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?
My home office is in my bedroom. I’ve covered what I can with electrical tape but the glow still comes through. Sometimes I just throw dirty t-shirts and socks over things
Sometimes I really need to read stuff like this on the webs, so I can rest assured that I’m indeed a normal human being, and not a filthy uncivilised animal.
A soldiering iron comes in handy.
I just remove annoying leds altogether.
Replace them with a resistor?
I usually just remove it and leave the space empty/open circuit.
It’s very very rare that a missing/nonfunctional led will effect the rest of the device. In those rare cases, swap the light emitting diode for a regular diode (though a resistor would probably do fine too).
easier, but only sometimes viable alternative: Wirecutters
this is a test
This is also a test
This is a test as well.
Fully agree. One of the worst offenders is the PS5 whose standby lights can’t even be covered with tape properly because they’re complex curves. Even the clocks on my stove and microwave are too bright. I happened to have some black “washi” tape (basically masking tape) and it did a nice job of dimming them without looking out of place.
There really should be an option to dim it low.
I also use sticky notes like @RedHandsome@kbin.social. I’ve tried electrical tape but I don’t like how it goes gunky after a while.
I have a lutron maestro light switch that has LED lights, but I like it. I can see it when I walk to the bathroom at night or when I walk into the apartment and it’s dark. I also like the LEDs in my keyboard. But that’s it. I have my monitor lights covered, and the USB charger, router, and power bar lights might end up with similar treatments soon.
I’ve read that a high-end electrical tape like Scotch Super33+ doesn’t leave residue, but I’ve never tried it myself.
Scotch Super33+ Hmm I think I’ve seen that packaging before. I’ll have a look for it next time I go to the store.
It’s also difficult to buy a power strip without a light nowadays. The ones without a switch+light are even more expensive, if you can find it…
I don’t understand why the need a light AND a switch. Is the switch not indicator enough?
Y’all need some Light Dims (yes, that website didn’t enter the 21st century, but their product is luckily solid).
Uh that kinda just looks like electrical tape with extra steps
I like the web design tho
Just search led light dim stickers on Amazon and you’ll find them for way less. They’re just stickers. You could also find round stickers in an office supply or art store.
Electrical tape does the trick for me
Try closing your eyes next time, that way you can’t see the light
I bought an LG TV for my bedroom. Its WHITE LED is FUCKING BLINKING WHEN OFF. I taped it with black tape, but then it’s so bright that’s leaking from the button spacing. I had to buy a smart relay like a shelly pm and write a simple program like “after 11pm if power usage is under 2W, cut the power to the appliance”
I have the same thing with one of my monitors. Thankfully the acrylic paint I used is enough to hide that nonsense.
Check your tv settings, most of mine have an option to turn off the led.
it doesn’t allow to turn off the LED (my other samsung instead has a setting “led on when it’s on, led off when it’s off”, but by default it was the opposite, “led off when on, led on when off”)
it has an ECO mode that I can enable. It’s so funny, when you turn off the TV, then it shows a grey rectangle at max brightness “ECO MODE ACTIVATED”
Sometimes there’s a hidden menu. It’s usually called hotel mode and/or service mode. It’s usually easily findable on Google. That mode is also great to e.g. limit the max volume. There could be multiple modes btw. Maybe the LED setting is part of those modes?
Bright LEDs suck. I’ve used painters tape before to cover some of the LEDs I’ve got around the house, and it works pretty alright. It’s thin enough to show the light but dim it pretty significantly.
Electrical tape is the real hack. I used to use painters tape until I saw a comment on reddit about it. Electrical tape 100% blocks all of the light with just one or two layers. It rocks.
my steam deck has this annoying retina burning white led that turns on while its charging, shit lights up my entire room, and i have a huge room, thankfully it can be turned off in its bios
my monitor also has this feature to turn it off… i hope more companies put in a feature to turn it off
I just sleep with a mask, but I hear you man, that trend is super-irritating. I think it comes from people who cant tell that something is powered on without seeing an led indicator
If someone can’t tell that a FAN is plugged in without TWO LEDs (one on the fan itself, another in the plug) then I’m sorry they shouldn’t own the fan, they may actually hurt themselves with it.
It’s a fan. When you plug it in it spins. If it isn’t spinning, you either didn’t plug it in, or didn’t hit the power button on the fan.
You mean can’t tell something is powered on without a freaking bat-signal? That’s how it feels at night.
For a second I thought you said “I think it comes from people who CAN tell that something is powered on without seeing an LED indicator.” I thought you were implying you believe those crazy people who can “feel” low-power home wifi etc. from across the house or whatever. I was going to say that double-blind studies fully indicate that these people are batshit. But that isn’t what you were saying, so I won’t.
I keep the modem from my ISP in its box with holes cut out for the cables. Even with LEDs covered with an electrical tape, it would just shine its blue blinking lights through all the cooling grilles and light up the whole bedroom in the night.
Good luck with it cooking and with your wifi reception
No worries, it’s alright, I put a few speed holes in the box for extra cooling and it’s been working for 2 years already. Also it’s just a modem, not my wifi AP. Having a wifi without an option to change its settings would drive me even more mad than bright blue diodes.
That shit sucks. When blue LEDs became a thing all sorts of electronics adopted them and they were effin everywehre.
This makes you appreciate professional equipment which is less likely to have those ridiculously bright ones. Lenovo usually have pretty discrete orange LEDs on their professional equipment. The large professional Dell monitor I use at work, while fitted with a white LED, has a very dim one.
I love Lenovo, and I realize you only speak of their professional line-up, but I can’t help but mention my Legion PC.
Besides the fancy red lights for when it’s on, which are to be expected on a gaming PC, the damn thing also for some reason has a massive bright white triangle logo on its front that blinks when the PC is in sleep mode. I needed to put it into sleep mode overnight one time and it illuminated the entire room
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.
Pretty much. I was actually purchasing a computer build and it was cheaper to give the build a cohesive RGB look. The main thing jacking the price up was the RAM. The RGB RAM was cheaper to get than the non-RGB one.
I don’t think RGB would be that bad as an aesthetic choice if all the companies actually stuck to one standard like how we have SATA, USB, etc., but they don’t. Most of my RGB components are from Corsair so it’s not a huge problem as iCUE can control it, but if you’ve got different vendors and/or you use Linux, it’s trickier. This is what OpenRGB is trying to solve, and what Level1Tech and Gamer’s Nexus are trying to sort out with OpenPleb.
OpenPleb is such a good initiative. It would be so helpful to have documentation and standards here.
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.
