Household LED bulb quality is terrible!

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I have gotten many Philips LED bulbs from Amazon. You have to buy them in 4 packs to get a good deal.

I do not believe LEDs are terribly sensitive to being shaken in delivery.

The GE and Cree ones are also well made in my experience.

FEIT is one of the few things that Costco sells that is an underperformer.
 
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Not that it means everything being UL listed, but any of the early failure LED household 'bulbs' I've had were not UL listed.
 
Originally Posted By: JTK
Not that it means everything being UL listed, but any of the early failure LED household 'bulbs' I've had were not UL listed.


FWIW: Being an EE, I would NEVER put any AC electrical device in my family home that was not UL listed!
A preventable house fire is a terrible thing!
 
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Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
I notice the heat is not in the bulb glass with LEDs, but in the base. I guess there is a lot of circuitry going on in there. Same way with CFLs, although their glass was hotter than LEDs, the base where the 'magic' happens takes on alot of heat.


I wonder if there will be an improvement or successor to these current bulbs that will allow less heat.


The gas station got new LEDs not long ago and they looked great at night. About a year later, you can see a few arent lighting up anymore. It is like a two foot by two foot square of many little LEDs and one here and one there are failing to illuminate.


The heat is from the driver in the base and hopefully some heatsink material pulling heat from the diodes. The CFL bulbs have similar circuitry in the base but the bulb gets hot because of the charged gas in there dissipating heat through the glass. If you were to pop the "bulb" off of an LED light the individual diodes would also be quite warm. The bulb of an LED is just a diffuser for the light, the actual light is an array of individual diodes.
 
A lot of the issues with quality of the light and longevity have to do with the power management circuitry. I was following a company called iWatt that did both AC/DC power supplies as well as LED control circuitry. A lot of older LED lighting uses simple analog circuitry that may not result in the best performance or longevity. The better lighting uses digital circuitry to monitor the performance and control the power supply. Better control may also mean a smaller heatsink and fewer parts can be used.

http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/pres...ing-application
 
Originally Posted By: Klutch9
I've had enough! This is now the 7th LED bulb I've had fail within the past 8 or 9 months.

I have used Philips CFLs purchased at Walmart, and they don't last any longer than a standard bulb.

Our society is WASTING more energy on these compact LED/CFL bulbs (shipping from overseas & then disposal in special mercury-capture centers) than if we just kept using USA-made & safe-to-dispose incandescent bulbs. Sometimes simpler is better.
 
Originally Posted By: veryHeavy
Our society is WASTING more energy on these compact LED/CFL bulbs (shipping from overseas & then disposal in special mercury-capture centers) than if we just kept using USA-made & safe-to-dispose incandescent bulbs. Sometimes simpler is better.


You have to dispose of LED bulbs in the mercury disposal things?

And welcome back, where did you go? I see you're wasting no time getting back into the swing of things.
 
No just the CFLs. I still stick to my point though..... Greenercars.org examines vehicles from creation to disposal, and they find EVs are cleaner than normal cars, but not always. Some EVs like the Tesla are no cleaner than a standard Cruze Sedan. IF they did a similar analysis on Chinese-made LED/CFLs I bet they'd learn the production, cross-Pacific shipping, and disposal costs are actually "dirtier" than a standard USA-made incandescent.
Originally Posted By: DeepFriar
I've tried the same type outside in an inverted fixture and they die in a month or less. I've wondered if the heat may not be able to dissipate in that orientation and it's killing them. Just a guess.

Almost certainly. The electronics are in the base of the bulb, so if you turn it upside-down the heat migrates directly to the electronics. Typically mode-of-failure is swelled capacitor leakage & then short.
 
Originally Posted By: ironman_gq
Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
I notice the heat is not in the bulb glass with LEDs, but in the base. I guess there is a lot of circuitry going on in there. Same way with CFLs, although their glass was hotter than LEDs, the base where the 'magic' happens takes on alot of heat.


I wonder if there will be an improvement or successor to these current bulbs that will allow less heat.


The gas station got new LEDs not long ago and they looked great at night. About a year later, you can see a few arent lighting up anymore. It is like a two foot by two foot square of many little LEDs and one here and one there are failing to illuminate.


The heat is from the driver in the base and hopefully some heatsink material pulling heat from the diodes. The CFL bulbs have similar circuitry in the base but the bulb gets hot because of the charged gas in there dissipating heat through the glass. If you were to pop the "bulb" off of an LED light the individual diodes would also be quite warm. The bulb of an LED is just a diffuser for the light, the actual light is an array of individual diodes.




Is a diode like a laser? Back in the late nineties I got in trouble at school for shining the red laser at someone's eye in Technology Discovery class.
 
Originally Posted By: veryHeavy
Originally Posted By: Klutch9
I've had enough! This is now the 7th LED bulb I've had fail within the past 8 or 9 months.

I have used Philips CFLs purchased at Walmart, and they don't last any longer than a standard bulb.

Our society is WASTING more energy on these compact LED/CFL bulbs (shipping from overseas & then disposal in special mercury-capture centers) than if we just kept using USA-made & safe-to-dispose incandescent bulbs. Sometimes simpler is better.


The single biggest cost to using an incandescent bulb is the electricity. An old GE LongLife 100 watt bulb I have has an average life of 1125 hours. At my baseline electricity rate of 18 cent/KWh it would cost a little over $20 over the average life of a bulb.

There's no way that the $5 LED bulb I buy at Ikea is costing more in energy costs to ship than the $20 of electricity used over the life of an incandescent bulb. Even if I disposed of that LED or CFL well before the rated life, the savings are pretty apparent. I worked in the overseas shipping industry as a summer job, and the cost of shipping a container full of goods from Asia is so low that you can buy stuff for $1 at Dollar Tree. Some of these LED bulbs are assembled in Mexico.

On top of that, LEDs don't specifically need any special disposal. Maybe if there's lead in the circuit boards, but almost nobody uses lead solder any more. It would frankly make sense to recycle LED bulbs since the circuit boards often contain a bit of gold and silver.
 
Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
Originally Posted By: ironman_gq
Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
I notice the heat is not in the bulb glass with LEDs, but in the base. I guess there is a lot of circuitry going on in there. Same way with CFLs, although their glass was hotter than LEDs, the base where the 'magic' happens takes on alot of heat.


I wonder if there will be an improvement or successor to these current bulbs that will allow less heat.


The gas station got new LEDs not long ago and they looked great at night. About a year later, you can see a few arent lighting up anymore. It is like a two foot by two foot square of many little LEDs and one here and one there are failing to illuminate.


The heat is from the driver in the base and hopefully some heatsink material pulling heat from the diodes. The CFL bulbs have similar circuitry in the base but the bulb gets hot because of the charged gas in there dissipating heat through the glass. If you were to pop the "bulb" off of an LED light the individual diodes would also be quite warm. The bulb of an LED is just a diffuser for the light, the actual light is an array of individual diodes.




Is a diode like a laser? Back in the late nineties I got in trouble at school for shining the red laser at someone's eye in Technology Discovery class.

A diode is a semiconductor device that primarily conducts in one direction. Most handheld laser pointers use diode-based lasers. LEDs are diodes that produce light.

All of these devices produce heat to some extent. The idea is to get light energy out of an LED, and it's not going to be 100% efficient in extracting light from the energy that goes into it. It's going to produce waste heat that needs to be removed. If you're looking to make it really bright, it's going to produce more heat as a result. Incandescents produce even more heat for a given light output (remember the old Easy Bake Oven?) but they use materials that can take extreme heat like glass, tungsten, and other metals. The heat would still be released to the ambient air, but it didn't need a heat sink to keep it from disintegrating.

An LED has all that circuitry in packages that will break down if it gets too hot. However, a better, more efficient control system can make it more efficient with need for a smaller heat sink.
 
Just had two Feit LED's fail also. Pretty much the same time on my 6 light bathroom bar. I think they were free from xcel at the fair.
 
Originally Posted By: greenjp
Had my first LED bulb failure recently. It was a Feit 60w replacement bulb that I got in a 6 pack from Costco a few months back for $3. So a $0.50 bulb. Called the number on the box, gave the pleasant USA based customer service rep some info, and they're sending a replacement...

The replacement arrived today, about 2.5 weeks after I called them. Nice surprise - they sent a 3-pack even though I only had 1 go bad! Not bad. They are functionally identical but a bit different. Same specs but more bulb and less base than the one that failed. I put all three into service so we'll see how they do.

jeff
 
Originally Posted By: y_p_w
A lot of the issues with quality of the light and longevity have to do with the power management circuitry. I was following a company called iWatt that did both AC/DC power supplies as well as LED control circuitry. A lot of older LED lighting uses simple analog circuitry that may not result in the best performance or longevity. The better lighting uses digital circuitry to monitor the performance and control the power supply. Better control may also mean a smaller heatsink and fewer parts can be used.

http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/pres...ing-application


Looks like the digital circuitry they are touting is for dimmer type detection, they still use a flyback converter (basically analog) like everybody else. It is nice to use primary side control to get rid of the opto, but that is also an inherently less accurate control technique...probably doesn't matter quite so much for this application, but I'd be curious to see a bunch of bulbs with primary side control side by side to see how well they match in brightness.
 
Originally Posted By: Virtus_Probi
Originally Posted By: y_p_w
A lot of the issues with quality of the light and longevity have to do with the power management circuitry. I was following a company called iWatt that did both AC/DC power supplies as well as LED control circuitry. A lot of older LED lighting uses simple analog circuitry that may not result in the best performance or longevity. The better lighting uses digital circuitry to monitor the performance and control the power supply. Better control may also mean a smaller heatsink and fewer parts can be used.

http://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/pres...ing-application


Looks like the digital circuitry they are touting is for dimmer type detection, they still use a flyback converter (basically analog) like everybody else. It is nice to use primary side control to get rid of the opto, but that is also an inherently less accurate control technique...probably doesn't matter quite so much for this application, but I'd be curious to see a bunch of bulbs with primary side control side by side to see how well they match in brightness.

I think their digital control also adjusts for noisy line power. Also preventing power-up spikes that reduce the life of the LEDs.
 
I have a few Feits, no problems yet. Only got one in the bathroom, stairway, and the outside light on my garage as of now. None have let me down yet. Most the other fixtures in my house still have CFL's in them but when those go out they'll be replaced by LED. Didn't they stop making incandescent bulbs or can you still get them? I don't pay much attention, but I remember hearing they were being banned pretty much a few years ago.
I've got a few incandescents leftover I use in my basement, but, when those are all gone LED's will replace them. I hate changing lightbulbs all the time but am now leery of the Feit Electric bulbs I have. Thankfully, I only have 3 as of now! Guess we'll see how long they last.
 
Have 30+ Ecosmart, Great Value, Ikea, Cree, and (cheap) Philips bulbs. Some are about 2.5 y/o and haven't had any failures. Some are used more often than others. The ones in my room are usually run 7-9+ hours per night.
 
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