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Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

My LED bulbs last forever. As in, I've never had one fail since I started using them.

I find LED bulbs last forever, with the caveat that instead of a notable failure (eg a bulb burning out with a loud pop), the bulb will start to fall off from its maximum brightness once you start getting past the 5-year mark. I've also noticed that bulbs kept well below their max brightness (50-80%) can maintain that level longer.

I bought about a dozen GE LED bulbs a couple of years ago due to the quality of their light. Sadly, in that short amount of time about 75% of them have either outright failed or developed some other condition that made me question their safety.

LED lights will fail if they overheat, if they aren't well vented or sinked. Not sure if that was your problem.

Doesn’t that also depend on the quality of components and assembly? Cheap LED bulbs usually skimp on smoothing the output of the AC/DC converter, on LED quality, or heat sinking (I’ve seen teardowns of bulbs with no thermal compound, or even no heatsink at all).

I think so. I buy Opus LED bulbs for a few pounds in each. Over five years, i think about a quarter of them have failed. Not a great lifespan! But they're cheap enough that it doesn't really matter.

I would be happy to spend much more on high-quality bulbs, but only if they were exactly what i wanted, and i have yet to find anything which ticks all the boxes.

Specifically, i want >= 800 lumens, daylight / cool white, very good colour rendering, in an ES27 screw fitting, and dimmable. There have been a few candidates, but i haven't actually been able to buy them - they're out of stock, or not available in the UK, etc.

> very good colour rendering

The one area where everything but good old fashioned incandescent lights fail.

Makes me wonder if anyone is working on applying quantum dots to LED lamps.

There are plenty of LED that is CRI 95+. Is that not enough?

CRI is a pretty worthless measurement, it only reflects the rendering of color in a specific CCT. It’s fairly easy to make a high CRI warm bulb because it can suck at reproducing the lower end of the spectrum (blue and green), or a cool one where it sucks at the high end, but a neutral temperature isn’t feasible due to the spiky nature of light emitted by white LEDs.

Even these?

https://www.waveformlighting.com/high-cri-led

My wet dream is a properly programmable LED light source that will give you great customization of its spectrum, simulating any sort of outdoor lighting conditions.

It is actually probably not the actual LEDs but the other things you mentioned instead. Plenty of cheap PCBs have no heat sink and are basically a resistor, a half bridge rectifier (I think) and a capacitor.

What kind of bulbs are you using? I've had a similar experience the OP with LED bulbs using the Feit ones sold at Costco. At some point I read about a design issue where manufacturers are using cheap components which die much faster than the actual LED's wear out, so even though the LED's are rated for 50,000 hours, the bulb itself will stop working after 10,000 hours (made up numbers). I would will to spend a bit more if I could be confident that I was going to get a bulb that actually lasted the lifespan of the LEDs.

We moved about three years ago and replaced 50+ bulbs with 2 1/2 brands of LEDs.

Phillips - around 40 regular socket, BR30 recessed, and 4x hue bulbs. Not a single failure or flicker. Am particularly a fan of the warm glow for nicer dimming at night.

Hyperikon. They were the only brand with the smaller PAR16 bulbs at the time, at least in warmer color-temp. They look absolutely fantastic as down-wash lights on walls. However, 2/8 are out or intermittent after just 3 years of low usage (they were in a low traffic area).

Random brands from promos / utility give-aways. Used three of these in the garage, and 2/3 already burned out.

TLDR: Quality matters, and high quality bulbs definitely last IME.

Also a fan of warm glow bulbs for any LEDs that get dimmed. FYI Ikea also has non-smart bulbs with warmer colour temperature as they dim.

Philips Hue, and the original warm-light bulbs that Philips had a long time ago (the ones with the yellow plastic). Also a few cheap-o ones from the electric company (CREE I think?). None have failed

Yeah, I have about 15 of the old yellow/silver Phillips LED lights and they've been fantastic. The only one that has died overheated because it was in a globe fixture without enough airflow to cool the bulb.

Crew is probably a higher-end bulb.

Same here, using Feit bulbs from Costco, and they last about 1 year.

> I would will to spend a bit more if I could be confident that I was going to get a bulb that actually lasted the lifespan of the LEDs.

That's why Costco is great - I save the box, and when I have a full set of burned out ones I just return them and buy a new set.

My LED bulbs last until they break. And depending on who made them, they break a lot.

All my philips hue bulbs still work. Even the ones that are like 8 years old. But every bulb from ikea has broken.

What kind of fixtures are you using?

LEDs - or compact fluorescent before that - in a torchière? Last forever. Recessed lighting, enclosed or narrow lamps? Maybe a couple times as long as an incandescent.

I've had my flat panel LEDs go out after a few years on a pretty regular basis, but it was the power/dimmer unit. Which can be replaced. But I ended up buying higher quality Japanese capacitors and replacing the cheapo ones and haven't had a failure since.

I've had a grand total of two failures in 5 years. One was a cheap $5 on sale special from the hardware store, the other was a Phillips Hue (!)

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