IKEA LEDARE teardown.

[jchw4]

My old IKEA LED bulb started flickering. No longer useful, so let's take it apart and maybe try to fix it

This is (was) LED1465G13 (IKEA LEDARE US version). I installed it probably 5-6 years ago, and it ran about 8 hours daily.

Initial inspection showed a cracked outer shell with potential heatsink under it.


The shell cracked on the side and also on top.


Not very promising ;(

Diffuser removal was successful! Hooray!


LEDs look cracked but not burned, plastic cracked.


The LEDs assembly drops out. Thermal design could be better ;(


We probably see a culprit.


But the whole assembly is heavily potted and I don't see any way of removing this capacitor.

[jchw4]

Even if I fit a soldering iron inside I could not lift the capacitor. There is absolutely no space around. ;(

Let's maybe do some measurements.


Now the repair that started for good does not seem to be very feasible ;(

What if I remove the screw connector? Could I push the board through?
After some wiggling:


Oops ;(


Ok. Forget the repair. Let's at least see how it was made.

Destructive teardown time:


Ok. After a lot of work we basically have the same bulb. It is now made of aluminum. Otherwise still the same:


Do you remember that feeling that you'd better stop with this useless process that takes more and more effort? That was it.

Hmmm.

Let's try to scrub and cut through the potting with a flat screwdriver, tweezers and a paper knife.


Not very successful.

I probably needed a saw at that point. And the process started to become difficult!

I would have dropped this disassembly but the nearby makerspace had a band saw. This was exactly what I needed!


Still not much.

[jchw4]

It's interesting though to see that the outer plastics did not fully cover the inside of the metal pipe. You can see that it only covers the bottom.


Some peeling.


We are getting something!


There is probably no reason to keep it intact. Let's desolder the through hole parts and clean it even more.


All the LEDs still light up fine. 121GW reports about 5.6V across each (manual says it uses about 5-7mA current).


Let's look at the board.


You can see the carbonization where it heated up most. That large cap that we saw above became a heater!
And the second one probably too.

[jchw4]

The parts:


Googling for the main IC label MRVL 00 187A4W1-SAH2 turned out to be tricky, but I finally believe that it is Marvell 88EM8187 .

The product page was retired, but the web archive found the old product brief with reference schematics and an especially useful photo of the eval board that looks very similar.


So in the end I basically ended up with a Marvell 88EM8187 eval board and had to buy a new IKEA bulb