How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?

I’ve bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said “up to 20,000 hours” which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don’t).

  • @[email protected]
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    367 months ago

    The same reason that western countries refused to buy the extremely hard to break Superfest glasses manufactured in the GDR (East Germany) during the Cold War: planned obsolescence and consumable goods mentality in the interest of profit (they got a west German salesman to take the glasses to a trade show, and nobody gave a shit, because part of the industry’s profit model at the time was the sale of new glass due to breakage.

    In point of fact: better, longer lasting LED bulbs DO exist, but they’re only sold in Dubai (due to the monarchy there basically decreeing that they wanted that to happen, so Phillips made them for them, but will NOT sell them outside of the country, because it would kill their sales elsewhere).

  • @[email protected]
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    167 months ago

    Maybe stop buying the seizure-brand ones from Amazon?

    I think I’ve had to replace one bulb in my entire house in the last 6 years or so.

      • tired_n_bored
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        7 months ago

        Well I’ve done it just twice, I don’t even remember what I did, I just soldered things that seemed broken.

        I’m not al electrical engineer whatsoever but the heat unglued the cover of the bulb exposing the circuits so I was like “lemme try”

      • @[email protected]
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        77 months ago

        Just Google “how to increase my fire risk to save $2 on a new LED”. Should be a how to guide or two out there.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          Some people like tinkering. Big Clive has a series of videos on Dubai led bulbs. The government mandates that the bulbs be extra efficient and last extra long, so they are built with more filaments driven at a lower current. They run cooler and last longer. You can do a similar thing with American bulbs if you’re handy with a soldering iron.

          Honestly, with how poor many of these things are mass produced, opening them up yourself is practically a personal form of quality control. Whether you modify it or not I bet it’s less likely to die prematurely or burn your house down than those of a regular person who doesn’t open them 🤷‍♂️

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          No, shorting a dead LED in a series chain of 10-20 will NOT burn your house down, it’s barely a difference to the driving circuit. Unless you’re buying knockoffs, there is a fuse in the base that will blow at like 0.5 A, no matter what you do to the circuitry. However, the other chips will likely not last much longer than the first dead one (unless you dooby the bulb, see below), so it’s not worth doing, and a poorly reattached plastic globe can come off and expose mains voltage. If all chips are OK, you can cut it open to check the inductor between smoothing capacitors and replace it if it has failed open circuit, or short it if you accept a little extra flicker and/or electrical noise.

          I’ve seen power supply boards of LED bulbs that literally burned themselves down to the crisp (never in ones that I modded) but the housing contained the fire thanks to its heat-dissipating design.

          In many bulbs, you can adjust the value of a current-sensing resistor (usually one or two in parallel, about 2-30 Ω) to make your own “Dooby” lamp with lower power and way longer life. Of course, you need to know something about electronics.

          What can burn your house down is still using incandescent and halogen bulbs. You may lay a piece of paper on top of a lamp and it can fall in when moved by the hot air, touching the bulb…

  • @[email protected]
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    57 months ago

    My experience has been that they last for more years than I tend to notice which ones are which. I’m not mad at all about their longevity.

    I had 2 LED bulbs that I know for sure that I bought prior to 2015 that only recently failed. Those bulbs lasted at least 9-10 years. The rest of my bulbs I haven’t kept up with but those 2 older ones looked very distinctive with aluminum heatsink material for their bottom halves.

  • @[email protected]
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    57 months ago

    What are the brands? What are the appliances? Have you tested the electricity coming out of those ports?

    Mine are generally good for near 5

  • @[email protected]
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    37 months ago

    Are you sure you have the same set up for voltage and resistance? If you don’t you’ll pass more current and burn out faster. Similar to a laptop marketing saying 14hrs, but that’s only if you leave it on low power, airplane mode, and don’t do anything useful. I’m curious to see if someone comments the real answer.

  • @[email protected]
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    287 months ago

    They’ve been sabotaged by design. LEDs should last 10+ years if built even half away reasonably, but unfortunately the manufacturers basically got together and agreed to build them in such a way they would fail. Same as regular light bulbs, they just have to work harder.

    I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks. They’ve been running for like 15 years now and not a one of them has failed. I spent several hundred USD replacing all my bulbs with those back in the day and they’ve done me well.

    Modern bulbs are trash by comparison. Not because the technology is limited in some way but because they refuse to make anything to that quality anymore.

    We need an alternate solution to this planned obsolescence bullshit. Light bulbs hit 50k rated hours long ago and they were talking about making ones that went 100k+ but these days you can’t find anything above 25k. And that’s setting aside the fact that a lot of these rely on apps that could be dropped at a moment’s notice.

      • @[email protected]
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        87 months ago

        One of the originators of the idea of “planned obsolescence”. Even after the cartel got killed the manufacturers never extended the life of the lights into (to an extent) CFLs and then moreso the days of LEDs.

    • partial_accumen
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      27 months ago

      I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks.

      I bought a couple of those for an enclosed fixture inside a skylight. The ceiling height there is 20 feet, plus another 2ft into the skylight tunnel. I bought those LED bulbs (at $40/each) because I never wanted to change them. Both bulbs were still fully functional 15 years later. I have since sold that house, but I bet they’re still functioning.

  • @[email protected]
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    717 months ago

    Generally because you’re buying cheaper ones that aren’t built as well. Heat destroys LEDs and the cheap bulbs generally use fewer individual LEDs running at higher power to produce a given output in lumens. More expensive bulbs use more LEDs at lower power to achieve the same light output so that they’re not constantly being overdriven and last much longer.

      • @[email protected]
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        27 months ago

        I just buy a cheap jumbo pack from Amazon. They’re like 15 bucks and last for years which is good enough for me.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        I have dozens of Philips Hue bulbs 6-10 years old and I honestly don’t think one of them has died. I’m sure they have lost some luminance over time, but they still get the job done no problem. I rarely run them at 100% anyway.

        But yeah I have also had some cheaper LED bulbs die within a few years.

        • The Pantser
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          17 months ago

          I had one flicker after 8 years and the company replaced it for free. The rest of my 10 year old bulbs are still working fine. I wish they would die though to give me an excuse to replace them with the better color versions. Many of mine are still the old ones with green that can only go to 🍋‍🟩 lime.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          I bought three of the gen 1 Philips Hue when they first came out and all three died within two years. I hope they’re better now, but I’ll never buy Philips Hue again.

          And in case you ask, they weren’t enclosed, they were in IKEA floor lamps. They were at 100% all the time, but I feel like if they can’t survive that, they shouldn’t be able to do it.

        • @[email protected]
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          317 months ago

          Just fyi for anyone who would care about this: while hue bulbs are built well they are moving towards a model that requires you to put them on “the cloud”, even though they were sold for years and years without that requirement. The update will be mandatory whether you want it or not as part of Philips security being integrated into the app. It’s unclear what will happen if you don’t create an account and sign in at that point

          So if you’re like me and put all your iot shit on an isolated vlan without internet access they may not be the best option for you. Or if you just don’t want to support a company that wildly changes the tos years after purchasing their (expensive) product. I don’t want my home shit on the internet, I don’t trust Philips to put enough cash or effort into securing their servers, etc.

          The bulbs do work with zigbee though and that seems to be a viable alternative to using their hub/app although I haven’t tested it fully. This also means if you’re using them via HomeKit you’ll need some kind of bridge like home assistant

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            I’ve been using Philips Hue bulbs with Zigbee in Home Assistant for years without issue.

          • The Pantser
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            37 months ago

            I added all my 10 year+ Hue bulbs to a zigbee stick about 4 years ago. I control them with Home assistant and Zigbee2mqtt. They were a bit flakey at first but after awhile now with updates they have been flawless. Best thing is you still get firmware updates through z2m. Highly recommend using Hue bulbs for their long term support and quality. I have had 1 bulb start flickering and Hue actually replaced it, free of charge.

            • @[email protected]
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              27 months ago

              That’s good to hear. I have a zigbee stick but haven’t found the time to repair them that way yet. I definitely agree they’re good products, it just left a real bad taste in my mouth when after years of using them I got a notification in the app that soon I’ll be required to put them online, which is nonsense

  • Kerb
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    197 months ago

    i have 7 bulbs since 2019
    none of them failed so far.

    all the lifespans i found ranged between 15.000 to 25.000 hours ( which btw was equated to 1.000 hours per year instead of 5.000 per year)

    so this doesn’t sound normal to me.

    how manny(in use) bulbs do you have?
    what brands do you use?

  • @[email protected]
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    137 months ago

    They never last that long, as they easily get away with it.

    In one of the gulf states, though (Dubai?), they actually have only longer lasting LED lights for sale, as the minister responsible for regulation is something like an EE and forced the LED bulb providers to make a special version of those bulbs that basically last for ever. Those are only sold in that country, and hard to come by elsewhere.

  • plz1
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    127 months ago

    I’ve had sets of LED under-cabinet lights powered on 24/7 for about 14 years. I think one bulb went bad, out of 12.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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    7 months ago

    Typically it’s not the emitters – the LED’s themselves – that fail. If driven correctly, those have lifetimes of tens of thousands of hours. That’s what the manufacturer is advertising on the box. Yes, an individual LED when driven correctly will probably last 20,000 hours. (Usually more, depending on how pedantic you want to get. The 20,000 hour figure often quoted is the point where the emitter drops to 80% of its original light output.)

    LED “bulbs,” the type that replace filament bulbs in consumer fixtures, typically fail in their driver hardware. LED’s run off of low voltage DC and in the base of all of those LED conversion bulbs is a power conversion assembly that steps down and rectifies 120v/240c AC to whatever DC voltage the LED array in there expects. These are inevitably made out of whatever the cheapest passives and semiconductor components the manufacturer thinks they can get away with. These don’t last 20,000 hours, especially not in where they’re usually installed.

    The main killer for all semiconductor electronics, which includes both LED’s themselves and their driver circuitry, is heat. This is often exacerbated by the fact that LED replacement modules are usually stuck in enclosed light fixtures designed for filament bulbs that have insufficient ventilation to get rid of the waste heat from the components in an LED module. The insides of those enclosed ceiling light fixtures, the ubiquitous “boob light,” gets hot, even with only LED modules installed. Filament bulbs don’t care because they don’t have any electronics in them and how they work is literally by getting so hot the glow. But LED modules in that kind of environment will invariably suffer an early failure.

    The best way you can get your LED modules to last longer is to install them in a fixture where they’ll have a lot of air circulation available or at the very least which is not fully enclosed.

    • @[email protected]
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      37 months ago

      Excellent.

      Also, the D stands for diode, which is a one-way passage for electricity, some rectifiers may use diodes in their circuitry. So another way to cut costs is to not rectify completely or well.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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        57 months ago

        Case in point, cheap LED Christmas lights are often not rectified at all so they flicker at 50/60 Hz depending on your country’s electrical supply…

        • bizarroland
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          37 months ago

          I freaking hate that flicker so much. I can always tell when someone has done a cheap aftermarket headlight conversion because I’ll see the flicker out of the corner of my eye and my rearview mirrors and it’s incredibly distracting.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            Slightly different. The alternator on a car has a very variable frequency due to change in engine speed and it’s fed into the car’s regulator/rectifier, so the typical power supplied is stable. However, many cars will use the high beams at half-power to function as daytime running lights (DRLs). This is usually done by pulse width modulation (PWM) meaning it’s chopping up the power supplied at a nearly imperceptible speed. An incandescent bulb will have so much fade time that the choppy power will go unnoticed. From there, theses two possibilities that cause the bulb to flicker. Very cheap bulbs will show their choppy power supply directly by flickering, making them noticeable as the move across your vision. Some mid-range bulbs will have cheap smoothing circuits (since vehicle power is “dirty”) so there will be charge time and discharge time as the capacitors charge up and down, allowing and disallowing the emitter to light, creating a slower flash pattern. Higher end bulbs (ignoring the part where their beam pattern is still usually trash) should be able to accommodate the chopped power and run dimmer.

            You may also notice a similar flicker on LED tail lights where the brake light is a brighter tail light instead of a dedicated element. Such cars will use PWM for dimming and may flicker as they move across your view as well. Some of my car’s dash uses LEDs for backlighting and dimming the dash is done via PWM. If I glance across the steering wheel from side to side, it looks like “cruise” gets stamped across the view

    • @[email protected]
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      17 months ago

      Hah, I have one three bulb boob light that’s my “trash” fixture because it gets whatever mismatched leftover I can find. At one point I had an LED, and incandescent and a CFL in it. It doesn’t have the extra ventilation that modern ones do so I’m sure it gets hot, but even that doesn’t seem to shorten the lives much

  • @[email protected]
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    117 months ago

    I have had the same light bulbs since 2012. One of them broke when I dropped it while moving. Otherwise, no issues at all. Philips brand that I bought a box of 12 of when I moved into an apartment that year. Maybe I’m just lucky, but still no issues.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 months ago

      I’ve got several full color Hue bulbs that are the most used lights in my house. I haven’t had a single failure in a decade.

      I was more than a little annoyed when they decided to stop supporting my original controller for them though.

    • @[email protected]
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      57 months ago

      Osram literally means “I’ll shit on it” in polish, they are the definition of a shit brand

    • FuzzyRedPanda
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      77 months ago

      +1 for philips.

      The problem is most of what the big box hardware stores in the US are selling are junk brands. And they won’t even offer basics like a philips 75-watt-equivalent soft-white led in their stores.

      The junk brand bulbs will fail in my kitchen light fixture after a year (they start flickering). The philips bulbs have never failed for me.

      A properly designed and produced led bulb should last like 20 years.