Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuon | Hacker News Reader

It is not directly related to the article, but the decaying LEDs mentionned in the article made me think of it.

Since we had to switch to LEDs, I had to change lightbulbs waaay more often. I realize they consume less (even if here they would just help heat the house so the energy is not lost), but hell they are crap. They start blinking, their color is shifting, they die quickly, they are super expensive, they are bigger and many lamp I had couldn't be fitted with LEDs unless I found some smaller ones which are even more expensive.

This is my personal anecdotal experience, but I would be interested if any serious study had looked into this kind of issues.

View on HN

Good leds are extremely durable and should last far longer than anything else, but it seems like there are also a lot of crappy leds on the market.

But it's also important that leds receive the right amount of power. If they receive too much, they'll burn out. We've had this issue with a system where you clip little lights on a rail. It uses GU10 spots which exist in led, so thinking that was compatible, I used leds of course. But our spots kept burning out at an alarming rate. Turns out we need a different transformer for leds. I'm using halogen now, and it works fine.

There are plenty of cheap LED lamps with inadequate cooling or other bad components, which will become defective after a relatively short time.

I have switched all the lighting in 2 apartments to LED lamps, more than 10 years ago, and no lamp has gone defective until now.

However, they were Philips lamps and not one of their cheapest models, but some model with 1521 lumen @ 13 W and 4000 K color temperature, i.e. slightly more luminous than the classic 100 W incandescent lamps and with almost white light, only very slightly yellowish, very unlike the yellow lamps with a color temperature under 3000 K, and also very unlike the cheap bluish lamps with a 6500 K color temperature.

My LED lamps are screwed in traditional incandescent lamp fixtures, which hang from the ceiling, but unlike some bad lamp fixtures, mine have below them a diffusive screen, to avoid direct light, but they are completely open above, so they do not impede cooling.

Philips are great. I installed the Phillips hue in 2013, they are still going strong. I replaced one out of the 40 or so over the years. It didn’t burn out, it was turning back on by itself…

I am buying philips now when I have to replace them, so far, only 1 philips led died. So they are much more durable, but still not living to the promise of "change once and it will last forever".

I also suspect that many LEDs are designed for 220V, but here in switzerland it is 240V norm and in the middle of the day my power meter reads around 245V (I suspect it is because there is a lot of solar panels on the roofs around me), so it is not a negligible voltage difference if the electronic is not designed for it.

The market is flooded with cheap garbage LEDs. They have shoddy bare-minimum electronics and poor heat control. Something on the board tends to die relatively quickly. If you go to Amazon and buy a no-name Chinese brand or your local big box store (who contracted to a no-name Chinese manufacturer) you are rolling the dice.

On the other hand my entire house is 100% LED from a prior owner gut and rebuild in 2015. With the exception of two LEDs the rest of them still work fine after over 10 years of use.

What, you didn't stock up on incandescents back in 2008?

Phoebus Cartel 2.0

Seems the elements are warrantied for 10000 hours but the drivers are not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com