Why LED Bulbs Don’t Always Live Up to the Hype About Their Life Spans

wsj.com

3 points·crackercrews··4 comments

In my experience LED has a significant worse lifetime than compact fluorescents. Both are about the same in energy efficiency. Expensive LED lamps have a better color rendition than CFL but cheap LED is very bad in light quality. Cheap LED lamps (and LED filament lamps) are also known for horrendous flicker.

I'll be switching back to CFL for the time being, but I hope LED will eventually get equal lifespan and light quality.

My personal experience is the opposite. Expensive CFLs had bulky bases, needed time after power up for full brightness, and still had light with those CFL characteristic, oh, and lasted just short after expiry of warranty. (6 months here)

Never tried (normal) LEDs with the exception of flashlights and similar, there they are OK.

With the LED filaments I'm finally happy since a few years. I use them exclusively now. Their color temperature and representation is pleasing and comfortable for me. They don't flicker, and I'm sensitive to that. And none died or went darker, so far. Also they are using way less power for the same Lumens, a.k.a. brightness.

One reason I can imagine they flicker for you, is that your mains electricity is at 60Hz, and you screens refresh at that rate, too. That can lead to "Schwebung", "beat effect", "overlapping frequency fluctuation". Which of course would be unacceptable. But I don't have that.

Another reason could be the way the electronics switch from mains AC to DC. Which you seem to had bad luck with.

This just talks about life spans. It doesn't talk about the impact the lower cost of electricity during that life span.

It also doesn't talk about the higher cost of the bulb and whether that would be offset by the lower cost of electricity.

https://archive.is/VtKFt

Reply on news.ycombinator.com