1y ago

Everything has LEDs now and they drive me nuts

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?

496 comments

Electrical tape to black it out.
Painters tape to dim it.
- 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.
- You can actually buy tinted tape to dim them without completely blacking them out. So you can take your clock from “bright enough to keep your entire bedroom lit” to “just bright enough to read in the dark.”
  Found out while watching Technology Connections. Bright blue monochromatic LEDs are one of his biggest pet peeves, and he mentioned the tinted tape off-hand in one of his videos.
  
  https://youtu.be/oHeehYYgl28?t=13m45s
  
  I bought some pre-cut led dimming stickers on a sheet. Any new electronics that come into my house get one. As someone who likes to sleep in near complete darkness it's a must have.
  
  Yep I have a pack of various shapes and sizes for dimming LEDs. You just stick it over the light. Works great
- Do this and never look back
  
  May the LED's I tape not light the way
  
  With the tape over the LEDs you can look back though. You won't be blinded. It'll be OK.
- I literally travel with a roll of black electric tape for this exact reason.
  
  No officer, I use it to cover the lights on electronics in my hotel room. Honest!
  
  Thanks for reminding me. Gotta pack that for my next holiday.
- Didn't think about the painters tape for just dimming the light, great idea.
- I have a black pen that can write on plastic. I've used that to dim the insanely bright LED on a smoke detector. If you are careful (I wasn't) then this method looks nicer than putting some tape on a device.
- Use cut pieces of sticky notes. It's the correct width and doesnt look as jank
- I use tiny balls of patafix/blutac to cover exactly the LED surface.
- ....or one or more layers of nail polish.

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.
- Hah, this is what I liked the most about reddit - learning random bits of knowledge about things I knew nothing about. I'm glad to see this happen here too!
  
  What's a reddit?
  
  Hell yes me too. And it was the top comment.
- This is also why those power strip lights can sometimes flicker in the dark. They are sometimes over-driven for extra brightness; this does cut their lifespan, but they usually still last for many years regardless. However, towards the end of that shortened lifespan, the accumulated damage to the electrodes leads to flickering as it struggles to keep the neon excited. However, incoming photons can give just a little extra nudge, which sometimes is enough to keep the neon excited and glowing.

Car headlight are too fucking bright nowadays
- People driving around like they're trying to spot kangaroos in the suburbs
  
  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.
  
  Even the auto dimming ones are too much
  
  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
- Agreed. I can't tell when people are driving with their high beams on anymore.
  
  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.
  
  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.)
  
  Thank you! I'm not the only one!
- Electrical tape can be used to black them out.
  
  lmao
- Might be some solace in the near future. Pixel Light is becoming a thing, where the car will selectively black out part of the headlight beam for oncoming traffic.
- Seriously, I swear I get temporarily blinded at night sometimes.
- They installed LEDs in the road lights near me and they had a faulty film cover that turned purple 😆 now they whole highway is light up purple at night!

Agree. When my DVD player back in 2000 came with a bright blue power-on LED, that crap started to bother me. Sitting right under the TV, so watching anything in a darkened room means I had that fucker blinding me all the time. Nothing a little duct tape can't fix, but that's not exactly helping.
Ever since I've been actively avoiding devices where I can't dim & disable the LEDs.

I have a similar complaint about almost all "gamer gear" having RGB lighting. Why would I want that? I'm not even opposed to the "gamer" aesthetic of a lot of sharp lines and strong colors, I think that can look really good, but when my mousepad has RGB it's time to blow the whistle and stop all manufacturing until we can figure out what's going on.

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.

I miss the days of red LEDs. I understand blue were new and novel at one point but that's passed.
- new AND novel?
  also fresh and different!
  
  Our fresh state of the art new innovation, neoBlue© coloured LEDs, using novaBright technology(patent pending) to brighten your days and lead to a fresh and exciting future filled with the latest stunning luxuries.
  
  It’s different to the eye! See how it’s something you might recognize, but you don’t?

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??
- 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.
  
  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.

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.

Next level pro-tip: Use a "dot" or dab of dark nail polish to tone down the intensity. It's more permanent than the tape method but will allow you to see if the LED is on or off so doesn't remove functionality.
- Black electrical tape is usually pretty long-lasting in my book, but nail polish sounds like a good idea too given that it dries pretty quickly

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.
- I prefer midrange crap from China

I have opened up devices to physically remove the led. SMD LEDs stand no chance against a steady hand and a precision flathead screwdriver.
- precision flathead screwdriver
  Ah yes. Just like my precision printer adjustment mallet.

I don't seem to find it mentioned: LEDs at night are terrible for your sleep, especially the blue ones. Among other things they suppress the melatonin release.
An article that goes into more detail and provides a citations for further research.
- Yep, its part of why this drives me crazy. I notice a big difference in my sleep when I'm in, say, a hotel that has any of these LEDs in it.

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.
  
  Or you can just not plug in the LEDs :P

Or how every appliance needs to have an alarming beeeeeeep to alert you its done. Like its cool that you finished sterilizing our babies bottles but it wasn't really urgent...

Y'all need some Light Dims (yes, that website didn't enter the 21st century, but their product is luckily solid).
- 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
- Uh that kinda just looks like electrical tape with extra steps
  I like the web design tho

I know your rage.
I ended up buying LED dimming stickers off Amazon and went hog wild on all the devices in the house.
- There's specialty stickers? What do they do that tape can't?
  
  I also bought dimming stickers. I can't tell you why everyone uses them, of course, but I bought stickers rather than using tape for a couple of reasons. The main one is that there are some lights that indicate information I still want to get. Our fan has LEDs to indicate current speed, my wireless phone charger has a light to indicate that it detects the phone. That information is good, and I want it! Just not as brightly as the manufacturer wants to give it to me, so I put stickers that dim about 75% and they're perfect. The other big reason, for me, is that I simply find the stickers more aesthetically pleasing. Even if I want to block the light fully, rather than just dim it, a little circular sticker looks nicer to me than a piece of tape.

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"
- 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"
- I have the same thing with one of my monitors. Thankfully the acrylic paint I used is enough to hide that nonsense.

I recently bought new USB-C cables to use on my nightstand and when they arrived I saw they have an LED ring with a flowing rainbow pattern. Are you kidding me? Just why.

Thought this was going to be a more specific complaint about computer hardware/accessories. So much of the high end stuff is just littered with bullshit RGB lighting. Coolers, GPUs, keyboards, mice, monitors, case fans, even fucking RAM sticks! It's insane.
For general appliances my complaint wouldn't be the single LED on it but the brightness. Like you I cover up the bright ones with electrical tape. It wouldn't even cost them any extra money to make it lighter. Just requires a different resistor value.
- For some fucking reason we went from a nice minimalistic design in pcs to all the colors of the rainbow and then some. Like, who cares what it looks like, what matters is the performance it gets...
- At least most of that can be turned off in settings somewhere.
  Bought a neat closed-loop watercooling cpu heatsink that has a whole dang programmable screen on it if I pay a monthly thing, or solid colors if I don't. defaults to cycling through the rainbow. But it has an off mode, so I'm A-OK with none of that.
  
  Yeah you can usually turn it off, but it's still annoying.
  I bought a mechanical keyboard that I otherwise really like. But it came with full RGB on it. I can disable the rainbow pattern it does by default with the software, but the manufacturer cheaped out and didn't include onboard memory for settings. I didn't realize this would ever be an issue so I didn't look for it when buying... The end result is that every time my computer turns on, my keyboard looks like it's trying to summon a leprechaun, and that only stops once Windows has loaded the software up in the background.
- I don't mind it in a computer because the rbg makes the ram go faster 😂
  But in all seriousness it bothers me less in computers because they are only on when the machine is on, so turning it off fixes the problem. Those are deliberately there to make an asthetic, so I understand it.
  But the indicator lights on power strips and shit like that don't do anything
- There's an even cheaper solution for manufacturers that's practically free, just put a more opaque plastic over it.

The team that invented blue LEDs won a nobel prize.
Now every fucking item in my room has a beacon that would put the eye of fucking Sauron to shame.
100% agree with you, and have started destroying LEDs where possible.

I can understand for things that don't look obviously on, but a fan? C'mon. If the fan starts spinning, I know it's working. I don't need a light telling me it's on.
- Last night I learned the one I bought actually has two. It had one on the fan itself, and ONE IN THE FUCKING PLUG
  WHO NEEDS AN LED IN A PLUG

I've taken too darkening them with a sharpie.

What drives me nuts is all of the light fixtures that have Integrated LED bulbs in them.
They make regular LED bulbs to put into fixtures, there's no reason for the stupid integrated LEDs. LED bulbs give you the option of choosing brightness and tone.
And sure, integrated bulbs may be rated to last 20 years, but the circuitry and drivers controlling those bulbs are not. You'll be lucky to get 5 years out of it, and then you have to toss the whole thing away and buy a new one and install it again.
- This just happened to me. I had an "integrated" LED light in my laundry room that died after 4 years. I was flabbergasted that I had to buy a whole fixture.
  
  Happened to me - two “integrated” LED fixtures (from different manufacturers) failed within 5-7 years from purchase. Instead of just switching a bulb, I had to replace the whole thing. Never again.
- Don't even get me started on color temperature and lumens ratings on integrated LED fixtures. Nothing brings the rage out of me more than when I installed 6 new "led can lights" with an integrated LED. The color temperatures ranged from like 2300K to 3500K and lumens were all over the place too. Despite all of them being rated at 2700K and 600 lumens. Returned them all and had to buy a significantly more expensive set to make sure they were all color accurate.

You’ve reminded to tape off the blinking blue LED on my monitor, it’s been driving me nuts when I’m trying to sleep!
- I like the big bright ass light on my monitor when I am using it. Burning my retina from the corner of my eye. Good thing it’s there to tell me my monitor is on. Like I wouldn’t know my monitor is on because I am fucking looking at it…
- Do it bro it makes a huge difference. Blinking ones are even worse to me.
  
  I did, it's so much better now
- If you have the means, try not to keep your computer in the same room you sleep
  
  Why?
  
  I totally would, but yeah, I don't have the means to

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?
The gradual spread of light pollution has gotten crazy, and people still don't really notice it. We're at the point that it's actually driving insects to extinction. If you look somewhere rural vs. urban the difference in what constitutes "night" is mindblowing, and rural areas are getting brighter all the time themselves.
- I'm honestly a bit surprised that we don't have mandatory dimmers installed in all major buildings that turn off the lights after X hour or x number of hours without any movement.
  That, and motion sensors and dimmers on street lights with shades on them to prevent light from being blasted into people's homes and apartments.
  This much light pollution can't be healthy.
- I really wish that street lights were required to be turned off after midnight on all but main roads. It would help with this.
  So would banning fucking motion activated spotlights that activate after a certain time at night.
  
  Or maybe, more surgically, we require that lights only illuminate the owner's property.

I've been covering LEDs with tape the last 20 years, televisions and media players in particular. Who in their right mind decides to build a DVD player with a damn blue laser led in the front panel to blind your movie experience?
Smoke detectors that blink once every ten minutes to let you know that there is nothing going on, with a light that could be mistaken for an electrical fire. Open up, cover LED hole with tape, careful not to disrupt smoke sensing capabilities, close up. Now the LED is visible when looking for it.
Get yourself a cheap pack of various coloured electrical tapes. Tin foil when it's not enough.
- Tin foil is not a recommended replacement for most applications of electrical tape. In case someone gets some bad ideas lol

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
- You mean can't tell something is powered on without a freaking bat-signal? That's how it feels at night.
- 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.
- 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.

From an electronic tech perspective... I've been replacing the LEDs in anything that annoys me with a dull red and a resistor valued to keep it barely visible. It's a tad more eloquent than tape. Most things don't need a led at all. I'd love to see manufacturers switch to an e paper solution with a simple "on" or "off" displayed. And I hate standby led's.
- I can't imagine any device that needs a sign telling you whether is on or off.
  When you look at your tv, can you tell if it's on? What about your car, your phone, your furnace, your microwave? If one needed a sign to tell them those things are on, it would be a miracle they could even use them at all.
  
  A lot of small electronic devices without screens(which are quite common) probably need something. That said, an ultra-bright LED, especially blue, which seems to be the most annoying, is not the way to go.
  
  For my old TV, the RED power LED is very helpful. Sometimes its on the wrong input, and very rarely something has gone wrong and I need to unplug-replug it in to fix the display. LED saves me clicking the power button when it's already on.
  It's kind of big red dot, but not bright which I'm grateful for.
  
  I hate the fact that my NVidia Shield has no indicator to tell whether it's running at all. The first time I plugged it in it wouldn't work and I was about to return it. Turned out the HDMI cable was bad, but not being able to see if the device even received power made it a pain to trouble shoot.
  
  If it didn't need a sign it didn't need a light.. some things need an indicator. A . 5 inch square bit of e ink is way better because it casts no light. And if a manufacturer thinks you need a light ... Then you get a light ... Need it or not. So ..
  
  If it doesn't need a sign ... It didn't need a light.
- Or even just design it better. My Logitech snowball has a massively bright led that sticks out. It's about 1mm by 2mm and sticks out about .5mm. Whatever happened to a pinhole? It would serve the same visual notification but not be blinding

Obviously you need that idle indicator light to give off more lumens than a 2D Maglite all night long right?

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.

Thought I read somewhere it’s cheaper to get these super bright LEDs, so they use those rather than something easier on the eye.
- LEDs are very cheap, very bright, take little energy, and have an extremely long life span. They're perfect, but designers keep bumping up the brightness.
  
  The newest gen Sonicare toothbrushes are so bright, they can cast a small beam of light into the sink. Coming from the old gen with a bad battery, the new ones appear to have cut costs in several places, while still keeping the same price. :/
- That wouldn't surprise me, since that basically summarizes capitalism in a nutshell. Make decisions that make the consumers experience worse but make the product cheaper to make, therefore increasing profits.
- It's more like having the LED on is cheap (you can control their brighness by reducing voltage or the more common way is to turning the LED on and off often enough Also the container and it's thickness affect the brightness (most LEDs are white with a different top)
  https://youtu.be/c6NFuJMfmYU

I hate this trend.
I'm quite sensitive to light, and some of these LED's are stupid.

I used to work in electronics manufacturing. I won't give my title because it was a shit title and didn't describe what I did well at all. I think that was on purpose to keep our salaries low.
I engineered final assembly test systems. Like the product fully completed. Most of these devices were commercial in nature.
My man, the testers fucking LOVED LEDs. Because LEDs not turning on correctly always means the device fails.
I hated them, because was really fucking hard to automate testing of LEDs. LEDs emit a wavelength, or combination of RGB. Because of the brilliance of my sales engineers, we used computer vision to automate this testing, NOT sensors. The reasoning? Much denser LED placements.
But guess what happens when your supply chain and manufacutirng is entirely Chinese and your product is designed and prototyped and originally manufactured here? YOU GET THE WRONG FUCKING COLOR CALIBRATED. I'm not shitting you, it was a tiny difference in Red wavelength. Tiny. but computer vision doesn't read wave length, it reads color.
LEDs make testing easy for humans. If you just need to see them light up? Everything is great. Bonus points for brighter LEDs for faster moving tests. Faster moving tests = more profit. Human testers means you don't spend money on automated testing and and can quickly repurpose humans to see if an LED is on.

I think we should also have a review on non-functional (decorative) LEDs on the gadgets we buy, especially those cheap chargers that decide to light up the whole room with blue.
- Tbh I think we need laws about them to get this shit to stop.
  It's objectively bad for people's health to be surrounded by bright light at night, because it impacts your ability to sleep.
  
  All for regulation of products but I don't think LEDs are something that need to be regulated
  
  I'm as progressive as the next guy and generally love the nanny state (who hates their nanny!?!) but this seems like something I'd like to have the choice to control - plus every appliance will just change to say 'dont place in areas that are light sensitive' or will just remove all functionality (a la "oh crap my phone hasn't been charging cuz the plug died and I had no idea")
  
  I should market a black adhesive tape as a health product.

My in-laws power outlets throughout the whole house have always on LEDs on them. It drives me crazy. My mother in law likes it and says they are like night lights, but the whole house is so bright at night.

I regularly take nail polish and paint over these infernal LEDs in layers until they are at a brightness that I find acceptable. Red are not so bad, but blue LEDs area nightmare. I have a cheap Chinese headlamp were the blue battery indicator is brighter than the red led for illumination, and the blue reflects off my glasses into my eyes.

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.

Sadly appliances with useful dimming options are getting very rare.
In the same boat as OP and other commenters: electrical tape and sharpies FTW

Even the small white leds on my pc are annoying, I've recently used a black sharpie to dim them, it did wonders.

I have an old Samsung screen, which has a bright blue LED when it's working. So far, so good. If you turn off your PC, the same blue LED starts to blink. Looks like you get raided by the police. How can anybody think it is a good idea to have a blinking LED for a device that isn't used?

Those bright LED interfaces are called "Abusive Appliance Interfaces" by Nathan over on the Toasty Tech website. It seems like there's more people that are being annoyed by the bright lights than I thought.

why are they blue!!!
Literally chose not to buy a powerbank because the power button flashed blue as bright as possible. my PC has blue LED's on the front for status indicators, and i put some black nail polish over them to block out about 80% of the light.

hashtag-not-an-engineer-but The vast majority of products you can just pull the LED. Don't resolder, just pull it out. If it goes badly, you can either just put it back, or replace with a "non-LE-"diode of the same spec.

You can't tell anyone this, but I have a friend who is deep inside the insurance industry. Some of the big guys have invested heavy into LEDs. So to maximize the LED investments, they give manufacturers safety discounts for every LED they can attach to their shit. Big guys make some extra zeros for their accounts, and sharpie and 3M get some splash, too.

it gives you a bit more appreciation devs who add in functionality to turn the LED off. My fan has that which is really nice, and my portable AC. Even my access points you can change them.
But still so many products with LED that cannot be changed or disabled so I have to use a piece of electrical tape.

Don't even get me started on VEHICLE HEADLIGHTS ! >:(
- Police got these super bright LED lights here recently (Germany). When I drive on a countryside road at night and police is in the incoming traffic, I am blinded for at least 15 seconds. I have to stare at my hood and the right strip of the road directly in front of me in order to not just veer off.
  I wonder whether I'm just oddly sensitive to light or if someone really fucked up. They are way too bright.
  
  They are supposed to be aimed down, but some manufacturers don't do this. On a 2021 subaru, you can practically paint a perfectly flat line on a wall at even a considerable distance. They are surgically flat and pointed down. Perfectly illumates people's legs from far away, but not their upper bodies.

I'm exactly the same as you. One tip I have is if you can open the device use masking tape on the inside of the shell where the lights shine through so it's dimmed but you can still see the lights if you need to/it's helpful to. I do this on some of my handheld gaming consoles so I can play them in bed and not be blinded by the LEDs
The worst is when you find bright LEDs all over a hotel room. Becomes like a buckaroo style puzzle game trying to cover things up with whatever you've brought along with you.
- Pack a small roll of electrical tape and you'll never have to play the game again.
  
  It's always the last thing I think about but that is definitely a good idea
- I give up in hotel rooms and consign myself to a bad nights sleep.

I have a pair of underpants draped over my internet router.😂😂😂 Really defuses the 🔆 🔆 brightness
- My router actually has 4 brightness options for the LEDs with one of them being "off". I wish more manufacturers would think about stuff like this.
- Just make sure you center the brown part at the back over the LED, as it masks the brightness better than the white cloth
  
  Nothing is more relaxing than falling asleep to the dim, brown light of your router :)
- My go-to excuse now when my girlfriend complains about me leaving my underpants on my router. Thank you!
  
  I can sleep peacefully tonight knowing I have done some good in the world.😂

Search for “blackout tape” or “dimming tape” and you’ll find dark sticky tape in different degrees of transparency that you can use to dull or block these annoying kinds of lights. I learned about it through my wife, whose sleep is easily disturbed.
You shouldn’t have to buy this and make the effort, but I’m trying to make a practical suggestion.

100% agree. I have tape over the lights on my PS5 to keep my room dark at night. Plus I turn all my monitors off...and sometimes put something over my router to cover up all those blinking lights...and the Oculus Quest charging light....

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