Well well well, if it's not one of my favourite videos from clive.
Why can't we get them? Phoebus cartel's legacy, not in the sense of "there's a conspiracy made and The Rothschild doesn't wants us to have better tech" but as in, if you made a bulb that can last for say 25 years, you'd run out of people you can sell bulbs to at certain point until it's not profitable anymore to keep manufacturing them, even if you could have a contract with ALL construction companies and contractors in a country as big as the US the amount of bulbs you'd sell wouldn't be enough to keep your company afloat.
The typical incandescent bulb is made to last no more than 2 years by using an extremely thin filament, CFLs meaning the tube itself can last for more than that, but there's a trick, the electronics on them will degrade faster due to overheating -again, no conspiracy- by people unknowingly installing them incorrectly, most houses around the world have ceiling lamp holders, while they're good for incandescent bulbs they're terrible for CFLs as the components in them will eventually overheat due to physics, heat rises, that's bad. I'd say a spiral type CFL is really similar to a nernst on how it behaves (of course the internals are completely different) so they should be placed "upside down" (glass facing up) so that the heat FROM the ballast and transistors heat up the glass -therefore the gas- providing better heat dissipation and light. Unfortunately this technology has been bashed so much for their supposedly short life that manufacturers came up with LED bulbs.
About LEDs we have the surface mounted LED models with the plastic diffuser on top that are usually cheaper and similar to CFLs suffering from the same overheating issue, and the incandescent copycats with a "filament" inside, these generate a bit less heat and most don't feature a capacitor. The LED overvolting in order to get more lumens is indeed an issue so unless you mod a bulb or make your own there's no way around it.
Something that most people don't know is that getting DC LED bulbs is better, why? there's only a filter cap inside them, the conversion is made by a power supply that's far away from the bulb itself so the LEDs will work at a lower temperature, there are plenty out there that work with 48V and all you gotta do is adapt the holder or lamp to work with DC, oh and make sure you don't screw in a DC bulb into an AC holder, that's a nice way to burn money.
Energy saving is a nice bonus, we have some really old chandeliers at home and the big one alone could eat up over 1300W with incandescent bulbs, it's 144 now (8W per bulb) so almost a 90% reduction, what I like about the glass bulb LEDs is that they nailed the right colour tone, it's the same as an incandescent, can't say the same about CFLs, tubes or plastic dome LEDs.
I've been experimenting with LED filament, I have a whole box of it, the only downside is that, of course, I can't blow the glass myself so... that's a problem, I don't have a bulb factory. If I could do it myself it'd look like one of the early carbon based filament bulbs with the nipple at the top, that'd be nice for sure.
My monitors use about as much energy as a old bulb.
