this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I wish the LEDs weren't such crap. They don't even last as long as a 60W incandescent a lot of times. The old CFLs last years, I have a few over ten years old.
I'm curious about what fixtures your led light bulbs were in.
Old incandescent lights worked great at high heat levels, so a typical boob light fixture that kept the heat in would be fine for an incandescent. Put an LED light in there, and it can still heat up beyond design capacity and might not get enough ventilation and age prematurely.
The only leds that failed for me were inside a fixture meant for incandescent lights. All our open bulbs or specially designed for led fixtures have been going strong for half a decade or more.
Planned obsolescence is a thing here. The LEDs don't fail, it's the power circuitry. Unfortunately the fixture theory doesn't pan out, as fixtures meant for incandescent bulbs need to be able to dissipate much more heat (about 6 times as much). I've been using LED bulbs for 7 years in all sorts of different fixtures and have never had even one burn out on me. Why? I don't really know. Maybe I turn the lights on less often than other people?
It's more likely that the cheap ones are just using a driver board so cheap that it cannot tolerate the heat at all to cut costs, and the bulb dying sooner is just a nice side effect of that.
It's best to just not buy the cheapest bulbs. I've had good luck with Philips.
I have a 10+ year old LED bulb of corn type, made by a local manufacturer. Works great to this day. It outlived a few generations of store-bought crap like Philips and Emos in the rest of the house.
Stoned me read boob light and was like, 'oh ya'. But I gotta make sure, we mean like
(image of a dome light cover with a protruding "nipple" at it's highest point-- making it breast-like in appearance.)
Exactly 😆
I can't think of another term for them.
Getting rid of them made our place look a lot less like 1997
can confirm, these are boob lights. even my wife uses the term. ripped every one out shortly after we moved in.
My apartment has one of those light fixtures in the living room and it uses a dimmer dial. I once tried to replace the incandescent bulbs with what seemed to be the LED equivalent that could be used with a dimmer, but it just didn't work right. Lots of flickering. I hope this will convince my landlord to replace the fixture so I can finish changing everything to LED.
For dimmers, you either need smart bulbs that do it themselves or a dimmer switch that you know is guaranteed to work with that bulb, it's tricky. Also, LED lights that get warmer (change colour tone to a more orange colour) as they dim are far more pleasing than just dimming since they emulate what incandescent bulbs do. Sometimes if the power supply to your unit or building is choppy leds are the first to show it, so hope it's not that.
Good luck with your landlord, let's hope they're a good one.
Thanks for the advice!
There are different types of dimmers to work with different types of bulbs. You may get better results with a summer rated for LEDs
This hasn't been my experience at all, I replaced most of the bulbs in my house with LEDs a couple years ago and I don't think I've had to replace a single one since. When they were all incandescent, I was regularly replacing burned out bulbs. Check which brand you're buying, you're probably buying crap which is why you're getting crap. I've found Phillips bulbs work great and are long lasting, I have some that've been in a fixture for 5 years now with no issue
I don't know what kind of crap LED light bulbs you get in the US but here in Europe to to get a CE mark (required to be able to import them into the EU) a model has to have less than 5% failure rate within (if I remember it correctly) the first year, last 10,000h at least (and have been tested for it, which is quite funny because the test requires having the thing always on for months), turn on within a second, lose (due to burn-in) less than a few percent (forgot the number) brightness within the first 6 months and a bunch of other requirements including stuff like color fidelity.
About a decade ago I actually looked into starting a business importing those things from China and still tody have several samples from back then still working fine (and that's also why I know the CE mark requirements for LED light bulbs).
More in general I've been using LED lamps for even longer and even back in the day when they were more expensive those things paid for themselves in lower power costs, and often do so quite fast (a couple of months) when used to replace incandescents, plus the rate of failures is now pretty low.
(When I first replaced all my lightbulbs with LEDs, way back when they weren't even as efficient as now, the fall in the electricity bill was very noticeable)
Oh, and the price of those things at the factory has been less than $1 for ages, so stores trying to sell those for more than $2 have huge markups and you're better of avoiding those places and getting them from hardware stores and similar (or just buy online).
I haven't had a filament LED fail on me yet. The cheapest LEDs you can find aren't worth it; best to get a name brand.
Name brand like Philips don't die quickly (mostly) but they lose its brightness pretty fast. I have few 12w MyCare™, it's going strong for like 3 years but it's now only as bright as my new 6w LED.
We need more systems where we can just replace the power supplies on these bulbs.
I've been running pure led for 10 years. The only failures I've had were in heat prone fixtures not designed for leds
Mostly capacitor plague or heat. I've only lost 2 / 50 in Open fixtures with good airflow over the last three years.
I have one outdoor that pops every spring the fixture is damn near sealed and in direct sunlight, but the HOA demands the fixture.
I had CFLs burn out all the time.
My LEDs have all been rock solid. Even the cheap ones.