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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

My living room is lit through 30(3W 240V) LEDs. I installed them about 2 years ago and nearly half of them are gone. The lifetime of these is supposed to be 20K hours. Obviously the lights are not switched on all the time, more like 4 hours on average. That's less than 3K hours of usage with about %50 fatality rate.

Out of curiosity, I teared down a few failed ones and they were all gone because one of the LEDs on the LED array blew up. Here is a picture of a failed one: https://imgur.com/aOg7D7S

I'm very doubtful about the longevity claims.

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I know someone who retired from working in the LED industry in Taiwan. She said the manufacturers were never going to make enough money from lights which last for ten or twenty years. They are 100% degrading the product so that they need to be replaced much more often. They are all colluding on this. You basically can’t buy the true LED light bulb. It’s a shame.

It’s the Phoebus cartel all over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

We have this, another example is Luxotica (https://youtu.be/yvTWjWVY9Vo). I'm wondering if someone keeps track of all industries that need to be disrupted.

I read an interview with the Luxottica founder - he's an absolute bastard, and proud of it, like a Bond villain. We'll have to wait until he dies to break that monopoly up.

When you visit an eyeglass store in the US, it's likely all Luxottica frames, especially the chains they own:

https://www.luxottica.com/en/retail-brands

I bought my house about 6 years ago, and since then I've converted the whole house (about 100 bulbs) to LED, using bulbs from maybe 5 different manufactuers.

One of the mfg bulbs go bad. I think I'm at about a 50% failure rate with them. Something like 10 out of 20 bulbs. None of the other mfg bulbs have gone bad. Basically I bought bulbs that were on sale. The "bad batch", IIRC is when average 60W led bulbs were in the USD$2.5 range and I got them for about $1.0, so about 6 years ago. I bought some other bulbs at a similar price point/date, and they are still all fine.

So, it could just be you got unlucky with a crappy mfg. Try some different bulbs.

wow 3W, with just 6x 2835 (so each is 0.5W). The thing has been driven through the roof. Even at 250mW I'd consider them overdriven - it's surprising they survived that long.

Also only the PCB is aluminium, not extra heat sinking. Is this GU10 socket?

It's an E27 socket. These are a bit hard to find bulbs with large sockets and tiny heads.

But they could easily have fitted in double the number of led's and driven each half as hard

Yes, my experience with LED bulbs from a swath of manufacturers is that they have only slightly better longevity than the old incandescent bulbs in reality, no matter what the theoretical lifetime claims are.

This is at least better than the CFL situation. At least in my house they had an absolutely horrific failure rate. The whole shift to CFLs had to have been an environmental disaster.

I still buy LEDs because I like the light from them, but man, I'm basically paying 10x the price (I like the 100-watt equivalent bulbs) for the same quality bulb. It's depressing.

Isn't the 20k hours if they are just left on 24/7? Turning them on and off reduces their life span.

>Turning them on and off reduces their life span.

That would be the case only if the driver is exceptionally bad, heat kills them pretty much (which would be continuous use). Any usable driver should limit the inrush current.

@mrtksn, pretty much all LEDs you buy in the shop are heavily overdriven to get 1) high power, 2) shorten their life span, so you have to replace them, i.e. the planned obsolesce.

It's exceptionally rare to see e27/e14 designs that would be half-decent. The "dubai ones" are an example of not-overdriven leds with okayish electronics but they still are subpar.

--- (Edit) A simple solution for DYI, are LED strips - they are not super efficient as they have current limiting resistors (i.e. heat) but they can be dimmed easily (PWM) to last for long long time. Also they can be used in a lot of creative ways.

We have min 2 years of warranty by law, they probably depend on people not going through the trouble requesting replacements.

Indeed - can you keep all the receipts? I have had LEDs replaced in warranty - but it's a massive hassle. They fail one by one, so less with than 2 quid each, it is mostly driving for a single lamp (and finding the correct receipt).

Replacing led bulbs under warranty is sometimes too complex and costly versus buying new ones: you need the receipt, you need to go to the store, they will exchange it with one that is as bad as the original and it will burn again.

We don't; for things like light bulbs, rechargeable batteries, etc. there is 6 months only.

Why would that be? The warranty is against defects in the product(design or manufacturing) that prevents you from using it for the expected lifetime. Limiting it to way shorter period than the lifetime doesn't feel right.

I didn't investigate too much when I was hit by this, but apparently it's because these kinds of goods suffer from wear. Now obviously, it doesn't make much sense to allow a manufacturer to advertise 10k hours for a lightbulb while only offering 6 months of warranty, but here we are.

For a laptop battery I might have put in more effort to dispute with the manufacturer, but for two ~5€ lightbulbs I just couldn't be arsed.

It's 2y in the EU and the UK.

I couldn't find the packaging but if I remember correctly, they also have on/off rating which was also at 10K-20K something.

50% failure rate in 2 years at domestic use is a very poor performance IMHO.

> 50% failure rate in 2 years at domestic use is a very poor performance IMHO.

Electroboom recently reviewed / explained common failure cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIK1jnYr0yw

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