How To Stop Your Devices From Being So Annoying

You turn off the light to go to sleep, and your bedroom remains lit up by a dozen tiny LEDs. Your phone charger throws blue light across your pillow, and the router in the next room flashes and blinks as your computers perform their night-time backups. Your MacBook’s MagSafe charger glows green or orange, and your partner’s Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones are shining right into your eyelids. Meanwhile, something’s beeping in the kitchen, and now, dammit, you have to pee again.

Our gadgets are too annoying, and it’s time to make them stop.

Home appliances and portable devices all contribute to a kind of notification pollution. Taken alone, your washing machine’s chime is handy to let you know when the cycle is done, but does it really need to beep every time you press a button? Likewise, your Wi-Fi router’s blinking status lights are essential when troubleshooting, but the rest of the time? No thanks. Hotel rooms are even more fun. The TV, the smoke alarm, the glowing phone number pad, even the emergency lights have indicator lights!

Worse is that these lights seem to be getting brighter, and more numerous. And why are they all a bright, piercing blue? I slept for years with the dull red 7-segment LED glow of a clock radio (which even all those years ago managed to dim its display after lights out), and it never bothered me. But today almost everything I buy comes with a retina-searing blue beam.

LED Blues

First, let’s take a look at the most common culprit of LED light pollution—the blue LED. The blue LED was the last LED color to be invented. It was first produced in the 1990s, and uses gallium nitride (the same stuff that gives us tiny, low-heat chargers) crystals. GaN was hard to grow, but turned out to be worth it—the three Japanese and American inventors won the 2014 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.

Blue LEDs are important for at least one big reason. They can be combined with red and green LEDs to make white — or any other color — light. This has given us tiny ultra-bright flashlights, LED displays, and those hideously unflattering, blue-tinged energy-saving lightbulbs that cheap bars seem to love installing.

The color-sensing cones in our eyes are not evenly assigned. The red-sensing cones make up 60%, green-sensing cones 30%, and blue-sensing cones just 10%. This suggests a hierarchy of importance. Could this be why intense blue light is so annoying? It’s a theory.

Does this explain why so many gadgets feature blue blinkenlights? It does not. The reason is most probably fashion, and a me-too herd instinct. Blue is modern, clean, and so on, whereas green is kind of meh, and red is either too 1970s, or too scary (red lights are often used for warnings).

How to Fix Those Too-Bright Status LEDs, and Annoying Beeps

Annoying LEDs are easier to fix than annoying beeps, chimes, and jingles, so let’s start there. The easiest and quickest fix is, as always, duct tape or similar. Just cut a square of tape and stick it over the offending light. For particularly bright lights, you may need more than one layer.

The kind of tape matters. I have found that electrical insulating tape works great, but will start to shed adhesive and get gloopy after a while. Duct tape leaves a residue. Gaffer tape, which is designed not to leave anything behind, is my favorite. And if you use a Dymo labeler, the old kind that embosses a plastic strip, save the offcuts and use those. One layer won’t be enough to block the light, but that could be an advantage:

If your status lights are too bright, but you still actually want to use them to read, you know, the status, then you might just want to dim them instead of blocking them. This problem is so prevalent that you can actually buy special stickers to darken the lights—kind of like sunglasses for annoying LEDs. These vary in opacity and color, and come in various sizes and shapes to fit any light.

A better option might be to disable the lights. Many more sophisticated gadgets have the means to dim or switch off their lights via a software setting. This won’t help you with a simple phone charger, but I have used this trick to subdue the status lamps on my router, and on my NAS. The best implementation of this is to switch off all the lights, but let them blink when there’s an actual problem. NetGear routers, for example, let you switch off everything except a dim white power indicator, but the other lights will activate in case of an error.

You may also be able to silence beeping alarms with a setting. If you get lucky, this may be as easy as pressing two buttons simultaneously (some Samsung washing machines). It’s a pain to have to dive into the settings to do any of this, but clearly, if you’re reading this article, then you probably consider the effort to be well worth it.

Finally, there’s the most extreme option—you can desolder the offending LED and remove it completely. That’s obviously also the riskiest option, compared to just taping over the light and calling it a day, but it could also be the most elegant in terms of the finished result. And if you have a nice, easy-to-deploy and accurate soldering iron like our iFixit FixHub Smart Soldering Iron, then the job is easy. And removing the problem at source like this might be the only way to silence an annoying beeper or buzzer, because there’s no easy way to just block sound like there is with light.

We’ve left the best way until last: just don’t buy gadgets with annoying lights or sounds. This is clearly the most desirable option—you don’t have to deal with any of the fixes listed above. On the other hand, it’s pretty low on the list of priorities. If a device is repairable, has available spares, and is designed and built with concern for the environment, I can live with cutting a few squares off my roll of gaffer tape.