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What Happened to the 100000 Hour LED Bulbs?
- jonny_eh 8y agoWhat's the short answer?
- Galaxeblaffer 8y agoIt's complicated
- module0000 8y agotldr; LED lasts 100000 hours, other parts of bulb do not.
- arendtio 8y agoDescribed in this paragraph: > Locate the Weakest Link: Component Lifetime
- d-sc 8y agoLED bulbs contain more components than incandescent bulbs and have more failure modes that simply going ‘pop’.
- baybal2 8y agoThe AC-DC or DC-DC converter will likely die long before LED's junction. Primary failure mode is capacitors "drifting" and closing the mosfet inside the buck converter too early. This is why I tell people to buy simple "driverless" LED bulbs. A shitty constant current driver is worse than not having it at all.
- digikata 8y agoAlthough the article talks of LED wearout, I think the key data was a survey of outdoor LED systems: 10% of failures are the LED itself, the other 90% is support components that fail causing shorter lifetimes. I'm curious how it compares to the LED filament lighting which can use much simpler power supplies with fewer components which should mean much lower failure rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_filament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_filament
- tomatotomato37 8y agoThe LED drivers suffer heat degradation due to poor heatsinks.
- foxhop 8y agoPersonally I love the heat that an incondecent bulb emits, I can actually keep my hands warm on my keyboard while lowering my room heat. 75 watt bulb with heat versus a 3000 watt space heater.
- QasimK 8y agoDepending on where you live, the energy “inefficiency” of a light bulb is no such thing. In the UK, for example, during winter (and spring and autumn) the heating is appreciated! However, it is 2-3x more costly than using gas central heating. (However however something something whole house vs room-specific heating.) In the summer, it’s a complete waste though. Directed infrared heating panels may be the most efficient because they do what you describe - heat you up directly, rather than heat the air in the room.
- darkpuma 8y agoElectric powered heat pumps (essentially air conditioners run in reverse) can have considerably greater efficiency than electrical resistance heaters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_considerations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Performance_consider...
- Brakenshire 8y agoIt's also heating the ceiling, which will reduce the efficiency further. It's a straightforward issue of separation of concerns, there are some occasions where you want heating and lighting always tied together, but they are niche. Almost everywhere in the world you have large periods of the day or year when you want lighting without heat.
- foxhop 8y agoI use a desk lamp so It's really close to me and I get both the light and heat and I swap the bulb out for an LED during summer.
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- wil421 8y agoMy father in law is a general contractor and religiously keeps all his LED bulb receipts. If anything goes out before the listed hours he returns it to HomeDepot. He hasn’t had any issue so far including some of the older bulbs described in the article.
- TheCoreh 8y agoThis works. I did the same when I switched all our lighting to LED, and was able to replace two faulty lamps that stopped working way earlier than specified for free.
- cr0sh 8y agoDoes he scan the receipts first? Because most POS systems now use a thermal printer system that for some reason - even when kept at a "proper temperature" - the receipt fades over time, to where it is virtually illegible. The conspiracy part of me thinks this was done on purpose to reduce returns and warranty claims...
- wil421 8y agoHe will put the receipt in the original LED box. Usually stores them indoors and not in an attic. I had a Lowe’s receipt do exactly what you describe out in my shed.
- rayshan 8y agoPro tip: Home Depot recently started to allow receipts to be pulled up and items to be returned with just a credit card. Ikea does this too if you always scan your Family Card.
- vanderZwan 8y ago> Plus, they’ll more than pay for themselves in electricity savings compared to the old, inefficient LED bulbs they replaced. Sure, eventually, but without further context this obsession with light bulbs always sounds a little bit penny wise and pound foolish to me. The relative cost of lighting on the monthly electricity bill is tiny so those savings are pretty small. Getting a more efficient fridge, washing machine, TV or (in our profession) computer typically has a much bigger effect on electricity expenses. And that is assuming your heating and cooking is done with gas.
- coldacid 8y agoGiven the starting "plus" of that sentence, it's obvious that the author's concern isn't so much the energy savings of the newer bulbs over the older ones, but the improved quality of light over the now aged bulbs. With that much yellowing on the older bulbs and a per-bulb price only 1/9th of what it used to be, I'd replace them too without a damn about the electricity savings -- that they would lead to any savings at all would be a bonus.
- BurningFrog 8y agoI think people are always overly focused on things they personally touch and see. Thus environmental policy centers on shopping bags, straws, and light bulbs, rather than things that objectively have real environmental impact.
- azinman2 8y agoI don’t think anyone making such policies thinks that those things alone will save the planet. It’s about a mentality into the daily choices we make that makes the difference. That said, leds that are 13-15 watts instead of 60 watts does make a big dent into saving electricity at the country scale.
- lupire 8y agoThey don't make much of a difference. Like recycling, it's a way to feel like making a difference with Puritan work ethic, without regard for results.
- izzydata 8y agoThis is pretty annoying as I replaced every bulb in my house with LED under the assumption that they would last at least a decade. I didn't even think to check a powered-on time rating. Not that using incandescent bulbs is a good option anymore anyway.
- Brakenshire 8y agoAt 10c/kWh, you only need about 700-1000 hours to pay back a $5 80W-equivalent LED bulb, so financially speaking something lasting only 7500 hours isn't that big a deal. It's more important in terms of house design, for instance there are a lot of fittings with inbuilt, unchangeable bulbs which are being used, if they last 20 years that might be justifiable, but if they last 2-5 years it's going to be an enormous hassle.
- umvi 8y agoI did this as well and was very disappointed/frustrated when bulbs started dying only a year later. Usually they would start flickering more and more frequently until it was really annoying to be in a room with flickering light and I would remove it. GE even had a warranty so I shipped them back on principle (shipping was nearly the cost of the bulbs themselves) and GE never responded with replacement bulbs. What a crock.
- pkaye 8y agoPhillips is pretty good on warranty. They either give me a cash back or replacement bulbs. I didn't even keep the receipt so they just ask for a picture of the bulb id information.
- dchichkov 8y agoCurious, have you noticed any sleep issues, after you've switched to LED?
- izzydata 8y agoNo, but all my LED bulbs give off a yellow light instead of a white light.
- setquk 8y agoI've taken every single LED bulb that has failed on me to pieces and it's always the same failure mode. The heatsink compound isn't applied properly to the back of the LED board. The LEDs immediately in the gaps smoke out. Alas this isn't a problem. If a lightbulb goes, Amazon send me a new one out now free of charge and tell me to throw the old one in the trash. This is one manufacturer, prevalent on Amazon, the Long Life Lamp Company. Long Life my ass. They have been replaced by Philips and Ikea LED bulbs now which the oldest are 5 years old now and still going strong. Edit: one thing to note is the really cheap ones run pretty hot. They have 105 oC rated capacitors in them. If you look at the derating curves at the running temperature they are clearly designed to last just past a year.
- baybal2 8y agoDo not buy "bulbs," they are hopeless. Just buy a whole fixture with a big aluminium PCB and directly bonded chips.
- mikepurvis 8y agoI wish there was more selection available of that kind of thing— when I last looked a year or so ago there was basically just one option at Home Depot, and it had the aesthetics of something you'd put in the laundry room. Worse than that, though, it was unusable with a dimmer switch; the whole thing visibly flickered every few seconds. I felt bad returning it because I really wanted it to work out, but the quality just wasn't there.
- tachyonbeam 8y agoI have an LED fixture that I got from home depot that is dimmable, no flickering. It's connected to a normal dimmer switch. I bought it about a year ago. My other LED fixtures were ordered through aliexpress. The fixtures were fine, but the transformers that came with the fixtures all failed and had to be replaced (overheated, melted the plastic casing). This turned out to be tricky, because the LED drivers available on ebay and aliexpress are never the same, there are constantly new shoddy ones from noname brands, and the ones I had bought before tend to be nowhere to be found when I need a new one.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- liotier 8y agoFirst generation "high power" LED (I have a bunch with E27 socket) had a small cooling fan... If you ever owned a laptop for a while, you know what happens to small fans after a (admittedly long) while.
- baybal2 8y agoI once worked for an offshoot of Sunfor - a chemical company making LED phosphors. The first driverless, flicker free LEDs on the market were their invention. Basic idea is that if you fine tune phosphor components, and their ratios, you can make a direct 120hz AC driven LED with close to no visible flicker for as long as your output colour temperature is in between 5500 to 6000 Kelvins
- biomcgary 8y agoGiven the high failure rate of drivers, do these new bulbs have higher reliability?
- baybal2 8y agoMuch, much higher. They are the ones which will most likely be replaced due to actual LED failures, and not other components. The problem... they got copycated within months, even though copycats did not understand the importance of a fine tuned, custom made phosphor.
- taxicabjesus 8y ago> as long as your output colour temperature is in between 5500 to 6000 Kelvins color temperature is really important. I despise 3300K+ headlights and bulbs. Philips has a dimmable LED bulb where the temperature varies between 2200K and 2700K. I've also found standard 2200K bulbs. But mostly I prefer using single-color red orange and yellow bulbs. My understanding is that white LEDs are basically blue/ultraviolet LEDs with phosphors to knock down the energy level of the photons. Do you have any links about the phosphor components used for different color outputs?
- baybal2 8y agoNo specifics, they don't get public about the tech besides bare minimum: http://xlgy.scnyw.com/product/powder.html http://xlgy.scnyw.com/product/powder.html http://en.scnyw.com/About/Affiliates/4.html http://en.scnyw.com/About/Affiliates/4.html http://xlgy.scnyw.com http://xlgy.scnyw.com They were bought and sold like 10 times over since I left them in 2013
- crispyambulance 8y agoI also have been disappointed with LED "bulbs". They get too damn hot in recessed fixtures but NOT because of the LED's. It's all because of the shitty power converter embedded deep inside the bulb getting too hot and failing. The industry has necessarily had to retrofit to where incandescent bulbs are supposed to go. I think that we'll start to see improvements in this area as people move away from "screw-in bulb" as the form factor and towards using external power converters delivering power to to LED fixtures that are just LED's and their heatsink + mounts.
- Steltek 8y agoEvery so often, I come back to the "I should have DC power on demand in my house!" until I'm reminded that DC power loss over a distance can hurt bad, even 48VDC telecom power. Perhaps USB-C PD might help? USB power adapters are compact and PD offers standard, useful high power DC. If the adapters become ubiquitous, you could see "USB-C lightbulbs".
- Someone1234 8y agoSlight tangent but "in-building DC" exists, and is rapidly gaining popularity but not via the medium many assumed: Power Over Ethernet. You can buy PoE LED light fixtures now, which are both powered and controlled over ethernet. You buy a single PoE switch, run some low voltage Cat6, and you can power an entire floor's worth of lighting. EEPoE (Energy Efficient PoE) offers more efficient PoE too which claims up to 94% efficiency. Definitely a space to watch. Particularly as the cost savings of running low voltage Ethernet cable compared to high voltage electrical cable (110v) are substantial.
- baybal2 8y agoDefinitely watching. I once was in the LED industry when it was still hot. The company was called Zega. They tried every random thing, including putting a small real ARM server on the bloody thing to do remote control. It was back then when I first stumbled on Espressif people and Teo. They got lightyears ahead of us with all-in-one SoC.
- gt565k 8y agoSeems like a capitalistic society will never get away from products with built-in planned obsolescence. It's all about the profits. Buy and replace consumers... There's a great documentary on planned obsolescence for those that haven't seen it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU
- momentmaker 8y agoThe same could be said about every product... Appliances back in the days could last decades. Now you're lucky if they don't break in a few years. What do they say about the best type of customer? The best customer is a repeat customer :)
- nine_k 8y agoJust recalculate the price of the built-to-last appliance from 1980 into 2018 dollars. For the same amount, you'll buy a very decently made device today, too. By the same token, all the large CFL and LED lamps in my house are expensive high-CRI lamps. I've seen two CFLs go due to a failure in internal electronics, likely as a result of a power glitch. The longest-running CFL I had to date ran for 7 years, for 12+ hours a day.
- tengbretson 8y ago> For the same amount, you'll buy a very decently made device today, too. For most products I find this to simply not be the case anymore. What I find is the more you pay, the more "gizmos" and "features" you get that ultimately lead to earlier device failures than the cheap models.
- scrooched_moose 8y agoIt says more that customers overwhelmingly prefer cheap products. A 1962 washing machine was 184.95 [1] ($1523.97 today) and a 1959 model was $209.95 [2] ($1729.97 today); which are both more expensive than all but the highest end front loader currently at Best Buy. The vast majority of top loaders are in the $500-700 range, top loaders $800-1000. There simply isn't much market for $2000 machines that will last decades. It's a similar story for almost all home appliances I've looked at. 1) http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60selectrical.html http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60selectrical.html 2) http://www.aei.org/publication/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-2012/ http://www.aei.org/publication/appliance-shopping-1959-vs-20...
- philsnow 8y ago> The vast majority of top loaders are in the $500-700 range, top loaders $800-1000. There simply isn't much market for $2000 machines that will last decades. Those "high end" washing machines will also fail in the same time range that the low end ones will. There is a market for them, but it will remain unfulfilled because the manufacturers make more money in the short term with the low-reliability ones.
- umvi 8y agoThis makes me wonder if we shouldn't have an AC and DC circuits in the house. I mean, it could be all AC coming in, but at the box it splits into (at least) two different circuits (an AC one and a DC one). AC circuit would still be used for things that have motors, but everything else uses DC. Imagine how simple LED lighting could be on a DC circuit. Just an LED and resistor. I only took a few electrical engineering classes so correct me if this is a bad idea.
- ars 8y agoIt would have to be high voltage DC. Low voltage just can't send enough power - you need wires as thick as garden hoses. High voltage DC is not useful for the things people use.
- umvi 8y agoIt seems like an efficient house would at least want a "lighting circuit" where you have a single transformer/rectifier/controller driving a bunch of LEDs all throughout your house. That type of lighting scheme seems like it could last decades if you use quality LEDs.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoThe usefulness seems questionable. LEDs have to be driven with current, so either you would have to have all LEDs in your house in series, with short-circuit switches for light switches, or you still have most of the electronics in every lamp/bulb anyway (saving only the rectifier and maybe needing only a smaller input filtering cap). The former is highly impractical (complete rewiring, one broken lamp makes all lamps in the house go dark, massive peak voltages if you have many lamps, ...), the latter isn't worth it either in device costs nor in efficiency gains (a shottky full-bridge rectifier probably eats less than half a percent of the lamp's power consumption at ~ 100 V supply voltage, less at higher voltages).
- heartbreak 8y agoI have 48vdc on my phone line which is thin wire and plenty enough power (amps) for very bright lights. This 48vdc phone line has been in my house for twice as long as I've been alive.
- amelius 8y agoAnd the confusion really starts when you hook up LED bulbs to a legacy dimmer.
- eddieone 8y agoIt's no problem to get 50,000 hour LED bulb but you going to pay $10+ for each one. Mainly due to the metal heat sink. American companies are still machining blocks of metal. The Chinese adapted other heat sink technologies to make thinner heat sink fins, when combined do the same with less materials. I'm pretty sure the next leap will come from LCD scale LEDs combined into bigger arrays which require even less for cooling since they can be printed onto various materials.
- nkingsy 8y agoAs others have mentioned, it seems all backwards that each bulb is converting AC/DC internally, and does not appear to have much in the way of heat dissipation for the converter or the LED chip(s). I've built a lot of LED lighting setups, and even with the most efficient chips and converters, extremely underdriven, the footprint required to run efficiently and dissipate heat in a way that will let them last 10-20 years is an order of magnitude larger than what would fit in a bulb.
- atonse 8y agoI've thought about the idea of wiring my entire house with DC for the lighting parts, for exactly this reason. But the fact that I'd have to sell my house one day stops me.
- Freak_NL 8y agoI've built a custom LED-lighting setup in my living room. There is one 10cm × 4cm × 30cm AC/DC transformer (with its jet-intake-like 4cm fan replaced with a quiet 8cm fan intended for gaming rigs) that supplies 12V from a central location, passing through a panel of MOSFETs driven by a PCA9685 controlled by a Raspberry Pi, onwards to the custom armatures in the ceiling. I can set it to all the colours of the rainbow (RGBWW LEDs), but the warm-white LEDs mean I can mix anything from a very low-key ambient amber evening lighting to a brighter and colder light useful for doing things that require, well, light. I've only done this in the living room as an experiment, and have no intention of doing this anywhere else exactly because of the maintenance overhead and the breaking with convention. > But the fact that I'd have to sell my house one day stops me. “Here. It works now. Here is a manual that describes how it works, here is a box of spare parts. You are welcome to rip it all out and replace it with conventional gear. There is no warrantee on this thing, even though it's awesome.”
- driverdan 8y agoLow voltage lighting is becoming common. Adhere to industry standards and it may increase your house's value.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoTwo of my Cree bulbs failed a couple months from each other about five years into a 22-year advertised life. I realized it wasn't worth it to pay to ship them the bulbs for replacement, so I just decided not to buy more Cree bulbs.
- lightedman 8y agoThats silly because Cree is literally no questions asked replacement. You literally ganked yourself, here. And they pay shipping.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoI toured a house looking to buy, 20 years ago. The old lady owner said "The light bulb over the door is going with me! I've had it 20 years and counting." It was a weird antique-looking thing with lots of wires and stuff in the clear glass bulb. Dim as hell. But 20 years! They don't make them like they used to.
- blattimwind 8y agoThe expected life of incandescent bulbs follows power laws with pretty big exponents: w.r.t. intensity its to the third power, w.r.t. voltage to the sixteenth power. So if you e.g. put a 230 V bulb on 110 V power, it will be dim as hell, but boi will it last!
- jandrese 8y agoSo what this is saying is that light bulb companies engineered their bulbs to need regular replacement and we could have had much much longer lifespans with somewhat dimmer bulbs?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lupire 8y agowikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_light_bulb but they are sort of illegal thanks to: wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Independence_and_Security_Act_of_2007
- 2019ideas 8y agoI bought some G9 bulbs, and they are not performing like the halogens... It doesn't give me the full RGB like halogens and my house looks pale white(lacks red) instead of full color. I might go back, I do not like the look of my house, and I find myself turning on my living room lights AND dining room lights. The brightness wasn't there. There is massive improvement to be made on LEDs still.
- Pheide1j 8y agoYou need to read the spec sheet when buying LEDs. CRI, lumen, color temperature and watt (actual, not incandescent-equivalent) are the relevant parameters. The item titles are generally vague. Specifically for the full spectrum you want CRI > 0.95
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cr0sh 8y agoIf you're getting a pale white, "operating room" color - look into "warm white" (instead of cool white or "sunlight") LED bulbs. I've found them to be the closest to an incandescent you can get. Be aware, though, that some "warm white" bulbs are toward the "cooler" end of the range and look more white; you'll need to try a few brands to find the color temp you like.
- 2019ideas 8y agoYeah the G9s we bought had nothing labeled. Going to give amazon a try.
- jpalomaki 8y agoThere's a wide variety of products on the market - not all led bulbs are the same. Google for example: led CRI G9 is probably quite challenging for high-performance LEDs because the size is so small. In the other sockets like E27 and GU10 there are lot of options available and also products designed for commercial use (where you need certain characteristics because you want to make your products look good under the light).
- djtriptych 8y agoMy experience has been totally positive, although limited to an early release of the full color Philips Hue bulbs which are like $50/each. The Hue app kinda sucks but those bulbs have been going strong for 4-5 years. No failures of course, and one bulb that was left outside (covered) in NYC and always on for almost two years. No issues at all, and runs very cool.
- tdhz77 8y agoEconomically it’s a disaster but technically Hue lights are a wonder. Every bulb is a Hue @ my house. I can make it a 80’s Miami nightclub or make the rooms feel bigger with bright light. It’s nice.
- legitster 8y agoSo it seems like part of this answer could be that the age statement could have changed even if the bulbs did not. After a dozen or so years on the market they have learned to promise less. The article goes into how the color and brightness degrades naturally over time, so it may also make sense that they counting more of that behavior as failures rather than the traditional "burn out".
- phasetransition 8y agoSo, engineering lead of a (outdoor) led Luminaire manufacturer here. And our sales director used to work for one of the biggest Asian light bulb OEMs. Happy to answer specific technical questions out there that this article triggered.
- int_19h 8y agoFrom the perspective of efficiency, defined as maximum perceived (by human eye) luminosity per watt used, what's the best color for LED bulbs? Is white as good as it gets, or is there any advantage with pure green LEDs?
- phasetransition 8y agoGo look up scotopic vision, phototopic vision, and metamerism if you want a deeper dive on human vision. Our eyes are most sensitive in the green, but green LEDs are not necessarily the most sensitive
- int_19h 8y agoThe green LEDs are not necessarily the most efficient in terms of amount of light emitted per watt of energy used, if I understand correctly. Hence the question - is the increased sensitivity to green enough to overcome that inefficiency, compared to white?
- arbitrage 8y agoSo, why do LED bulbs seem to last not as long as they should?
- phasetransition 8y agoI think the parent article provides a reasonably accurate description of why
- Pheide1j 8y agoMore of a non-technical question, do you see demand for outdoor lights at the red end of the spectrum? Supposedly that's better for night vision, light pollution and various animals. But everywhere I go I see yellowish sodium vapor lights replaced with white LEDs.
- supabure 8y agoMy led bulbs and "long live bulbs" average age is 2 years..
- brianpgordon 8y agoWhy are they putting electrolytic capacitors in these light bulbs? The SM2082D datasheet specifically calls for an electrolytic cap, but wouldn't a power ceramic cap last longer? 4.7uF is doable with ceramics. Is it just a really minor cost thing, and hoping the bulb fails so you have to buy a new one?
- dfox 8y agoYou have to take into account the voltage that the capacitor runs at. 4u7 200V X7R MLCC is going to be huge and certainly several orders of magnitude more expensive than Al electrolytic.
- rmu09 8y agoCould be the driver is designed for a specific range of equivalent series resistance of the capacitor. High ESR could help with peak current and EMC.
- brianpgordon 8y agoYou have to add a resistor across the cap anyway according to the wiring diagram. I think dfox is probably right that it's a voltage rating thing.
- rmu09 8y agoThat's a bleed resistor to discharge the capacitor when turning off, else it could keep dangerous charge for a long time. ESR limits current inrush into the capacitor, with ceramic caps you would need some additional current limiting. Voltage should not be that much of a problem, but there may be other issues with ceramic caps (like cracking due to thermal stress, voltage dependent capacity, microphoning, ...)
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoThe same thing that happened to CFLs, they got cheap. The CFLs I bought in the mid 90s lasted for years and years. Now they are practically pre-burned-out for your convenience.
- hypertexthero 8y agoI was recently excited to find an ”award winning” Ikea Riggad LED lamp on the ”take for free” shelf by the recycling area of my building. Plugged it in, did not work. Tried dismantling it with the help of these photos — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhfZ-vwau8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhfZ-vwau8c — but some screw sockets seemed damaged and the screws would not come off. I could not see anything wrong with cables or soldering as far as I got, so I wonder if the LED or circuit board is the problem. Good design needs to consider sustainability, longevity and ease-of-maintenance in addition to how something works and looks.
- lightedman 8y agoIdiots cant properly heatsink or design proper power drivers. Which is why I run a bank of blue diodes in a bridge rectifier setup, drop in a tank circuit, and hook directly to AC power, and cover with a remote phosphor with high persistence. 10 years and still going. Zero flicker. Every other company are simply amateurs when it comes to designing simple and functional solutions.
- jxramos 8y agoI was an early adopter thinking it would save a bunch of money in the long run. I went all Cree and happened to have a few Philips. The Philips are still standing tall, one burned out of the two after like 7 years. However there's these eco incandescent lights I installed in my parent's bathroom that are connected to a standard fixture powered trough one of the Lutron Maestro dimmer switches. Those bulbs have never failed possibly going on 8 years+. I'm pretty convinced that their fade in fade out dimming when you turn on/off the switch makes a graceful ramp of current that the filament never gets shocked to suffer rapid thermal expansion that eventually fails the bulb. Cree has a good 10 year warranty though, I've sent in boxes of dead bulbs to them. However many substitutes are dying out too and they're included in many of the replacements that are going back for my next batch.
- moab 8y agoSome fun reading on the topic of long-living light bulbs: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html Edit: the source is not mentioned anywhere. This is an excerpt from Gravity's Rainbow.
- dwighttk 8y agoAnd why does every single LED stoplight I see have large segments of unlit LEDs? Seems like some municipalities got sold a pile of crap. At least they work even with the missing lights, but who knows how often they are having to replace those?
- organsnyder 8y agoFunny... I've never noticed that. Maybe your municipality picked the wrong vendor?
- ChuckMcM 8y agoFrom the article -- "The new $5 BR30 LED bulbs I just installed in the kitchen are amazingly bright and crisp: tests with a lux meter show the illuminance is more than 60% higher. Plus, they’ll more than pay for themselves in electricity savings compared to the old, inefficient LED bulbs they replaced." This is what amazes me, I've been an early adopter of LED bulbs (Google even gave out a bunch at one time to employees) and have seen my share of failures, from color shift, to brightness degradation, to controller failure. That said, they nearly always cost less to operate than the previous incandescent lamps they replaced. When the LED 'tubes' which replace fluorescent bulbs became cost effective I replaced all the bulbs in my garage. And when a credible can light with acceptable dimming came out I replaced all of the recessed lighting in the family room and living room. I now don't have a single incandescent lamp in the house and it has reduced by monthly energy by anywhere from 35 to 55 KWhr per month. That represents about a $50 a year in energy cost savings. The cost has come down to the point where the bulbs pay for themselves well within their lifetime range (my experience over a population of 62 different bulbs has been 7.5 years MTTF). That said, I haven't been as diligent in figuring out exactly why a bulb has died, if it is just the power supply I expect they could be resurrected less expensively than a new bulb, caveat the reassembly of the light diffuser bulb.
- fritzball 8y agoThe biggest advantage of LED over fluro for me is light quality. High quality LEDs can put out a pretty nice spectrum which for me makes them ideal to replace halogens or incandescent. I use 100W (actual) LED flood lights for my loft and I love them.
- rsynnott 8y agoThree years in on a bunch of very cheap Ikea GU10 LED bulbs, haven't seen any failures yet. Though one of them occasionally likes to buzz softly at random times. The fittings are open-backed (not ceiling-recessed) which probably helps.
- droithomme 8y agoMost of mine have lasted about a year. So a few times longer than incandescent, sure, but cost a lot more. And I am sure the energy cost of manufacturing them (including mining for rare earth minerals) is so greatly more that over their lifetime they use more energy than incandescents which were made of simpler materials.
- lucb1e 8y ago... so what happened to the 100k hour LED bulbs? It never answers the question. It has an anecdote about the author's own lamps that ran an estimated 15-20k hours with an advertised lifespan of 30k and have degraded to the point where they will replace them. That's n=1 and nowhere near 100k hours, or even 50k as the author mentions early-adopters will remember seeing advertised. The article contains a lot of info, but does not actually answer the original questions it poses in the title and the second paragraph.
- jiveturkey 8y agoas with many such articles, the title is rhetorical and not intended to be answered.
- djsumdog 8y agoIs it in this case. I presume that at one time there were actual bulbs which said 100,000 hours on the physical box. What specifically happened here? Do we have the same bulbs today and the marketing was wrong, or are bulbs today de-engineered?
- shadowoflight 8y agoI'm not positive on this one, but out seemed the article alluded to the idea that the 100,000hr life was measuring to LED failure and ignoring the possibility of driver failure, whereas now there are stricter standards both for measuring the potential of a driver to fail and measuring the lifetime of an LED as the point at which out drops by 30% rather than the point of total failure.
- 0xffff2 8y agoClosest I saw to an answer was the last sentence of the "Color Shift Happens But is Unpredictable" section. >It’s possible that the reduced lifetime ratings we see on current bulbs simply reflect better knowledge about actual performance of existing LED technology over time.
- Guereric 8y ago
- natch 8y agoArticle does not so much as mention Philips which are the gold standard here. The off brands he’s looking at are the problem. Cree is a fine brand for LED components but not for the entire bulb assembly in my experience.
- analog31 8y agoIn some of the fixtures in my house, I've thought of installing small fans running at low speed (resistor in series with the fan slows it down) to stir the air and help cool the lamp.
- mrbill 8y agoI bought a bunch of the Cree LED bulbs from HD when they first came out, and I've had probably 6-8 of them fail into what I call "disco strobe" mode. Eventually I'll replace the rest of them as they fail with whatever cheap store brand LED bulbs I can get.
- mrb 8y agoLifetime isn't even my #1 concern with LED bulbs. It's strobing/flickering. I film all the LED bulbs I buy in slow motion at 240 fps with an Android phone, and play the movie back on a PC with mplayer using the dot(".") key to move frame by frame. Here is a shot I made comparing 2 brands of LED bulbs: https://youtu.be/QbenId_F2RQ https://youtu.be/QbenId_F2RQ (Edit: yeah you don't have to transfer to a PC, just playing back in slow motion on the phone will still show the effect quite well.) It's amazing how I find this way that most (but not all!) of LED bulbs flicker with a strobe effect at 120 Hz (frames alternate between bright and dim) because they have crappy power supply designs that fail to smooth the A/C voltage. As a result they flash one time during the positive phase and one time during the negative phase of the 60 Hz A/C mains frequency. I find this unacceptable. Although not too noticeable in normal conditions, a 120 Hz strobing light is definitely noticeable when your eyes move or track an object illuminated by the bulb. In my experience, Philips lightbulbs are one of the few brands that don't have this flaw because they take care of converting AC to a stable DC voltage internally. In fact they are advertised as such: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CFRCGKC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CFRCGKC "COMFORTABLE LIGHT: Our products meet strict test criteria including flicker, strobe, glare and color rendition to ensure they meet EyeComfort requirements"
- telchar 8y agoPerhaps dimmable LED bulbs would be better in that regard? The LED dimmers on the market use a very high rate PWM (afaik) to prevent/minimize flickering at low brightness. I would guess that the dimmable bulbs are designed to work well with intermittent power and so wouldn't have the same problem. Of course it's still hit or miss, compatibility between bulbs and dimmers seems to be very hard to judge without testing these days.
- masklinn 8y agoThe bulb they link are listed as dimmable (flicker-free silent dimming) aside from the part they quoted.
- mrb 8y agoIn my experience, dimmable bulbs are no better. Most of them still suffer from the 120 Hz strobing effect. That's because even though they might PWM at 1-10 kHz to control the dimming function, when A/C voltage crosses zero, the "on" state of the PWM can still be a lot dimmer than the "on" state during the A/C voltage peak.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoNew Yorker:'LED Quandry' (2016)https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quandary-why-theres-no-such-thing-as-built-to-last https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda... "A light bulb at a fire station in Livermore, California, has been on almost continuously since 1901. In 2015 it was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s longest-burning bulb.... Giles Slade, in his book “Made to Break,” traces the term “planned obsolescence” to a 1932 pamphlet, circulated in New York, titled 'Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence'.... the lamps market will bring in an estimated thirty-eight billion dollars this year, L.E.D.-bulb makers are already reacting to the spectre of declining sales."
- th0ma5 8y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light
- jpalomaki 8y agoAs pointed out in the article the LEDs just fade away. This means that if you define "lifetime", you also need to define how much you can lose brightness to still considered it to be alive. Could it be that with the initial 100k LEDs the definition was different than with current ones? As mentioned, the industry is now using the 70% of brightness as the limit. Since such figure was probably not defined early on, maybe the vendors put the limit much lower.
- ph0rque 8y agoSomewhat related, I am collaborating with someone on building an indoor aquaponics system, and he's ready to pick out LED lights. We both are really confused by all the acronyms (PAR, PPF, PPFD, etc). Does anyone have a good, ELI5 (or ELINP: Explain Like I'm a Normal Person) article on what to look for?
- noonespecial 8y agoThey didn't come with 100000 hour power supplies. All the failures I've torn down over the years had failed power supplies and perfectly functional LED's. I've got a drawer full of the for little projects.
- perseusprime11 8y agoLED bulbs are bad for us. Better to use low-voltage incandescent halogen lights.
- nkurz 8y agoI'm surprised that there is no mention in the article of "filament led" bulbs (and very little mention in the comments): https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/led-filament-bulbs https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/led-filament-bu.... They are based on the simple idea of stacking enough small LED's that they can run on mains voltage. You still need a rectifier to go from AC to DC, and a capacitor for smoothing, but no voltage conversion means there are fewer parts to fail. And multiple smaller LED's makes the heat dissipation much easier, so they tend to run cool. I've been using them for a couple years, and think they are so much better than the previous generations of CFL's and heat sink LED's that would quickly fail, especially in enclosed fixtures. I'm buying cheap ones from Amazon, and occasionally I get early failures, but lifespan after initial burn in has been excellent. Like others, I often wonder why they haven't taken over the market: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/why-haven_t-filament-led-bulbs-taken-over-the-market/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/why-haven_t-filament-led-b...
- pitaj 8y agoThese result, generally, in a 120Hz flicker, which some people are sensitive to.
- ricardobeat 8y agoThere’s no reason they can’t smooth out the power like other lamps (except space). The linked article mention manufacturers already doing this in 2014, surely you’ll find flicker-free versions. These are all over home improvement shops over here.
- pitaj 8y agoDoing so requires bigger and better capacitors.
- midef 8y agoCree's 1st generation LED bulbs are one of the worst purchases that I've made. I outfitted my entire house with them, but they started dropping like flies. The failure rate was around 50% and the cost of shipping back a bulb under warranty was the same as buying a new one.
- epx 8y agoWell I had only one LED bulb fail me in 10 years. And not having a mercury vial in each roof (CFLs) is a bonus.
- SomeHacker44 8y agoOne potential solution would be to standardize the driver and lighter assemblies and allow them to be independently replaced. You could even then have lamps with a single large driver which connects to many small lighter assemblies without duplicated effort. Of course, that standardiZation process could take a very long time and have a wide variety of form factors, output levels, etc... which is sort of where we are anyway with light fixtures and bulbs today!
- SomeHacker44 8y agoMy personal biggest problem with LED bulbs is that my entire (100 year old) home is wired with neutral free light wiring and a lot of 3-way switches. This makes using dimmers very hard and most do not support 3-way and many will not work with LEDs and no neutral wire. Some do - Lutron Caseta makes a nice neutral free dimmer that works on many of my bulbs - but others don’t and I then just use high efficiency incandescents. Shame. Maybe there is a good “neutral free dimmable LED” that allows reasonable leakage current so the dimmer can work.
- ricardobeat 8y agoThere are many recent LED models that have built-in dimming, you step through three or four brightness levels by flicking the switch on and off. Or, switch entirely to Philips/Ikea smart bulbs which are very affordable now. I think dimmers as a wall-mounted fixture will be on the way out soon.
- Spooky23 8y agoA: There is no such thing. In pursuit of cost savings, we made a simple product 100x more complex.
- 0000011111 8y agoLife pro tip. Sharpie the date on your bulbs the day you install them.
- trumped 8y agoWe know how to make incandescent bulbs that last this long, that is not the problem... Companies just make more money this way.
- pishpash 8y agoBad LED bulbs, like bad headphones, or TVs that emit high pitched whine, brought to you by undiscerning people with broken senses who nevertheless insist you're crazy.
- finin 8y agocf. Byron the Bulb in Thomas Pynchon's book Gravity's Rainbow http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb.html http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb.h...
- userbinator 8y agoI have some electronics with LED displays/indicators that have been on 24/7 for over 30 years, or 256k hours, and haven't failed. The difference between those and the ones in bulb replacements is that the latter are driven much harder, to the point that they dissipate a lot of heat. Indicator/display LEDs don't get hot or even noticeably above ambient. Thus it seems that, just like with incandescent bulbs, LEDs will last practically forever if they're run dimly. The difference is that LEDs are actually more efficient at lower current densities, where they're converting more of their input power to light instead of heat, but cost considerations has lead to typical bulbs driving them at much higher currents for more brightness but correspondingly less life and efficiency. They're still far more efficient than incandescents, so I guess that's what counts...
- joecool1029 8y agoReading about bulbs lead me on a journey and I somehow stumbled upon limelights (aka oxyhydrogen bulbs), which was the original theater lighting 'bulbs'. Basically, you can direct a torch over a block of lime (or a cinder-block I guess) and it will become extremely bright. Could only find one video of the effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wheumkzDslA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wheumkzDslA
- jammygit 8y agoI personally haven't have a LED bulb last 2 years yet, most last 3-6 months. I get them from dollar stores, Walmart, and Ikea. Maybe there is some magical lighting store that sells good ones, but I think there are 3 burnt out ones in various places in my house as I type this.
- kuon 8y agoI have another issue with LEDs, I am designing an indoor device that use solar panel for recharge, and if I put my current solar panel (IXYS panel) under a LED vs under an halogen light, which are both similar in light intensity "to the eyes", I have like 100 times less energy on my panel under the LED. I just discovered that a few days ago because I was using a LED maglight to test my panel and realized I had incredibly small power output with it. Now I am building a small circuit to measure and datalog the power output of different solar panels under different type of artificial lights (vs having to use the multimeter + oscilloscope which is not very portal outside my labs). If you designed solar powered device for indoor use and have heard of this issue, I'm very interested.
- echofavor 8y agoThanks for sharing. You can also share your ideas for free on www.echofavor.com
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- ShinyObject 8y agoThere is a youtube channel that does detailed led bulb teardowns, for those who would like more of this sort of info. https://www.youtube.com/user/electronupdate https://www.youtube.com/user/electronupdate
- yonatron 8y agoUnless you need to get there by boat, it's "lighting aisle", not "lighting isle".
- OliverJones 8y agoGravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, has a plotline involving hunting for a rogue lightbulb that has lasted too long.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]