Hacker News Reader

Comment by veltas | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light.

This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.

View on HN

anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.

Three led lights in my flat went within 3 months after I moved in. But some time ago I had an incandescent bulb that lived for years.

With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes.

With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.

We essentially have a lifetime supply of LEDs because we label each one with the date and refund from Amazon when they don’t last the full warranty, which none of them do.

People assumed that LEDs would last forever because the crystals essentially do, but the encasement and all of the heat issues you have to deal with for the electronics makes that pointless.

Neat approach. I am not organized enough for that so I just buy whatever crappy leds ikea sells today.

On the one hand you have your Anne site, on the other hand there’s decades of data.

And only one of them is directly pertinent. None of the "decades of data" takes into account correct exploitation. But all talks about leds are about perfect spherical cow in vacuum that doesn't exist for average consumer

I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.

Look up Dubai Philips LEDs. The problem with most consumer LEDs is that they are overdriven, so their life is short. In Dubai, the Sheikh basically mandated that the bulbs need to be underdriven, so the lifetime is about 25x that of incandescents. They only deliver about 1/4 the power to the individual “filament” that most similar Philips lamps would at the same light output.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...

That is interesting.

Since only apparently anecdotes count as pertinent for you, here’s one. I haven’t bought a bulb in over 12 years. My LEDs have simply not gone out. I had changed bulbs nearly every 6 months before that.

Maybe spring the extra couple of dollars and get high quality LEDs.

Not anecdotes but practical data. Yes if you power cycle tungsten all the time at maximum brightness they will not live long (when I was a kid we used them this way and changed them often). Read my comment about correct exploitation

Leds themselves are often fine for long time. It is the circuits they are powered by that are very often crap, poorly designed, specified, too cheap. So heat can kill it. Or like my last cheap powerful bulb in kitchen that flickers when I have certain controlled resistive loads on.

I wonder how many tests are run in actual enclosures for example. Which for example might not dissipate enough heat.

One of the dead lights that died was above the stove so could be heat related. Other 2 maybe just bad circuits...

I think it is too expensive to run tests in real life changing conditions

The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply.

Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.

And part of the reason for that is compatibility with existing light fixtures using legacy sockets designed 150 years ago at the dawn of electrification for incandescent bulbs, where the part dissipating the most heat was the light emitting element itself, and not whatever lays between it and the mains power source. If the customer doesn't want to pay for a slightly more expensive LED lightbulb, they sure as hell won't pay for a whole new fixture specifically designed around LED technology that will last forever.

This is anecdata, but I haven't replaced a single LED bulb since I bought the current set ~7 years ago, and it's nothing fancy, just basic IKEA stuff.

So... somebody responsible for the power supplies does not care? ;)

They care about being the cheapest option on Amazon, so that you will care about buying it. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com