Remote Living > Lighting

Did not last a year

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SparWeb:
Hi Amy,
We all know what the DOE says.  How do you reconcile that with my experience, and that of the others, who cannot realize the claim?

clockmanFRA:

Empirical Evidence Amy, Empirical Evidence.

This forum has real folk sharing their real time experiences and is therefore in my opinion 'ruddy' fantastic.

Mary B:
LED in my bathroom and porch are both going on 16 years old... as I mentioned earlier they are name brand.. With the wider adoption and sped up production/production pushed to China I can see more failures. We had a power supply at the casino that powered a slot machine. Originals were made in the USA and only failed from to much coin dust or a coin working its way inside. Easy to repair, usually a blown internal fuse and while we were in there we replaced the electrolytic capacitors because they all had 100k hours or more on them.

Then they offshored production to China. Failures started after 4-5 months of use, regulator transistors blown, capacitors exploded(this always brought in a panicked call from the gaming floor..."the machine had a bullet go off in it! Then smoke poured out!!!").

I reverse engineered the Chinese power supply and they removed some safety components, changed capacitor ratings from 105c to 85c(these ran 24/7/365 so got HOT), used smaller wattage regulator transistors... in general they did whatever they could to save a few pennies knowing we would not be shipping them back to China for repair. We ended up rebuilding every last one of the Chinese power supplies to the same parts as the US built ones and they started lasting longer. Still had some issues, the circuit boards were thinner copper so traces came off due to heat... many had a maze of added on wires on the backs of the boards to connect things. And the solder they used had to be acid core, it ate legs off components!

tanner0441:
Hi

I have a LED lamp in a table lamp that has been running 24/7 for about 6 years never missed a beat. I have had others that are in standard room light fiting some have lasted a similar time, others a few months. One that went bang and tripped the breaker.  The best one I stripped didn't have a power supply as such it had a capacitor in series with the mains, a zenner, a resistor little diode bridge and an electrolytic. one of the LEDs failed so a bridged it out with thin wire that made everything much brighter not for long.

Now if they fail I just bin them I had a box of "one day i'll fix them" that went in the bin. They do seem better than CFLs though

I have two ten watt floodlights on the area we park the vehicles on they are on a dusk till dawn sensor and are running on an inverter and 12V batteries the inverter is on 24/7 and has been running now for a year this February.

Brian

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