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Was expecting this to have something to do with the shift away from incandescent bulbs, but apparently not. (Is it just me, or do the newer, environmentally fr
by downerending 6y ago
Was expecting this to have something to do with the shift away from incandescent bulbs, but apparently not.
(Is it just me, or do the newer, environmentally friendly bulbs seem not to last nearly as long?)
- ubercore 6y agoMy LED bulbs last forever. As in, I've never had one fail since I started using them.
- colejohnson66 6y agoDoesn’t that also depend on the quality of components and assembly? Cheap LED bulbs usually skimp on smoothing the output of the AC/DC converter, on LED quality, or heat sinking (I’ve seen teardowns of bulbs with no thermal compound, or even no heatsink at all).
- twic 6y agoI think so. I buy Opus LED bulbs for a few pounds in each. Over five years, i think about a quarter of them have failed. Not a great lifespan! But they're cheap enough that it doesn't really matter. I would be happy to spend much more on high-quality bulbs, but only if they were exactly what i wanted, and i have yet to find anything which ticks all the boxes. Specifically, i want >= 800 lumens, daylight / cool white, very good colour rendering, in an ES27 screw fitting, and dimmable. There have been a few candidates, but i haven't actually been able to buy them - they're out of stock, or not available in the UK, etc.
- snuxoll 6y ago> very good colour rendering The one area where everything but good old fashioned incandescent lights fail. Makes me wonder if anyone is working on applying quantum dots to LED lamps.
- ksec 6y agoThere are plenty of LED that is CRI 95+. Is that not enough?
- snuxoll 6y agoCRI is a pretty worthless measurement, it only reflects the rendering of color in a specific CCT. It’s fairly easy to make a high CRI warm bulb because it can suck at reproducing the lower end of the spectrum (blue and green), or a cool one where it sucks at the high end, but a neutral temperature isn’t feasible due to the spiky nature of light emitted by white LEDs.
- CyberDildonics 6y agoIt is actually probably not the actual LEDs but the other things you mentioned instead. Plenty of cheap PCBs have no heat sink and are basically a resistor, a half bridge rectifier (I think) and a capacitor.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Exmoor 6y agoWhat kind of bulbs are you using? I've had a similar experience the OP with LED bulbs using the Feit ones sold at Costco. At some point I read about a design issue where manufacturers are using cheap components which die much faster than the actual LED's wear out, so even though the LED's are rated for 50,000 hours, the bulb itself will stop working after 10,000 hours (made up numbers). I would will to spend a bit more if I could be confident that I was going to get a bulb that actually lasted the lifespan of the LEDs.
- nfiedel 6y agoWe moved about three years ago and replaced 50+ bulbs with 2 1/2 brands of LEDs. Phillips - around 40 regular socket, BR30 recessed, and 4x hue bulbs. Not a single failure or flicker. Am particularly a fan of the warm glow for nicer dimming at night. Hyperikon. They were the only brand with the smaller PAR16 bulbs at the time, at least in warmer color-temp. They look absolutely fantastic as down-wash lights on walls. However, 2/8 are out or intermittent after just 3 years of low usage (they were in a low traffic area). Random brands from promos / utility give-aways. Used three of these in the garage, and 2/3 already burned out. TLDR: Quality matters, and high quality bulbs definitely last IME.
- Marsymars 6y agoAlso a fan of warm glow bulbs for any LEDs that get dimmed. FYI Ikea also has non-smart bulbs with warmer colour temperature as they dim.
- ubercore 6y agoPhilips Hue, and the original warm-light bulbs that Philips had a long time ago (the ones with the yellow plastic). Also a few cheap-o ones from the electric company (CREE I think?). None have failed
- mjcl 6y agoYeah, I have about 15 of the old yellow/silver Phillips LED lights and they've been fantastic. The only one that has died overheated because it was in a globe fixture without enough airflow to cool the bulb.
- Karunamon 6y agoI've had a grand total of two failures in 5 years. One was a cheap $5 on sale special from the hardware store, the other was a Phillips Hue (!)
- ascagnel_ 6y agoI find LED bulbs last forever, with the caveat that instead of a notable failure (eg a bulb burning out with a loud pop), the bulb will start to fall off from its maximum brightness once you start getting past the 5-year mark. I've also noticed that bulbs kept well below their max brightness (50-80%) can maintain that level longer.
- hinkley 6y agoWhat kind of fixtures are you using? LEDs - or compact fluorescent before that - in a torchière? Last forever. Recessed lighting, enclosed or narrow lamps? Maybe a couple times as long as an incandescent.
- jjeaff 6y agoI've had my flat panel LEDs go out after a few years on a pretty regular basis, but it was the power/dimmer unit. Which can be replaced. But I ended up buying higher quality Japanese capacitors and replacing the cheapo ones and haven't had a failure since.
- entangledqubit 6y agoI bought about a dozen GE LED bulbs a couple of years ago due to the quality of their light. Sadly, in that short amount of time about 75% of them have either outright failed or developed some other condition that made me question their safety.
- TwoBit 6y agoLED lights will fail if they overheat, if they aren't well vented or sinked. Not sure if that was your problem.
- ryanobjc 6y agoMy LED bulbs last until they break. And depending on who made them, they break a lot. All my philips hue bulbs still work. Even the ones that are like 8 years old. But every bulb from ikea has broken.
- econcon 6y agoQuality of grid has huge influence on life of LED. Basically, the drive circuit needs to be of pretty robust to guard against voltage fluctuations and surges which kill led. Not sure if there is something user can do to protect their house from grid quality issues.
- tialaramex 6y agoIt's often possible to choose DC for the final metres to the lamp itself, whereupon you've reduced the problem to ensuring you deliver a nice clean DC feed or nothing. As a side benefit to the extent you're successful you also eliminate flicker, which some people find extremely annoying in LEDs. You may find that your retail options for DC lamps are more limited depending on where you shop, and it will likely require a more extensive change than just unscrewing a "bulb" and putting a new one in but it's an option. Certainly worth considering if you're remodelling for example.
- blackguardx 6y agoLED flicker usually has nothing to do with AC power. They LED is being purposely driven pulsed to maximize power efficiency. Incidentally, incandescent bulbs flicker at 120 Hz (in the US) but it is imperceptible because the light output doesn’t go to zero and it is beyond the flicker fusion threshold (~60 Hz)
- mrob 6y agoMany cheap LEDs flicker at at double line frequency (100Hz or 120Hz depending on the country), because they're driven by rectified AC power with inadequate filtering. Pulsing LEDs only increases efficiency at low brightness, e.g. 7-segment displays, not room lighting. See: http://donklipstein.com/ledp.html http://donklipstein.com/ledp.html The flicker fusion threshold for many people is above 60Hz. Remember 60Hz CRTs? 85Hz is a more reliable threshold. And in any case, flicker fusion threshold is only relevant when your eyes are stationary. On eye movement you get phantom array effect. People vary greatly in how sensitive they are to this, and depending on how strong your saccadic masking is, it can be annoying at frequencies well into the kilohertz.
- genocidicbunny 6y agoAre you putting your LED bulbs in enclosed spaces? The cheaper ones tend to be very prone to overheat if they're not adequately ventilated, which really reduces their life (and can change their color a bit too.) Make sure that if you're putting LED bulbs in enclosed spaces, that they're designed to handle that.
- agumonkey 6y agoI knew about LED heat dissipation issues but I'd be surprised if at equivalent light output the incandescent would heat less..
- downerending 6y agoAs far as that goes, I suspect most incandescent bulbs can take a lot of heat. (The one in your oven, for example, which I suspect is a pretty vanilla bulb.)
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThey put out much less heat, but they're also much more sensitive to heat. (Incandescent bulbs, meanwhile, are heat, and mostly don't mind.)
- dv_dt 6y agoThe leds are generally ok as components, but badly designed power electronics are the failing portion. However, strand LEDs designed for bulbs w/ no power electronics are on a completely different reliability basis.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoSometimes it's not even that; I've had bulbs where the glue holding the frosted glass part came off the base, because of the heat.
- pwg 6y agoCombine this fact with the fact that most enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs are insulated (at least on the mounting side) to keep the heat from the bulb inside the fixture (fire prevention reasons) and even the low heat level output by an LED bulb can eventually warm the interior above the temperature that the driver electronics can tolerate.
- pkaye 6y agoProbably because even LEDs have become a low margin business. I've a bunch of the Chinese brand LED bulbs from Amazon and they last for years and there is so much variety. In terms of LED bulb longevity, I think a big part is heat dissipation so the heatsink size and fixture design are critical.
- WalterBright 6y agoLED bulbs don't last if they are in an enclosed fixture, because the heat buildup fries them. Most incandescent fixtures are enclosed.
- twblalock 6y agoThere are some that are rated for enclosed fixtures. I've been using a few for several years now, 100W incandescent equivalent, and I haven't had a problem.
- Scoundreller 6y agoName and unshame!
- twblalock 6y agoYou need to go to one of the online bulb retailers, like bulbs.com or 1000bulbs.com. They have the commercial/wholesale products that you can't find at most stores, e.g. dozens of LED bulb models from Philips that are not listed on their consumer website. I recently bought some 100w-equivalent bulbs rated for enclosures (TCP brand, and also Philips) and some Philips LED replacements for fluorescent tubes that are actually as bright as the fluorescents -- 2600 lumens each.
- WalterBright 6y agoThe fluorescents are 3360 lumens. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Daylight-Ballast-Equivalent-Dual-End/dp/B07MQZ8KY9/ https://www.amazon.com/Replacement-Daylight-Ballast-Equivale...
- karatestomp 6y agoIt's not just you, though my LEDs do on average last longer than incandescents, it's just that quite a damn few die in under 6 months. Not like CFLs, which gave off terrible light and failed very fast— I was very unhappy when it seemed like those would be what replaced incandescents. Now I just need LEDs to drop to 1/3 their current price for the nicer-quality (might outlast an incandescent) bulbs and I won't feel like I'm getting ripped off in this whole deal. If I buy the ones that are a mere 60% the price of nice bulbs then they go back to the CFL behavior of dying constantly and quickly. (I've used LED bulbs across three houses with build ages between 20 and 0 years at move-in, so I don't think it's something wrong with my house, and incandescents have done about as well as they ever do in all three)
- tzs 6y agoAround the end of 2016, I replaced almost every incandescent in my house with Great Value LEDs from Walmart, when they had some sort of arrangement for an automatic at-the-register rebate from my power company that made them $0.17 each. The only one that has failed since then was one that I dropped from about 8 feet up onto the concrete floor of my garage. I gave to a curious coworker who took it apart. There was some component (an inductor I think, but don't remember for sure) that was attached to the PCB only by a couple thin wires, and one of those wires had broke. I measured the output of all of them with a lux meter. A few months ago, I measured again and they are all about the same as they were when new. In particular, I didn't see any definite difference between ones that I've used for hours every day for 3.5 years, and ones that have seen maybe 5 minutes use in that same time.