[ars]

It's self sufficiency after purchase not before.

They don't mind buying things they can't make, as long as they can repair or do without them afterward.

They won't buy things that need constant connection to the outside - like grid electricity.

They will buy a generator as long as they can take it completely apart and put it back together. But if they can't do that they won't.

LED's seem unexpected to me, but I suspect they are OK with them because the lights are not for them they are for the outside world. As far as they are concerned they don't need them (so can do without).

Note: Things (such as buying a generator) vary by community.

[rconti]

Is the vastly lower energy consumption of LEDs perhaps a virtue that makes them preferable to incandescents, even though they are far more complicated to manufacture?

[ars]

They can't manufacture either of them, so complexity of manufacture doesn't enter into it.

So I assume they like LED's for the same reason you do, less battery.

If they did make incandescents (I suppose if they tried they could), then the comparison would be harder for them, and I would expect some communities to go one way, some the other.

[ams6110]

I would imagine they could manufacture incandescents if they so chose. Glassblowing seems like something they'd be OK with. And otherwise it's just a bit of wire and a vacuum.

[ars]

That wire is pretty special though, it's a coil of coil, with extremely tight tolerance. i.e. if you look at it it looks like a coil, but actually the wire that makes up that first coil is itself an even smaller coil.

You have to wind it such that no part of the wire touches (or it will burn out at that spot).

It's titanium which is not an easy material to make wire out of without special industrial equipment. And not pure titanium either, but has special additives.

You have to make it without any variation in thickness! Even a 1% variation will cause it to rapidly overheat and burn out.

It's also not a vacuum in there, but a mixture of nitrogen and argon, which needs special equipment to gather.

In short they could make a bulb like what Edison made, but without an industrial base not anything like a modern bulb.

And despite all that, those bulbs sell for pennies.......

[int_19h]

Isn't incandescent bulb filament made of tungsten, rather than titanium?

[ars]

Yes, sorry, that's a typo. The high melting point is what I was thinking of, and that's tungsten.

[SamReidHughes]

Also, in homes, the main alternatives involve fire.