After failure I like to do a postmortem teardown, it has never been the LED proper, usually it is the capacitor in a capacitance power supply, otherwise the controller IC.
I also have quite a few Philips Hue bulbs, I’ve had 1 fail out of 20-30 and I think that was not the LED itself but some control board. Some are going on 10 years old.
I agree that even Osram doesn’t meet the hours or years, Philips doesn’t by a long way.
I have a room which is lit for like 10-20 hours per day and so it clocks up hours very quickly and my LED lamps are guaranteed for 2 years so I figured surely the guarantee would trigger but nope, I began keeping receipts and turns out that I only need to replace one every 3-5 years it must just feel frequent because it's annoying, I just dug out the most recent receipt and it's from 2021. I will continue keeping the receipts to feel better about the annoyance.
The cheap China stuff tend to fail in a few months, while I've only had two Hue bulbs in my collection fail ever, so Philips seems to be doing something right.
None of the other bulbs in my house are really on long enough to say much about failures... like I've got dozens of recessed LEDs without any failures over 5 years, but I doubt any of them are over 1-2k hours.
What is a 'cheap' bulb though? We paid a few bucks for a bulb for generations. Suddenly we're paying 10x that for a Phillips Hue and anything lesser is 'cheap'.
I had an IKEA lamp with a pretty tight fitting for the bulb and it killed LEDs after a few months. I reverted putting a fluorescent bulb inside it. No failure.
Here's a nice dim-to-warm recessed: https://www.homedepot.com/p/HALO-RL56-Series-5-6-in-Recessed...
Have you checked the wiring? I may be stating the obvious, but in household electrical wiring every fixture or receptacle is connected to its circuit in parallel.
I can't think of a way for one bulb on a correctly-wired circuit to fail in a way that causes other bulbs to dim, unless the failed bulb is essentially shorting out the circuit but not causing the breaker to trip for some reason.
If you know why it's behaving that way, I'd love to know too. I've never seen anything like that.
I used to have a lamp that I kept replacing bulbs for "all the time". I didn't understand why since the light bulbs claimed to last for years and years. One day I read the light bulb package more closely, and it said something along the lines of, "7 years life span at 2 hours per day" in small text (the numbers may be wrong, going by memory). Doing the math, the number of active hours claimed on the box turned out to be roughly true. I don't know if LED bulb packages play similar tricks but it's worth checking out.
It's perfectly logical that lifetime should be measured in hours of service, not days of existence. People don't know how to translate 7500 hours of service into a real duration, though. Hence the years.
I switched to all LED lighting many years ago. I've had a few that lasted less than a year, but by and large I'd say that nearly all the lights I've had have lasted at least on the order of years.
Similarly, you can’t install recessed cans into a ceiling that is insulated without them being IC rated or they will die an early death.
Spend a few dollars more per lamps for quality ones. Philips makes decent LED lamps, I’m fond of their 2200-2700K dimmable lamps that lower the color temp as they dim. Philips makes an E12 base BA11 shape (candelabra) lamp that should fit your needs.
I buy Keystone lamps LED T8 lamps almost exclusively, but those are pretty uncommon in homes.
Commercial LED fixtures are rated for 50,000 hours typically but they have a separate LED driver and massive heatsinks to provide that sort of lifespan.
Now the house is ancient, so I'm guessing there was some sort of short happening that was causing this.
They were awful. I genuinely believed that LED lights were crap.
In our new house the sparky put in a proper Chinese brand from the commercial sparky store I guess, no external box, dimmable, 4 adjustable hues with a toggle switch. They were like $10 each. Been 7 years no failures.
We have some really expensive ATOM ones above the shower (IP68) and outside around the perimeter. Those were around $75 each, but are the same age as well, no issues.
There was some sort of deal between Walmart and Puget Sound Energy that applied an instant rebate automatically so that they simply rang up on checkout for $0.17.
They are all still working fine.
Plural of anecdote isn’t data and all that but I think the several hundred quantity adds some weight. Also about 90 of those are in outdoor lamps so there’s a good amount dealing with weather and we’ve not had to replace any of those yet.
It shows that, yeah, bad designs can fail early. But if you buy from a reputable company, it is likely to be fixed.
[1] https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/superwarm-1700k-...
[2] https://store.waveformlighting.com/products/lux24-circadian-...
Half the bulbs were carried over from a previous house, so some are ~14 years old. Admittedly these were early ones, so the original batch had metal bodies etc. the replacement was a Phillips one. This is in the UK though, with pendant fittings, so less heat issues.
Can't say my experience matches at all!
44 months later, all of them are still working.
I haven't had a single one go bad so far.
Cheap WiZ bulps
A 100 out of 100 success rate after 8 years.
When I got a new apartment ~10 years ago I filled it with LED bulbs. Mostly Philips hue, but also some generic stuff on Lutron controls. Had 0 failures for 7-8 years.
One summer we had weeks of power issues on my block. Transformer blew out 2-3 times and we had no power/low voltage/no power/restoration state multiple times. At this point 5-10% of my hue bulbs were fried. Pretty randomly since a bunch were in the same fixture and only a few of them died.
Its possible the hues died more than the generics since they are constantly "on" rather than behind a switch, so they experienced all of those voltage states directly.
These were not cheap off the shelf bulbs from the local store.
3 in the kitchen went after less than a year.
I contacted the manufacturer directly. Turns out they had a "bad batch". How many bulbs did I fit?
About 50..
A box of 48 bulbs turned up 2 days later.
Not a single other bulb has gone 4 years later.
Not sure what the lesson there is. You win some you lose some? It's not always down to cheap bulbs?
Cheap/poor quality LEDs (the only kind I buy) hate high temps. Like really, really really hate it.
I've killed more bulbs near the shower than all other rooms on that floor combined. Meanwhile in the garage/basement the only tube LEDs that I've replaced this decade are the ones in the hot unventilated area away from the door or near hot work.
Cree is now no more; the bulbs are just a brand for FEIT who imports the same unreliable Chinese white-label bulbs.
Hue is basically the only bulbs not being sourced from the same couple of white label manufacturers. Philips/Signify's rapidly shrinking line of dumb bulbs are being sourced from there too.
Never buy filament style bulbs. They are universally unreliable because of poor thermals with the emitters.
All of my led bulbs that failed were either cheap poor quality bulbs or expensive poor quality bulbs.
I have a hard time determining the quality of a bulb without running it for 2 years, and then it's a little late.
And then you have the mix and match problem. The same model number from the same manufacturer purchased at the same retailer gets different internals. So if you've got a room with 6 can lights, when one stops working properly, you have to search your inventory to see if you can replace just one, or if you have to replace all six. As long as the color is roughly the same, I don't mind a difference between rooms, but it's unacceptable when one lamp comes on instantly and the other five take a moment, or when they don't dim together, etc. I never had this problem with incandescents, as long as you bought the same color type and wattage, you could mix and match across brands. I did have one fixture that had tight tolerances for the fashion shaped large sphere bulbs it wanted, but that was fixable with a copper shim that cost one cent (and some paint on rubber insulation around the edge)
If only that were true. Osram is a well-renowned brand so you'd think their - rather pricey - 'high-wattage' (10W) bulbs meant for outside lights here on the farm would last longer than about a year, all in different armatures, all with plenty of cooling (they're mainly used in autumn/winter/spring when it tends to be rather chilly here in Sweden). You'd think cheap bulbs go bad quickly but the cheap 'Biltema' brand bulbs I bought for some rooms just keep on going without marked loss of output.
All in all the average life time of a LED bulb seems to be around 2-3 years before it either has dimmed so much that it is no longer usable or it has failed outright. There are exceptions like the mentioned cheap bulbs which are still going strong after about 9 years of close to daily use or those Osram bulbs which fail in about a year or less or the (not mentioned) 'fluorescent tube replacement fixtures' which last less than a year before one of the 4 LED segment strips fails due to a failed LED. I repair these by replacing the failed chip, they work for a few months and then the things fail again.
I've used 'efficient' lighting since I bought my first house starting with jam-jar like Philips SL 'bulbs' (compact fluorescent tubes with all the related gizmos packaged in a single replaceable unit) for which I made fixtures out of birch plywood wood, 90° PVC drain pipe bends and E27 sockets because those things were heavy at about 500 grams. None of those SL bulbs had failed when I moved out 6 years later, I still have some somewhere in storage. Later I moved to the lighter PLC version which also tended to last a long time, some of them are still in use here. Then came LED bulbs which were supposed to last for tens of thousands of hours... and I suddenly started to have to think about replacing failed bulbs again.
Pay attention to the European efficiency rating for LEDs. Anything above B is practically "Dubai LED" class. The common Osram isn't doing good in this category, their LEDs I have seen in retail are rated like E-F.
To reiterate: the article fell short on the point of LED efficiency. LEDs are semiconductors, do you know when the CPU is at peak efficiency? Before it hits the exponential voltage/frequency curve. Low voltage -> cooler LEDs -> more efficient light conversion -> easier to cool -> tens of thousands hours of practical lifespan.
What does it cost? Like less than a dollar in BOM. What does it cost us? Billions in replaced LEDs worldwide and megatonnes of electric waste, because it is not made to last for "objective reasons": lower price tag in storeshelves aka capitalism and oblivious consumers.
The lamps I'm referring to have 4 wide (4mm) LED filaments in a normal-sized glass bulb. On the packaging they're marked 'Ledvance' [2]/made in China, i.e. they carry the Osram brand under licence.
In other words LED lamps can be made to last a long time but many are not, brand names and brand pricing notwithstanding. The form factor - E27 socket with glass bulb, fluorescent tube replacement, large heat sink mounted LED strip - does not play as much of a role as you'd think given that the lights with the 'best' cooling (LED strip mounted on a large heat sink) shows the highest failure rate while the 'traditional incandescent lamp' form factor with the electronics in the E27 base shows both the lowest as well as the second-highest failure rate here. It probably comes down to component quality, something which again does not seem to be related to brand name.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...
[2] https://www.ledvance.com/00_Free_To_Use/asset-8344755_THE_AS...
People can make up their own mind about going for cheaper electronics or aiming for longevity, but at least we would have a clearer picture of who is contributing to that pile of electric waste and we could make more informed decisions.
Now we pay more for something that lasts a bit longer with more waste.
It's not "capitalism" if the government mandates a product.
What you are seeing is the typical enshitification that occurs when a product becomes mass produced and low cost to the customers becomes the primary driver.
I had a bulb go bad once (out of almost 50 bulbs), but I called their support number and they shipped me a new one for free without any hassle.
they might not have great QA