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).
Can’t actually remember when or if I had a LED bulb die on me yet. Knock on wood …
What lasted forever for me…CFLs. downside is they just don’t seem to put out as much light. But I had some in my house 10+ years old. They lasted so long that when one finally burned out and I didn’t have a replacement of the intensity…I was pissed to learn they don’t even make them anymore. I’m not a fan of LEDs because some of the cheaper ones are like mini strobe lights and really big my eyes. I had to go through like $60 work of LEDs to find a set I actually liked
I’ve had the best experience with the Philips LED lights, and secondly, the GE lights. I’ve seen some here say IKEA as well are good. Others just are too cheaply made and fail quickly.
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.
What would you recommend?
Philips.
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
My smart LED bulbs don’t even say how long they last, but my experience with LEDs in general tells me they will last practically forever. Out of all the LED things I have, the only ones with any burnt out lights are a couple of cheap LED strips I have and I can’t even be sure the ones that are dead weren’t because of where I cut the strip. I’ve had those things for over 12 years now and they’re in my PC which is always on.
Afaik, the biggest threat to killing the LED is heat, and some cheaper LED bulbs have really poor heat dissipation. Technology Connections has a video about them, which may be more informative.
The same reason that filament based incandescent bulbs burned out. Planned obsolescence.
There’s a very real conspiracy (not just a theory) about the “arms race” in light bulbs for long lasting bulbs. Eventually, they made bulbs that lasted so long that they stopped making money.
Lighting manufacturers intentionally made worse bulbs to simply improve profits. They realized that they were driving themselves out of business. Everyone in the light bulb industry agreed to stop development of even longer lasting bulbs, just so they could continue to move units and make money.
Also, with LEDs, the thing that burns out fastest isn’t the LEDs (there’s usually a dozen… ish, in an LED bulb)… It’s the electronics. The power needs to be converted from line power to something the LEDs can handle, which is usually DC. So there’s a full power supply in the bulb to convert AC to DC, with a certain voltage to power the LEDs.
Sometimes this conversation is simple, a full bridge rectifier with little more than a filtering capacitor, other times it’s very complex.
The power supply in the bulb is usually what fails first.
Something to remember: thicker filaments, while they do last longer, worsen the ratio of light to heat.
This guy watched The Lightbulb Conspiracy… Am I right…?
I fix my LED bulbs when they stop working
How so?
Just Google “how to increase my fire risk to save $2 on a new LED”. Should be a how to guide or two out there.
Some people like tinkering. Big Clive has a series of videos on Dubai led bulbs. The government mandates that the bulbs be extra efficient and last extra long, so they are built with more filaments driven at a lower current. They run cooler and last longer. You can do a similar thing with American bulbs if you’re handy with a soldering iron.
Honestly, with how poor many of these things are mass produced, opening them up yourself is practically a personal form of quality control. Whether you modify it or not I bet it’s less likely to die prematurely or burn your house down than those of a regular person who doesn’t open them 🤷♂️
No, shorting a dead LED in a series chain of 10-20 will NOT burn your house down, it’s barely a difference to the driving circuit. Unless you’re buying knockoffs, there is a fuse in the base that will blow at like 0.5 A, no matter what you do to the circuitry.
In many bulbs, you can adjust the value of a current-sensing resistor (usually one or two in parallel, about 2-30 Ω) to make your own “Dooby” lamp with lower power and way longer life. Of course, you need to know something about electronics.
What are the brands? What are the appliances? Have you tested the electricity coming out of those ports?
Mine are generally good for near 5
I replaced my mom’s can lights with LEDs and I was an early adopter. I believe it was ~2012-15 ish. Not a single one has died. The only reason any of them fail now is poor quality and / or planned obsolescence. The tech itself is solid AF. I had some bulbs I got from IKEA for $1. Those have failed countless times.
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.
Dirty power? Aww geez it’s been a few years since I last washed and waxed my power lines. Guess I gotta open up the walls again.
That’s a good point. LEDs dislike unstable power a LOT more than incandescent or fluorescent.
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
Generally I don’t buy anything else other than Phillips. They’re usually bulletproof if you don’t get the smart bulbs. I’ve not had a Phillips fail in ~10 years. But that’s a sample size of like 30 or so bulbs.
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.
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
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?
Lighting a campfire
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 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.
are there cool/non-warm colored filament led bulbs? My SO prefers the cool colored bulbs.
I’d be shocked if there aren’t.
Planned obsolescence
