How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?
I’ve bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said “up to 20,000 hours” which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don’t).
Get the ones with the strip LEDs that look like they’re trying to emulate a glowing tungsten filament. I can’t remember where I got the information; it was like the Technology Connections YouTube channel or something, but I remember them saying that since they put the LED lights in series on those bulbs, they have a much higher voltage requirement to drive them, and much less circuitry is needed. It’s the circuitry that burns out, and many of these filament-style LED lights literally only have a resistor as their main component.
I’ve swapped to these kinds of LEDs like…5 years ago, and haven’t had one burn out yet. Probably have like…15 of them across the entire house.
https://youtu.be/fsIFxyOLJXM?si=4wz0wa355Wd9gkUP&t=1389 – YEP – Found the advice. Starts at 23:09 BigCliveDotCom also says the same in his episode about Dubai Lamps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
Almost every bulb in my house is the filament style and it’s always surprising when one dies. The 4 in my porch lights are on 24/7, in all weather of course, and have been for 4 years.
The same reason that western countries refused to buy the extremely hard to break Superfest glasses manufactured in the GDR (East Germany) during the Cold War: planned obsolescence and consumable goods mentality in the interest of profit (they got a west German salesman to take the glasses to a trade show, and nobody gave a shit, because part of the industry’s profit model at the time was the sale of new glass due to breakage.
In point of fact: better, longer lasting LED bulbs DO exist, but they’re only sold in Dubai (due to the monarchy there basically decreeing that they wanted that to happen, so Phillips made them for them, but will NOT sell them outside of the country, because it would kill their sales elsewhere).
Heat.
While the actual LEDs (*) may be rated up to 20,000 hours+ in optimum circumstances, but the actual 3rd party bulb manufacturers, especially the cheapo brands, are building bulbs with poor heat dissipation designs and cheap and/or poorly designed circuits. Same goes for other parts they may use, such as the power supply. To reach 20,000+ hours, you need everything - not just the LED - to be working optimally together.
(*) the best LED makers out there right now, e.g. Nichia, Cree, Phillips - really do some amazing engineering.
I was going to being up Nichia and Cree! (I’m a flashlight junkie, can’t help it.) There’s a world of difference in quality LEDs vs. cheap units.
I have 3x CREE floodlight-style bulbs on my terrarium, never lost one. The CRI (color rendering index) is 90+ (94?) and the colors are natural. If you contrast those with a regular LED, the results are gross.
I have a dozen that run 12+ hours a day. I’ve had 1 fail in 5 years.
Don’t buy cheap LEDs, and don’t put them in enclosures that trap heat.
Speaking from experience: LED drivers hate dirty power. If they burn out frequently, check the wiring for damage. I probably avoided a house fire.
Yep. When I moved into my house the previous owner had used all garbage Walmart LED’s. I think I had one fail each month and just bought a bunch on sale from Phillips eventually.
Most common failure was the driver. So they turned into strobe lights lol. Most annoying failure ever.
And more importantly, not every LED is dimmer compatible. Sometimes they’re super picky or just plain don’t work.
Can you recommend which ones to buy? I have the strobe light problem and it is indeed very annoying
They’ve been sabotaged by design. LEDs should last 10+ years if built even half away reasonably, but unfortunately the manufacturers basically got together and agreed to build them in such a way they would fail. Same as regular light bulbs, they just have to work harder.
I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks. They’ve been running for like 15 years now and not a one of them has failed. I spent several hundred USD replacing all my bulbs with those back in the day and they’ve done me well.
Modern bulbs are trash by comparison. Not because the technology is limited in some way but because they refuse to make anything to that quality anymore.
We need an alternate solution to this planned obsolescence bullshit. Light bulbs hit 50k rated hours long ago and they were talking about making ones that went 100k+ but these days you can’t find anything above 25k. And that’s setting aside the fact that a lot of these rely on apps that could be dropped at a moment’s notice.
I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks.
I bought a couple of those for an enclosed fixture inside a skylight. The ceiling height there is 20 feet, plus another 2ft into the skylight tunnel. I bought those LED bulbs (at $40/each) because I never wanted to change them. Both bulbs were still fully functional 15 years later. I have since sold that house, but I bet they’re still functioning.
Wait til people hear that GE, Phillips, and others literally created a cartel to sabotage light bulb lifespan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
One of the originators of the idea of “planned obsolescence”. Even after the cartel got killed the manufacturers never extended the life of the lights into (to an extent) CFLs and then moreso the days of LEDs.
Generally because you’re buying cheaper ones that aren’t built as well. Heat destroys LEDs and the cheap bulbs generally use fewer individual LEDs running at higher power to produce a given output in lumens. More expensive bulbs use more LEDs at lower power to achieve the same light output so that they’re not constantly being overdriven and last much longer.
What would you recommend?
I have dozens of Philips Hue bulbs 6-10 years old and I honestly don’t think one of them has died. I’m sure they have lost some luminance over time, but they still get the job done no problem. I rarely run them at 100% anyway.
But yeah I have also had some cheaper LED bulbs die within a few years.
Just fyi for anyone who would care about this: while hue bulbs are built well they are moving towards a model that requires you to put them on “the cloud”, even though they were sold for years and years without that requirement. The update will be mandatory whether you want it or not as part of Philips security being integrated into the app. It’s unclear what will happen if you don’t create an account and sign in at that point
So if you’re like me and put all your iot shit on an isolated vlan without internet access they may not be the best option for you. Or if you just don’t want to support a company that wildly changes the tos years after purchasing their (expensive) product. I don’t want my home shit on the internet, I don’t trust Philips to put enough cash or effort into securing their servers, etc.
The bulbs do work with zigbee though and that seems to be a viable alternative to using their hub/app although I haven’t tested it fully. This also means if you’re using them via HomeKit you’ll need some kind of bridge like home assistant
I added all my 10 year+ Hue bulbs to a zigbee stick about 4 years ago. I control them with Home assistant and Zigbee2mqtt. They were a bit flakey at first but after awhile now with updates they have been flawless. Best thing is you still get firmware updates through z2m. Highly recommend using Hue bulbs for their long term support and quality. I have had 1 bulb start flickering and Hue actually replaced it, free of charge.
That’s good to hear. I have a zigbee stick but haven’t found the time to repair them that way yet. I definitely agree they’re good products, it just left a real bad taste in my mouth when after years of using them I got a notification in the app that soon I’ll be required to put them online, which is nonsense
Can confirm
I had one flicker after 8 years and the company replaced it for free. The rest of my 10 year old bulbs are still working fine. I wish they would die though to give me an excuse to replace them with the better color versions. Many of mine are still the old ones with green that can only go to 🍋🟩 lime.
I just buy a cheap jumbo pack from Amazon. They’re like 15 bucks and last for years which is good enough for me.
Phillips warm glow are my favorites after watching technology connections. They last, and they look just like incandescent bulbs as you dim them.
Lighting a campfire
Typically it’s not the emitters – the LED’s themselves – that fail. If driven correctly, those have lifetimes of tens of thousands of hours. That’s what the manufacturer is advertising on the box. Yes, an individual LED when driven correctly will probably last 20,000 hours. (Usually more, depending on how pedantic you want to get. The 20,000 hour figure often quoted is the point where the emitter drops to 80% of its original light output.)
LED “bulbs,” the type that replace filament bulbs in consumer fixtures, typically fail in their driver hardware. LED’s run off of low voltage DC and in the base of all of those LED conversion bulbs is a power conversion assembly that steps down and rectifies 120v/240c AC to whatever DC voltage the LED array in there expects. These are inevitably made out of whatever the cheapest passives and semiconductor components the manufacturer thinks they can get away with. These don’t last 20,000 hours, especially not in where they’re usually installed.
The main killer for all semiconductor electronics, which includes both LED’s themselves and their driver circuitry, is heat. This is often exacerbated by the fact that LED replacement modules are usually stuck in enclosed light fixtures designed for filament bulbs that have insufficient ventilation to get rid of the waste heat from the components in an LED module. The insides of those enclosed ceiling light fixtures, the ubiquitous “boob light,” gets hot, even with only LED modules installed. Filament bulbs don’t care because they don’t have any electronics in them and how they work is literally by getting so hot the glow. But LED modules in that kind of environment will invariably suffer an early failure.
The best way you can get your LED modules to last longer is to install them in a fixture where they’ll have a lot of air circulation available or at the very least which is not fully enclosed.
Excellent.
Also, the D stands for diode, which is a one-way passage for electricity, some rectifiers may use diodes in their circuitry. So another way to cut costs is to not rectify completely or well.
Case in point, cheap LED Christmas lights are often not rectified at all so they flicker at 50/60 Hz depending on your country’s electrical supply…
I freaking hate that flicker so much. I can always tell when someone has done a cheap aftermarket headlight conversion because I’ll see the flicker out of the corner of my eye and my rearview mirrors and it’s incredibly distracting.
Slightly different. The alternator on a car has a very variable frequency due to change in engine speed and it’s fed into the car’s regulator/rectifier, so the typical power supplied is stable. However, many cars will use the high beams at half-power to function as daytime running lights (DRLs). This is usually done by pulse width modulation (PWM) meaning it’s chopping up the power supplied at a nearly imperceptible speed. An incandescent bulb will have so much fade time that the choppy power will go unnoticed. From there, theses two possibilities that cause the bulb to flicker. Very cheap bulbs will show their choppy power supply directly by flickering, making them noticeable as the move across your vision. Some mid-range bulbs will have cheap smoothing circuits (since vehicle power is “dirty”) so there will be charge time and discharge time as the capacitors charge up and down, allowing and disallowing the emitter to light, creating a slower flash pattern. Higher end bulbs (ignoring the part where their beam pattern is still usually trash) should be able to accommodate the chopped power and run dimmer.
You may also notice a similar flicker on LED tail lights where the brake light is a brighter tail light instead of a dedicated element. Such cars will use PWM for dimming and may flicker as they move across your view as well. Some of my car’s dash uses LEDs for backlighting and dimming the dash is done via PWM. If I glance across the steering wheel from side to side, it looks like “cruise” gets stamped across the view
Hah, I have one three bulb boob light that’s my “trash” fixture because it gets whatever mismatched leftover I can find. At one point I had an LED, and incandescent and a CFL in it. It doesn’t have the extra ventilation that modern ones do so I’m sure it gets hot, but even that doesn’t seem to shorten the lives much
What would you recommend?
Philips.
Killer of LED bulbs is heat. If you have some in fixtures that trap heat you should either replace the fixtures or get high quality bulbs for those fixtures. Look for bulbs rated for hot locations. And for outdoors make sure it’s rated for wet areas.
I wonder if somebody will ever make some sort of like light bulb extender that has some cooling fins on it to go between your light bulb and the socket and to offer a secondary path for some of that heat to get out.
The bulbs themselves are amazing. There are good ones in cars and computers, the flash of phones etc.
The failure point is typically the electronic components that run or regulate it. And of course most companies want to sell more bulbs so they conveniently skimp on that stuff. So maybe the answer is a more expensive bulb that hopefully will last long enough to justify the extra cost?
What would you recommend that actually last long enough to justify the extra cost?
If you can get a hold of Dubai Led bulbs, they are supposed to last extremely long
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-lights-you-cant-buy/
Make sure to choose lamp fittings that don’t trap the heat.
If you’re technically inclined, Big Clive has a tutorial for ‘fixing’ most bulbs not to overdrive the LEDs by removing or changing a single resistor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HTa2jVi_rc
My experience has been that they last for more years than I tend to notice which ones are which. I’m not mad at all about their longevity.
I had 2 LED bulbs that I know for sure that I bought prior to 2015 that only recently failed. Those bulbs lasted at least 9-10 years. The rest of my bulbs I haven’t kept up with but those 2 older ones looked very distinctive with aluminum heatsink material for their bottom halves.
Yeah the drivers are shit on cheap products and heat can wear them out easily. I find that LED bulbs “burn out” by just being super dim rather than physically snapping like incandescent filaments. I have these 96 cent cheapass LED bulbs that I have no expectation of lasting long, and I have other 6 dollar dimmable bulbs that I hope I will last longer.
I still buy more halogen bulbs than LEDs - 4 fixtures in one room that I haven’t been able to convert go through more bulbs than the rest of the house of LED fixtures combined.
So far I haven’t bought any bulbs this year and have used only halogens, but I used up my stock of both.
My only real complaint about replacing LED bulbs is they change design more frequently than they need to be replaced - If I need to replace one bulb in a fixture, I can never find an exact match
Are you sure you have the same set up for voltage and resistance? If you don’t you’ll pass more current and burn out faster. Similar to a laptop marketing saying 14hrs, but that’s only if you leave it on low power, airplane mode, and don’t do anything useful. I’m curious to see if someone comments the real answer.
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