LED bulbs experience? Do they last as declared?

[TVman]

In my kitchen I use A 70w,5000 lumen,Metal Halide Bulb.
I found it at A Hotel warehouse Free MADGrab.....
It uses Less power than 6 LED 650 lumen Bulbs.

[calexanian]

Something I just noticed, in two steps.

Some of my solar calculators do not work under LED lights.. Ok, that figures. Different spectrum.. That got me thinking. Are bugs attracted to LED bulbs? I have one in my entryway.. Typically a whole barrage of bugs would be buzzing it this time of night.. I changed it to a LED recently and did not bother to look. I just did, and no bugs! I am free to use my front door in the summer evenings now without fear of being dive bombed by a dozen hungry mosquitos! Also I can leave my windows open and the no see ums don't some through the screen towards the light. I guess it has something to do with the lower UV content.

[Kjelt]

It's a shame we can't get 5000lm LED lighting for homes in the west. It's amazing, far better than anything on the market here, but only seems to be available in Japan and Korea (and maybe China).

Enough choice in the professional market such as the standard 60cm x 60cm tiles but not as a standard light bulb replacement which is logical considering the wattage and required cooling.

[Kjelt]

I was thinking of this kind of thing: http://www.sharp.co.jp/led_lighting/ceiling/index.html
As well as providing 5000lm of diffuse light they have remote control, variable colour temperature, dimming, air purification/anti-virus, insect repellent, voice control and more. Even the basic, cheapest models have remote control and excellent light, vastly better than anything available in the UK.

[TVman]

Toto do a toilet with built-in LED lighting so you don't have to turn the main light on and wake yourself up at night. Little things that make your life better.

 

[madworm]

Big fan of LED lighting myself. I tend to build my own custom LED-lamps, great fun.

so you don't have to turn the main light on and wake yourself up at night

Sooner or later you will find out that it is actually better to be somewhat awake when taking a leak. Running completely on autopilot can lead to nasty surprises later in the day. But you're right that soft light is very nice for tired eyes :-)

[mamalala]

Enough choice in the professional market such as the standard 60cm x 60cm tiles but not as a standard light bulb replacement which is logical considering the wattage and required cooling.

I think that LED bulbs that go into normal, old fixtures are only a stop-gap thing anyway. Personally i find it rather silly to use them, since that takes away the huge advantages of LED lighting. With LED's, you can do things that are hard or impossible to do with normal lamps. Try to make a 1cm thin panel with fluorescent or incadescent lamps. Or thin, long and very bright aluminium strips. Or those flexible strips.

LED's have the big advantage that you can make lights in shapes that so far no other technology can produce. Just recently i installed a bunch of 60x30cm and 30x30cm panels above my workspace. Nice, even and bright light, from nice looking, flat panels. No bulky tubes and fixtures...

Greetings,

Chris

[Kjelt]

I agree fully, unfortunately esp. For pro consumers the biggest potential is still in retrofit led lighting, the customers they refuse to rewire anything because that is extremely expensive in manhours. For consumers it is easier but even there it has to run on mains and mains dimming since another wire for controls is difficult.

[mamalala]

I agree fully, unfortunately esp. For pro consumers the biggest potential is still in retrofit led lighting, the customers they refuse to rewire anything because that is extremely expensive in manhours. For consumers it is easier but even there it has to run on mains and mains dimming since another wire for controls is difficult.

True, there will always be time required for transitioning to new technology. But i'm really confident that the time of regular fixtures and bulbs is coming to an end rather quickly. Then there are many advances in LED driver chips, meaning that dimming isn't going to be much of a problem either, i.e. no extra control wiring needed. Only "problem" right now is that many conventional dimmers require a minimum load, and LED lighting using such chips takes so little power that the load they present to the dimmer is too low. But then again, this is just a matter of advancing technology a bit. In the times of incadescent lamps, dimmers just worked and there simply was no need to get them to work at loads as low as a Watt or two, so no one developed that.

Greetings,

Chris

[ASowa]

The most common failure for any led system is driver failure usually due to electrolytic capacitor failure.   Cheap chinese 2000 hour 105C 50V caps are often use to hit a the low price point required for consumer bulbs.  Assuming the best case of 25V forward voltage,  the driver would need to operate at 78C to get the common 25k hour claim.  That is a hard temperature to reach when you are dissipating ~10W in such a small area. When you enclose the bulb, you can easily increase the operating temperature by 10C which would then reduce your life by half to 12.5k hours.

You shouldn't have to worry about the leds failing.  Even at high temperature 25k hours is easy to achieve with modern phosphors. 

In terms of CRI, all new leds are in warm white color temperatures have a CRI of at least 80 but the R9 value which renders red may only be single digits.  Recently 90+ CRI versions are becoming available due to pressure from California legislation. These will have a R9 value of at least 50, which will make skin tones look more like filament type bulbs. 98 CRI chips are available, but its debatable if it matters at that point.

[Kjelt]

I think you will eventually get LED drivers that fit right into a standard residential switch box. You separate the driver from the LED and LED prices come down, the driver isn’t cooking in the LED enclosure so it last longer. You don’t have to add any wiring and diming can be done by throttling back the driver, not PWM.  You could just add a PTC on the LED package for thermal protection. That would be the way I would do it if I were to replace all the lights in my house with LED’s.

You're house will then become a huge EMC problem unless you use DC current and don't use switchers. All current Led drivers have high frequency PWM dimming some Maxim chips use >1MHz for switching so the user can not see any blinking. Using those kind of chips you need the leds to be close and filter the output. In my led lighting project I developed a driver with such a Maxim ic did everything said in the datasheet, let a colleague run the final pcb in the emc room and I was transmitting big time on FM frequency Luckily two beads, a resistor and NPO Cap solved the issue but it remains tricky business.

[Hydrawerk]

Hello, what do you think about Panasonic LDAHV11LH3 LED bulb? Is it good? I bought it for my grandmother. It was cheap in a sale. It cost me 99 CZK including VAT. It is about 3,6 EUR.
I believe that Panasonic makes good quality products.

[Hydrawerk]

 

[rrinker]

 I replaced all the incandescent bulbs in my house with LEDs, 3 years ago when I moved in, None have thus far failed, and some are in enclosed fixtures which the specifically say not to do 

[CatalinaWOW]

I can't answer reliability questions since to date I have had no failures, but I haven't had any operating for the projected life.  I now have a couple of dozen LED bulbs in various ratings up to 100W equivalent.   The oldest ones are approaching four years, most are almost three years old.  Most get turned on and off a couple of times a day.  The total on time varies from well under an hour to nearly 12 hours a day.  The only quibble I have with any of them is that on some the color temperature changes dramatically as they are dimmed. 

Even the ones that are on roughly 12 hours a day are accumulating less than 4000 hours a year and would take over six years to reach the 25,000 hour advertised life.  At best my oldest bulbs are just over half way through that life.  The fact that none has failed is encouraging, and is in stark contrast with my experience with CFD bulbs, which had average life times not much different than the incandescent ones I was replacing.

[Cubdriver]

At this point I have more than 60 in various places around the house.  The oldest were installed a bit before 2011, most in the 2012-2013 time frame, and a few since.  Knock on wood, none have yet failed.  <cue smell of magic smoke escaping from LED lamps>

Most are Philips, Cree, and Eco-Watt (from Home Depot), and there are also a few oddballs.  I stay away from dollar store and off-brand types.

-Pat

[rdl]

All the Cree LED bulbs I bought 3 years ago, when I last posted in this thread, are still going. The little 130 lumen Philips that runs 24/7 already had a year and a half on it at that time and it's still working. It may have run over 40,000 hrs now, but the fact that it's rarely switched off and on probably has something to do with that. I even have a few very inexpensive Newegg/Rosewill branded ones that are going strong after over two years.

[cdev]

A while ago I bought a bunch of Feit warm white bulbs and almost all of them have failed. I don't think that more than maybe a quarter of them are still working. That's disappointing because the color temperature of them is nice, for an LED, warm white.

[helius]

Incandescent lamps typically have broadly the same level of performance until they fail by breaking the filament. Especially with modern bulbs they typically don't last long enough to suffer sputtering problems. So questions like "has the bulb completely stopped working" are what people think about when you say failure.
LED lamps are different. They age. You really need to measure their output with a luxmeter before assuming that they are meeting the claimed lifetime spec.

[CatalinaWOW]

Incandescent lamps typically have broadly the same level of performance until they fail by breaking the filament. Especially with modern bulbs they typically don't last long enough to suffer sputtering problems. So questions like "has the bulb completely stopped working" are what people think about when you say failure.
LED lamps are different. They age. You really need to measure their output with a luxmeter before assuming that they are meeting the claimed lifetime spec.

Technically you are right.  But from my point of view, if I am still happy with the illumination they haven't failed.  I won't replace them until I am unhappy.

Again, the LEDs are performing very differently than CFDs.  Many of those showed noticeable dimming before they failed.  That is in addition to the wild variations in intensity during the warm up period following turn on.  While I haven't checked with a light meter, I haven't noticed any drop off in brightness with the LED bulbs.  I am guessing that my sensitivity to this is somewhere in the 3 dB to 6 dB range (Guess based on a smattering of observations, complaints about dim bulbs etc.  I know this is not something human physiology is good at).  I believe they spec to the 3 dB point so it is very possible I am giving "failed" bulbs a pass.

[Kjelt]

I have teared down three led bulbs and ledspots recently, branded and non branded, all below $5 price.
They all had chinese electronics inside, the branded ones had pcbs with compliance markings had fuses , ikea had the same as philips on some cheap bulbs.
The non branded ones were scary no fuses no markings on compliance just crap:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/lets-see-what-a-$4-ebay-'cree'-ledspot-looks-like/msg1189082/#msg1189082

[Jeroen3]

There are two problems with LED lights:
1. They flicker. They differ from filaments in the way they flicker. Sine vs square/sawtooth waveform light intensity. It is very fatiguing on the eyes.
2. If they don't they have capacitors, and the capacitor fails first.

Here is a website with a comparison on various lights, including flicker.
http://www.olino.org/advice

[madires]

An E14 spot (3 1W LEDs, no cheapie) failed after about 4 or 5 years, caused by a bad cap in the SMPSU (signs of too much heat and a cheap cap). Two E27 spots (same model) failed during the warranty period. The vendor issued a refund, since he didn't sell that model anymore. Unfortunately you don't know if a bulb got a bad thermal design or cheap components in the PSU before buying it.

[PlainName]

I am a convert to LED lighting. Previously, LEDs meant about 6000K which is far too blue for me so I went for 2700K 'warm' white. They're fine but not brilliant. However, the recently available 'natural' whites of around 4000K are perfect, and those are what I kit the place with either with new fittings or to replace filament/flouros.

There are two issue with lifetime: first is complete failure, which we've had but not often enough to put us off. The one light (a T8 replacement) I did take apart turned out to be the electronics, and feeding the LEDs from a CC supply repurposed it.

The other factor is, literally, wearing out. As LEDs age they get dimmer, and once they get down to about 80% you notice. We have several fittings where the lights are not as bright as they were, and although they are still good I can see the time when they'll need to be replaced even though they still work. BTW, that applies to pretty much all lights, but the CCFL seem to be particularly bad. We won't touch those with a bargepole now, and replaced all of them as soon as LEDs became affordable.

[kaz911]

I use Phillips Master LEDs where there are old 240v->12v trafo's as they can take it and does not flicker - but use fractionally more power. But not enough to warrant replacing trafos.

I normally use standard Philips LEDs for 240v

Now my 12 kitchen "Halogen's converted to LED" use less power than my 2 stove lights I have not converted yet...

I have replaced about 60+ halogen's so far in my house, a friends house and our vacation apartment. So far only 2 dead (DOA) Philips that was promptly exchanged with no questions asked. And going on 3 years for the oldest now. Philips have good heat transfer and I do think they will last

I also put in Solar Powered PIR activated outdoor spot-light for my Bin Area and despite installed in December - it works great with UK sun only and shade for > 1/2 the day.