12 ms·

This is just an anecdote, but I’ve had multiple “10 year” LED bulbs fail after just a year or two. I suspect much of the claims for these bulbs are theoretical

by DougN7 4y ago

This is just an anecdote, but I’ve had multiple “10 year” LED bulbs fail after just a year or two. I suspect much of the claims for these bulbs are theoretical as they just don’t hold up, probably for reasons the grandparent poster is pointing out.

britzkopf 4y ago
I'll add a second identical anecdote. I've witnessed about a dozen die after about doing about 1/10th their promised duty.
- smolder 4y ago
  Are they in fixtures designed for incandescents? "Boob lamps" for example are highly efficient LED bulb destroyers, since they don't breathe, and the bulbs overheat.
  - ubercore 4y ago
    More anecdata, but I had ~20 lights, of various quality (many Hue, some cheaper Home Depot specials) in boob lamps that survived at least 11 summers in a New England house without AC. Still there probably, but I moved out so I can only vouch for 11 years.
    - smolder 4y ago
      That seems especially lucky. I'd guess they're slightly different in design or installation from the ones in my previous apartment (also northeast) that killed several and various LEDs... They stopped dying when I had the idea to shim the cover and create some ventilation. Mine were fairly heavy glass domes and had some insulating material against the ceiling.
iso1631 4y ago
On the other hand I lived in my last house for 5 years and didn't replace a single bulb.
- tomatocracy 4y ago
  When I moved into my current place 5 years ago a lot of the lighting was 12V MR16 halogen bulbs. I replaced most of them with high CRI Philips Master LEDspots (specifically marketed as having a longer lifetime aimed at commercial installations but they weren't significantly more expensive vs "consumer" versions at the time if you were looking for high CRI anyway) and kept the transformers in place. I've had one fail out of probably 50 or so bulbs in that time, which feels about par for the course to me.
ajross 4y ago
I have too. I have significantly more in my 11-year-old renovation that are still working. That's just the way statistics work. A lot of this topic smells like typical geek snobbery. They're lights, folks. Cheap consumer products have always been cheap. Halogen bulbs suck too.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  People have a terrible tendency as well to blame the bulb when it's just overheating in a really bad fixture.
- sgc 4y ago
  I have had at least 10 bulbs die on me within months, while others have lasted much longer, but the average lifespan on bulbs in our house can't be over 18 months. So I don't think people are complaining to be snobs, just noting that led bulbs don't last nearly as long as claimed. I have no idea why you needed to fall into personal attacks rather than concluding that bulbs readily available 11 years ago might be made better than those readily available now, and that most led bulbs are a lot newer than yours.
kldavis4 4y ago
3 year warranty instead of 10, but I've had a lot of problems with Philips LED Flicker-Free Dimmable BR30 Indoor Light Bulb. They consistently die and need to be replaced within a year or so. I replaced a couple under warranty but just gave up after the hassle involved. I've tried other brands without success and would love to know what a good reliable alternative would be.
gambiting 4y ago
If we're sharing anecdotes - I've had my homes 100%(or close) LED equipped for over a decade now and never had a single LED bulb fail.
- jhartwig 4y ago
  I wish I could say that. I have a 3 year old house that is about 3k square feet wiht alot of bulbs. Every bulb installed was LED and I have replaced most of them at this point, and some more then once. I have even had the electrical company come out thinking there was something wrong with the power in my house or the breaker box. Nothing...
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    It usually comes down to the brand, factors you can't be aware of like component choice, and the light fixture itself. A lot of LED edison socket lights die quickly in recessed lighting or other tight fixtures because the heat is death to them. Manufacturers build the worst technically functional capacitors into the power supplies with a low temperature rating, meaning they really can't handle anything above ambient. This is also the same industry and the same players that were perfectly fine with agreeing to not improve incandescent light past 1000 lifetime hours, illegally. I have no doubt that there is a tacit agreement not to make good lighting, as that would extremely disrupt the industry.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Lightbulbs are a bad form factor. I have some lights without bulbs and no issue. Meanwhile the halogen emulating LEDs break all the time.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Exactly. Luckily halogens were commonly installed in pots. So for longevity, replace the pot rather than the bulb.
  - smolder 4y ago
    I'm repeating myself a lot in this thread, so I'm sorry. What fixtures are the bulbs in? Are they a generic design meant for incandescents? A huge number of fixtures out there don't allow for enough heat to convect away and the bulbs overheat.
vikingerik 4y ago
10 years isn't a minimum threshold for every item. Any individual item could fail any time, and the overall distribution will have a shape somewhere between a bell curve and a long tail. I don't know if there are any regulations around the 10-year claim, but if there are then I'd expect that it's either an average or something like a one-standard-deviation threshold, like 68% last past that but 32% don't. "Guaranteed 10 years" doesn't actually say anything about expected lifetime at all, just that they'll do a warranty replacement if it fails sooner.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  One standard deviation would mean that 16% fail early and 16% last extra long. If the distribution is normal. Personally I'd want a durability guarantee to be more like two standard deviations, on top of replacement in case of early failure.
JohnFen 4y ago
Almost all LED bulb failures are because the power supply died due to overheating, not the LEDs themselves. I harvest the LEDs out of dead bulbs to use in hobby projects. With Edison-style bulbs, anyway, the orientation they're mounted in makes a huge amount of difference. They're last a lot longer if they're oriented upright (base down) than in any other orientation because it reduces the heat buildup in the power supply.
- cogman10 4y ago
  This is the frustrating thing about LEDs that IDK we can change. If there was a "DC" light socket in the house we could have LEDs outlasting owners, and for cheap. Nearly all the expense of LED bulbs is the power supply. Everything else is dirt cheap. A single home DC power supply with ~200W of output could light an entire house, flicker free. What's even more frustrating is I think we could fix it. A national regulation for DC light sockets would fix it. Mandate a voltage, shape, and max amperage and BAM, you'll get 1000 different manufactures making standard compliant bulbs and home power supplies that will last an eternity.
  - petra 4y ago
    Would this system need new electrical wiring ?
    - wlesieutre 4y ago
      Yes. For the commercial DC lighting installations I've seen they were using power over ethernet. That's not necessarily the only way to deliver DC power but whatever you do it's going to be wired differently from 120 VAC.
      - samtho 4y ago
        I used to do electrical installs in commercial buildings and this was starting to catch on, mainly because the the practice of running ethernet (including the 8P8C aka RJ45 connector, patch paneling, etc) is already established. This always felt very roundabout and requires expensive networking equipment just to run lights which I do not personally like because it will just cause confusion.
dwighttk 4y ago
In my experience LEDs have been a little more reliable than CFL, but that’s not saying much… those things you could almost watch burn out.
RHSeeger 4y ago
Others have commented, but to reiterate - Older LEDs house bulbs were much worse than newer ones; far more prone to failure from "things". I had many of them fail after only a few months because our power was "flickery" and their power supplies could not handle it. That's _far_ less common now. - The power supply / controller circuitry is not a fan of heat. Don't mount them upside down (so the heat floats up to the circuit) and never mount them in a recessed mount. The heat buildup will destroy them a lot quicker. That being said, this advice can be ignored is you're paying attention... mounts that have a way to heat to escape; bulbs that are designed to go in upside-down mounts (maybe?), etc. - While you certainly don't want to always buy the most expensive bulb, you also don't want to buy the cheap ones. They are far more likely to be made from poor, failure prone components.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  I’m sorry, but your solution to bad bulbs is to say “you’re holding/using it wrong.” It’s not my fixtures’ problem. It’s these crappy bulbs.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    The bulbs not being suited to certain uses doesn't make them bad bulbs, it makes them more limited. There are bulbs that are good for external use and ones that are not; but that doesn't make the external ones "better", it makes them different. There's tradeoffs. And the tradeoffs for LEDs have gotten better over time, but are still there. You don't go buy offroad vehicle, then complain it doesn't drive as comfortably on the highway and say it's an objectively worse vehicle. It was designed for a different goal than the 4 door sedan you're comparing it to. It does better at that goal, and worse at others. And, over time, offroad vehicles have gotten better on highways; they'll just never be as good.
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      Not everybody in the country is being forced to buy SUV's for "environmental" reasons.
sizzle 4y ago
Same for me the brand is “Feit Electric” from Costco. Avoid this brand!
TexanFeller 4y ago
All the big name brand(Cree etc.) bulbs I've bought have been going strong for 5-12 years. Out of dozens the only ones I've ever had fail were off brand or special purpose like LIFX wifi bulbs.
Dalewyn 4y ago
If you look closely on the box you'll probably find the "10 year" claims are based off something stupid like 2 hours use per day. The way most people use lighting goes far beyond whatever the manufacturers want to foist.
pigsty 4y ago
My personal anecdote, but I’ve never had an LED bulb fail and I’ve been using only LED for nearly a decade.

by DougN7 4y ago

britzkopf 4y ago

I'll add a second identical anecdote. I've witnessed about a dozen die after about doing about 1/10th their promised duty.

smolder 4y ago
Are they in fixtures designed for incandescents? "Boob lamps" for example are highly efficient LED bulb destroyers, since they don't breathe, and the bulbs overheat.
- ubercore 4y ago
  More anecdata, but I had ~20 lights, of various quality (many Hue, some cheaper Home Depot specials) in boob lamps that survived at least 11 summers in a New England house without AC. Still there probably, but I moved out so I can only vouch for 11 years.
  - smolder 4y ago
    That seems especially lucky. I'd guess they're slightly different in design or installation from the ones in my previous apartment (also northeast) that killed several and various LEDs... They stopped dying when I had the idea to shim the cover and create some ventilation. Mine were fairly heavy glass domes and had some insulating material against the ceiling.

iso1631 4y ago

On the other hand I lived in my last house for 5 years and didn't replace a single bulb.

tomatocracy 4y ago
When I moved into my current place 5 years ago a lot of the lighting was 12V MR16 halogen bulbs. I replaced most of them with high CRI Philips Master LEDspots (specifically marketed as having a longer lifetime aimed at commercial installations but they weren't significantly more expensive vs "consumer" versions at the time if you were looking for high CRI anyway) and kept the transformers in place. I've had one fail out of probably 50 or so bulbs in that time, which feels about par for the course to me.

ajross 4y ago

I have too. I have significantly more in my 11-year-old renovation that are still working. That's just the way statistics work. A lot of this topic smells like typical geek snobbery. They're lights, folks. Cheap consumer products have always been cheap. Halogen bulbs suck too.

mrguyorama 4y ago
People have a terrible tendency as well to blame the bulb when it's just overheating in a really bad fixture.
sgc 4y ago
I have had at least 10 bulbs die on me within months, while others have lasted much longer, but the average lifespan on bulbs in our house can't be over 18 months. So I don't think people are complaining to be snobs, just noting that led bulbs don't last nearly as long as claimed. I have no idea why you needed to fall into personal attacks rather than concluding that bulbs readily available 11 years ago might be made better than those readily available now, and that most led bulbs are a lot newer than yours.

kldavis4 4y ago

3 year warranty instead of 10, but I've had a lot of problems with Philips LED Flicker-Free Dimmable BR30 Indoor Light Bulb. They consistently die and need to be replaced within a year or so. I replaced a couple under warranty but just gave up after the hassle involved. I've tried other brands without success and would love to know what a good reliable alternative would be.

gambiting 4y ago

If we're sharing anecdotes - I've had my homes 100%(or close) LED equipped for over a decade now and never had a single LED bulb fail.

jhartwig 4y ago
I wish I could say that. I have a 3 year old house that is about 3k square feet wiht alot of bulbs. Every bulb installed was LED and I have replaced most of them at this point, and some more then once. I have even had the electrical company come out thinking there was something wrong with the power in my house or the breaker box. Nothing...
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  It usually comes down to the brand, factors you can't be aware of like component choice, and the light fixture itself. A lot of LED edison socket lights die quickly in recessed lighting or other tight fixtures because the heat is death to them. Manufacturers build the worst technically functional capacitors into the power supplies with a low temperature rating, meaning they really can't handle anything above ambient. This is also the same industry and the same players that were perfectly fine with agreeing to not improve incandescent light past 1000 lifetime hours, illegally. I have no doubt that there is a tacit agreement not to make good lighting, as that would extremely disrupt the industry.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Lightbulbs are a bad form factor. I have some lights without bulbs and no issue. Meanwhile the halogen emulating LEDs break all the time.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Exactly. Luckily halogens were commonly installed in pots. So for longevity, replace the pot rather than the bulb.
- smolder 4y ago
  I'm repeating myself a lot in this thread, so I'm sorry. What fixtures are the bulbs in? Are they a generic design meant for incandescents? A huge number of fixtures out there don't allow for enough heat to convect away and the bulbs overheat.

vikingerik 4y ago

10 years isn't a minimum threshold for every item. Any individual item could fail any time, and the overall distribution will have a shape somewhere between a bell curve and a long tail. I don't know if there are any regulations around the 10-year claim, but if there are then I'd expect that it's either an average or something like a one-standard-deviation threshold, like 68% last past that but 32% don't. "Guaranteed 10 years" doesn't actually say anything about expected lifetime at all, just that they'll do a warranty replacement if it fails sooner.

Dylan16807 4y ago
One standard deviation would mean that 16% fail early and 16% last extra long. If the distribution is normal. Personally I'd want a durability guarantee to be more like two standard deviations, on top of replacement in case of early failure.

JohnFen 4y ago

Almost all LED bulb failures are because the power supply died due to overheating, not the LEDs themselves. I harvest the LEDs out of dead bulbs to use in hobby projects. With Edison-style bulbs, anyway, the orientation they're mounted in makes a huge amount of difference. They're last a lot longer if they're oriented upright (base down) than in any other orientation because it reduces the heat buildup in the power supply.

cogman10 4y ago
This is the frustrating thing about LEDs that IDK we can change. If there was a "DC" light socket in the house we could have LEDs outlasting owners, and for cheap. Nearly all the expense of LED bulbs is the power supply. Everything else is dirt cheap. A single home DC power supply with ~200W of output could light an entire house, flicker free. What's even more frustrating is I think we could fix it. A national regulation for DC light sockets would fix it. Mandate a voltage, shape, and max amperage and BAM, you'll get 1000 different manufactures making standard compliant bulbs and home power supplies that will last an eternity.
- petra 4y ago
  Would this system need new electrical wiring ?
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    Yes. For the commercial DC lighting installations I've seen they were using power over ethernet. That's not necessarily the only way to deliver DC power but whatever you do it's going to be wired differently from 120 VAC.
    - samtho 4y ago
      I used to do electrical installs in commercial buildings and this was starting to catch on, mainly because the the practice of running ethernet (including the 8P8C aka RJ45 connector, patch paneling, etc) is already established. This always felt very roundabout and requires expensive networking equipment just to run lights which I do not personally like because it will just cause confusion.

dwighttk 4y ago

In my experience LEDs have been a little more reliable than CFL, but that’s not saying much… those things you could almost watch burn out.

RHSeeger 4y ago

Others have commented, but to reiterate - Older LEDs house bulbs were much worse than newer ones; far more prone to failure from "things". I had many of them fail after only a few months because our power was "flickery" and their power supplies could not handle it. That's _far_ less common now. - The power supply / controller circuitry is not a fan of heat. Don't mount them upside down (so the heat floats up to the circuit) and never mount them in a recessed mount. The heat buildup will destroy them a lot quicker. That being said, this advice can be ignored is you're paying attention... mounts that have a way to heat to escape; bulbs that are designed to go in upside-down mounts (maybe?), etc. - While you certainly don't want to always buy the most expensive bulb, you also don't want to buy the cheap ones. They are far more likely to be made from poor, failure prone components.

jtbayly 4y ago
I’m sorry, but your solution to bad bulbs is to say “you’re holding/using it wrong.” It’s not my fixtures’ problem. It’s these crappy bulbs.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  The bulbs not being suited to certain uses doesn't make them bad bulbs, it makes them more limited. There are bulbs that are good for external use and ones that are not; but that doesn't make the external ones "better", it makes them different. There's tradeoffs. And the tradeoffs for LEDs have gotten better over time, but are still there. You don't go buy offroad vehicle, then complain it doesn't drive as comfortably on the highway and say it's an objectively worse vehicle. It was designed for a different goal than the 4 door sedan you're comparing it to. It does better at that goal, and worse at others. And, over time, offroad vehicles have gotten better on highways; they'll just never be as good.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    Not everybody in the country is being forced to buy SUV's for "environmental" reasons.

sizzle 4y ago

Same for me the brand is “Feit Electric” from Costco. Avoid this brand!

TexanFeller 4y ago

All the big name brand(Cree etc.) bulbs I've bought have been going strong for 5-12 years. Out of dozens the only ones I've ever had fail were off brand or special purpose like LIFX wifi bulbs.

Dalewyn 4y ago

If you look closely on the box you'll probably find the "10 year" claims are based off something stupid like 2 hours use per day. The way most people use lighting goes far beyond whatever the manufacturers want to foist.

pigsty 4y ago

My personal anecdote, but I’ve never had an LED bulb fail and I’ve been using only LED for nearly a decade.