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?
I wonder which of those appliances will stop working if I drill into the LED with a micro drill… Tape is good, but not perfect. I have a bluetooth speaker in my bedroom, and of all colours it has to use bright blue LEDs as a power on indicator :-( I have the speaker now in a leather bag at night, which does not exactly improve the sound quality.
Open it up and destroy the LED or unsolder it, if you can. Sometimes there’s no way around it.
The case is waterproof, I’m not sure that’s still so once I temper with is.
My other concern is I’m not 100% sure, if LEDs are always on a separate path or maybe part sometimes part of a signal path, i.e. if the LED is removed and that current can’t flow anymore, could the device stop working.
No, you’ll be fine with smashed LEDs. I have never come across a circuit in a consumer device that would do that. Without getting to technical, it wouldn’t make sense to do that in >99,9% of usecases too. Just remove them thoroughly in order to not create a possible short-circuit.
What kind of tape are you using? If you use the solid black electrical tape, I’ve never found an led so bright that it could get through more than 3 layers of the stuff.
If the LED is more or less on the surface, it works, although I don’t like the look much. If the LED is somehow deeper inside, to give an “elegant” shine spread through a bigger area of the casing surface, tape doesn’t work well…