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Comment by Torkel | Hacker News Reader

The reliability of LED lights is, from my experience, crazy bad. We installed all-LED lighting in the office. Over the past two years way over 50% of the LED lamps have died. Yesterday I ordered yet another batch of 25 new LED lamps. The office isn't even all that big, just four rooms.

And this is without dimmers. In the hallway, where there is a dimmer, the LED lamps (that are marked as supporting use with dimmer) dies after only a few months. Our hallway is dark at the moment, because it is just too much effort to replace the lamps.

IMHO the biggest boost for LED lamps would be for the longevity ratings to at least somewhat correlate with real world life time...

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You're not buying Cree, thats why. Pretty much every brand except Cree cuts corners in the DC inverter stage... they tend to overheat badly and fry. Often, you can apply DC directly to the LEDs, and they still light.

Also, you need to read the package, even with Cree: many state "not suitable for fully enclosed fixtures". They make ones expressly for this, and are required to prevent the lamp from cooking itself.

On top of that, many of those scammy brands say things like "x year warranty", when they really mean "1,000 hours per year" warranty. Cree warranties their bulb for tens of thousands of hours... I have a much older 100 watt equivalent that has been burning 24/7 for over 5 years (somewhere around 50k hours), still ain't dead yet.

Now that the government is (theoretically) back on track, I'd love to see the FTC go after LED lamp manufacturers that straight up lie about their lifetime estimates; I don't care if their prices go up, all they'd do is start matching Cree in price.

Fun fact: Cree isn't just the world's best LED (as in, the actual diodes) manufacturer, they're also one of the world's leading GaN power module manufacturers, and all of their own in-house knowhow is used in their own consumer bulbs.

What tends to die aren't so much the LEDs, but the power supply. And those seem to be very heat-sensitive. At home many LED lamps die as well, presumably because our lamps are somewhat flat on the ceiling and enclosed, which gives the heat nowhere to escape. Those where the air circulation is better and the bulb is in the open air the live a lot longer, to the point that I didn't have to replace some of them so far.

I completely agree. In every "dead" LED bulb I have opened up (because I like to take stuff apart) the actual emitter still worked when I applied power directly. Seems to me the power supplies are all junk.

There is a huge variance with LED lights in my experience.

LED bulbs from Ikea are cheap garbage and die quickly.

220V 10W E27 Osram bulbs are pricey but reliable (but I don't have as many of them, so maybe I was just lucky).

I've never had a lamp with non-replaceable, built-in LEDs die. Probably because the power supply is not directly next to the LED, and the LEDs are typically attached to a big heat sink.

The tiny GU10 LED spots are the worst and die about as quickly as the halogen spots they replaced.

I was surprised at how short the Ikea dimmable LEDs lasted (not the smart ones) - but it's surprisingly hard to find E14's that are bright enough (60w equivalent), dimmable, and warm. The Osram's i gave in and tried (albeit at 40w equivalent and dimmable) had a green/yellow-ish tint that i despised.

Recently accidentally picked up ikea's tradfris (zigbee bulbs, dimmable (but not with dimmer), multi-white) and have gone on a zigbee spree after that. I hope they last.

I think E14 bulbs are just too small for high power output. I only use them for accent lights that don't need a lot of power.

yeah, i basically use them for standing lamps - i don't like overheads/ceiling lamps so much but still like enough light not to feel I'm in the dark.

Still happy to turn on the bright ceiling lights to find something/see well/etc.

The problem with E14's was that at least in Germany I knew they exist, but couldn't consistently find them. I'd regularly find 60W equivalent non-dimmable or cold white. Only Phillips and Ikea (it seems) had 60w (classically dimmable) warm E14s. They did not generally last that long

Most of these are GU10 from Ikea... wonderful combo...

Without having measured it, I get the impression that LED lamp failure follows the typical "bathtub curve" and that all mine that have failed so far have been on the downhill slope at the start. These were various brands and odd shapes when LED bulbs were still immature.

Current "Feit Electric" bulbs - outfitted the house with them top to bottom when they were about 30 cents/bulb due to a government rebate + deep discount at Lowes, actually seem to live up to expectations. I'm not sure when I've last replaced one, and a big box of them bought later for spares (at about $1/bulb) is so far mostly unused.

The other thing is that even crappy LEDs with low efficiency and reliability save so much electricity that you come out ahead, compared to a 1000h incandescent, even if they do fail after 1000h as well. Maybe not better for the environment, but microeconomically OK.

Check the voltage of your supply. I had the same problem, and I didn't think much about it until I mentioned it to an electrician I had in to do some work and he pointed out my supply was about 10 volts higher than it should be.

I cheaped out on some LEDs bulbs ("edison" form factor) and my biased opinion is that they mostly lasted about a year.

Bought some brand name ones recently and so far (~2 years) they are doing ok; I can't recall having replaced any since I bought them, but I only replace them when they're out. If there's room, I write in sharpie when I do it so I can see how long they go. My CFLs are often in the 5-8 year range.

Out of curiosity, what's the exact product you bought?

And do you keep your bulbs on 24/7? The mass market, "budget" (really, the baseline bulbs that most people buy; ~$1.25/bulb) LED bulbs are usually rated for around 10,000 hours of on-time (which is ~1.14 years).

The mass market, higher end bulbs (namely from Cree; ~$2.50/bulb) are rated for around 20,000-25,000 hours of on-time (~2.28 and ~2.85 years, respectively).

Commercial grade LED fixtures that don’t have replaceable lamps are generally rated for 50,000 hours. Swapping fixtures is the best way to do it, imo.

Yep. Especially for can lighting. Don't bother buying PAR13 LED bulbs, you will likely have a medium time at best.

I have about 50+ el-cheapo Feit LED can fixtures from Costco installed in my house now for over 3 years without a single failure. Previously there would be a PAR13 bulb failure at least once a month.

The downside of course is no bulb-change-with-a-stick, but since we're talking 20 minutes of pulling a ladder out every 4 (or more!) years to replace a $20 fixture vs. 5 minutes once a month for a $5 bulbs I'm pretty happy.

Even the Philips Hue 3-year US warranty only covers three hours of usage a day.

I just got started with em in December, have already killed one, and wonder how the warranty process goes when you admit that you do, in fact, occasionally use your lights for longer.

The terms are pretty unclear.

They ask you if you were running them for more than three hours a day on average during the warranty process.

Ikea for the most part...

The dimmable ones where $18 Osram ones though, and they died first of all.

edit: more specifically, a lot of this one: https://www.ikea.com/se/sv/p/ledare-led-ljuskaella-gu10-600-...

My price estimates are only for the "traditional" bulb size/shape (A19) used in the US [0]. GU10 bulbs do seem to be much more expensive than that (I'm seeing ~$5~6 being pretty typical) [1] which is basically exactly how much the IKEA bulb you linked is.

[0]: https://www.homedepot.com/p/EcoSmart-60-Watt-Equivalent-A19-...

[1]: https://www.homedepot.com/p/C-Cattleya-75-Watt-Equivalent-GU...

That seems like an _extremely_ high rate of failure. Are these embedded spot lights or something?

Ikea fixture and Ikea LED lamps.

I've taken many of them back. They give me replacements if I can show them the receipt... Maybe a good counter to poor quality LED lamps is making stores perceive them as a huge hassle with high return rates.

LEDs don't handle incandescent dimmers very well. The way it chops up the incoming electricity has harmful effects on the power supply. You should just replace the dimmer with a normal light switch or get a LED PWM dimmer.

You have to be careful of all the LED lights being produced as cheaply as possible by many manufacturers. I would think somewhere there is a website listing reliability of some of these manufacturer's LED lights.

I suspect the issue is the light bulb form factor. That shape requires that each fixture have its own (cheap) voltage regulator, and badly hampers their ability to release heat.

If you look at new residential light fixtures at your home improvement store, you’ll notice that they’re starting to shift over to built in LEDs. This allows them to use larger and better thermally regulated power supplies, and to provide better airflow over the individual LEDS.

I actually believe that the light bulb form factor is going to end up dying out in our lifetime.

I've been through many vendors on these things. I would literally pay $100 per lightbulb for a zero-bullshit implementation that can actually last 10 years regardless of how dirty/variable my electrical power is and/or how 'hot' the lightbulb area gets (as if this couldnt be anticipated by engineers). The PSU in my computer is certainly capable of this level of reliability and has an even longer warranty.

LED lights are quite reliable, it's their power supplies which die many times quicker than LEDs themselves.

From my experience this is not quite correct. About half of them seem to die because of the power supply and the other half because of problems with the LEDs themselves. This surprised me a lot because it seems to mean that the lifetime of both the transformer and the LEDs is pretty similar.

The failure of the LED element itself (in the model that I put under a microscope) was an internal wire burning through. The LED elements actually contained two LEDs in series connected by a tiny wire.

I assembled a working LED bulb from two broken ones that had failed in different ways. Not that I would ever dare to use such a thing in normal operations.

That's definitely not normal. Normally, the current needed to fry the lead will be many times the current needed for the diode junction to short.

I guess I didn’t explain well enough: it aren’t ‚huge‘ external leads (if you meant these) that fry but a minuscule wire internal to the SMD LED element that houses two junctions in series, connected by said wire.

Here is a bad picture of an undamaged wire, diagonally at the center. The image shows approximately 1.5x1.5mm.

https://i.imgur.com/4olUBvd.jpg

Uh! So tiny! Effectively, they ship an LED with a free fuse! Buyers can be sure they will never burn the junction.

Same with old incandescent lamps.

The glass bulb is quite reliable, it's often the filament that dies many times quicker.

(I'm confused why so many people feel the need to differentiate the reliability of the power supply from the LED chip in this context.)

Because it means that if you buy a fixture with built-in LEDs and a more reliable power supply it'll be a very reliable light.

The problem is that trying to cram a tiny power supply and a hot LED chip into a small bulb without a good heat sink is inherently unreliable.

Especially if you put that bulb into a completely enclosed light.

Is there no market for a properly-engineered solution that takes into account heat and power fluctuations?

Light emitting diode as a fundamental technology is reliable and has very long lifespan, if the application is designed and implemented correctly, including thermal management and power supply. Unfortunately many consumer LED bulbs are cheap shit, but you can't blame the LED technology itself for that, it's the usual story with economics/marketing etc.

Really? I’ve never seen an LED fail

Are you in an area with unstable power?

On the contrary - Sweden is supposed to have a great power system...!

Actually scratch my above comment. I have seen LEDs fail. LED driven traffic lights...I've seen dead pixels on those.

...but never in the home lighting LED sense.

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