that it makes them feel safer in an accident.

        In 10 years they’ll probably all be driving tanks with stadium lights mounted on top.

  • EntropicNinja@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s so “Big Brother” can still watch you…?! 😅

    Bluetack is your friend. The constant red light on our baby monitor was too distracting in the pitch blackness of the night that it kept my kids awake. A small amount of Bluetack and this problem is solved. Not asthectically pleasing but a good option.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I work in IT, LEDs are useful for diagnostics.

    Why blue? No idea.

    Who asked for this? Nobody, as far as I can tell… They just switched, and didn’t ask anyone for an opinion on it.

    Why so bright? Because modern LEDs are generally pretty darn bright… When these are used as an indicator instead of an actual light source, I’m scratching my head just as much as you are. I’m immune to the light problem when sleeping; I understand some have that problem, but it’s not me. Generally I’m unbothered by device LEDs, but I’m not the majority. I’d rather go back to the old, barely visible LEDs used on 386 computers, they did the job and didn’t burn a hole in your retina doing it.

  • Veraxis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.