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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

What's with the scary hedge at LED dominance?

"Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate. There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes were reached. "

Other than warmth, my home LEDs (all of them - Cree) have lasted 7 years and look to last about 10-15 more. They've already paid for themselves as before that I was replacing 4-5 bulbs a year and wasting 10x the wattage.

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Many LED bulbs have performance issues, especially in fixtures.

There’s such a large market now it’s hard to identify quality product. Good news is that the prices have fell to the point that the ROI in energy savings is very short.

There's the Lighting Facts labels so you could at least see a 3rd party validated lumen output and color temperature. If you've seen the labels that look like nutrition facts on LED bulb packaging, those. Also served to track the overall progress of the LED industry.

Just got defunded.

http://edisonreport.com/goodbye-lighting-facts/

My suspicion, CFL tubes generally had plenty of life. On the other hand CFL power supplies had be be miniaturized and high voltage. Many of my old CFL bulbs had melty spots somewhere. So they generated a lot of internal heat with an inefficent supply.

If the LED bulb needs a power supply, it's much lower voltage (and there are an abundance of component choices for those voltages - at least more so than fluorescent bulbs), and there's been lots of work for efficient power supplies in that range. Also there's new no-power supply LED filament bulbs expanding in the market now, and I would think those would tend to last even longer with much fewer components to fail.

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

Also CFL bulbs were rated for running in an open fixture; the power supplies are somewhat heat-sensitive so putting them in e.g. a can can greatly lower their lifetime.

My Philips Hue LED bulbs have been very reliable.

On the other hand, some cheap no-name chinese LED lamps I got off Amazon started failing after less than a year.

There definitely are some bad, short-life LED bulbs out there -- especially on the lower end of the market.

Yes. I bought some very cheap LEDs of AliExpresss, but they failed quite quickly (no surprise). Name brand bulbs from my local supermarket have, so far, held up vastly better.

One of the more amusing ways the cheap bulbs failed is by neglecting to use UV stabilisers, so just leaving the bulb on would cause them to degrade their own housing until they fell apart. (The other main failure mode I saw was the transformers giving out.)

There's a Philips LED (one of the weird looking three-lobed ones) that has been burning continuously in the entryway of my inlaws' house for over seven years. It's a 60W equivalent. I bought it for them because a) the light burns all the time (even in daylight that area is dark) and b) it's a pain in the butt to change.

I think it was about $45 when I bought it. A similar model is down to $21 for a 100W equivalent now.

I've got several other Philips bulbs of that type that have been in use for a long time, though not quite that long.

I've never had one go out.

As with you, I've had numerous cheapies go out over the same interval.

That sounds like the bulb that Philips won the L Prize with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Prize#/media/File:Philips_LE...

Yep, that's the one.

It produces good-quality light, too, despite what you'd think from the yellow shell color.

It depends on the quality a bit.

From my experience, about 1/5th of LED bulbs fail within the first year.

However, all lamps that survived the first year haven't broken in 3 years total yet.

I think it might be related to the internal powersupply, some had visible stress damage from thermal cycles (molten, cracks, etc.).

I also had a few LEDs in an RGBW strip fail that I use for lighting though I soldered around that.

For what it’s worth, I have taken my LED bulbs back to Home Depot and have gotten then replaced at no cost. This is a lot easier with their electronic receipts as I can easy look through my receipts and pull it up to show purchase date.

> wattage

energy / power. Both work in this situation.

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