Fieldlines.com: The Otherpower discussion board
Remote Living => Lighting => Topic started by: SparWeb on April 02, 2022, 04:46:01 PM
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...so this is what saving energy feels like...
This one only lasted 7 months.
7 bucks each.
1 dollar per month.
I've been trying different varieties... No value for the money. None last long, but this was the worst.
Note: there are STILL some fixtures in my house that have incandescent bulbs in them, but haven't burned out yet (10 years after starting to swap out bulbs for CFL and LED).
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I've had about 20% of my LEDs fade or quit over their first year. Some are still strong going on 7-8 years.
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A Catch-22 - take enough time to determine LED quality and either product has vanished or some bean-counter has revised it...
On my last move I had to leave behind 3500k outdoor floodlights that seemed to double lumen output when temperatures dropped below minus 20F... they were on dusk to dawn & half-bright dimmed w/o motion present... early adopter purchase, six or seven years later and zero chance of finding duplicates, blizzards will never be the same :)
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First ones i bought were terrible. Very bad flickering etc They were cheap, about $1 a piece.
Next ones were similar price but better. Maybe 20% bad after a year.
I blamed the voltage spikes and drops from having an inverter. I guess I'm not the only one not getting great life out of them.
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If you blame your inverter then I blame my grid supply. I only run off RE when the grid is down. There are spikes and brownouts often enough that I don't doubt that this pitiful bulb just couldn't handle a few cycles above 130V and that's why it quit. Nothing I can prove, because I'm not going to buy a cycle-by-cycle datalogger to put on my feeder, but when the kitchen lights seem a bit too bright or too dim I know what I'm likely to measure if I stick the probes of my multimeter in a wall socket.
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i recall G.E. or Sylvania incandesant lite bulbs costing .60 cents and lasting years. now led bulbs are $7. 00 dollars and last 8 months. are we really progressing ?
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I have had good luck with LED bulbs but all of them have been brand name, mostly Sylvania.
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Ive have consistent failure of 6 ikea lamps I bought. All failures in the electronics. Cheap ones I've taken from client's homes have all been led failures, and are fixable by either robbing a led off another lamp, or just jumper it as these are normally constant current devices.
I had a failure of a Philips light fitting after 3 months and they replaced it. Not interested in the old one, so I just jumpered the failed led. I'm very disappointed to get a led failure in a big brand fitting. We'll see if it's a dodgy batch as it's installed at a friend's house.
It certainly feels like I'm getting through more modern lamps than the old room heater tungstens.
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We have a bunch of LED flood lights in our house and they flicker really bad whenever the washing machine runs. It drives you crazy.
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According to the U.S. Department of Energy, LEDs use at least 75% less power than incandescent bulbs and last up to 25 times longer.
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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?
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Empirical Evidence Amy, Empirical Evidence.
This forum has real folk sharing their real time experiences and is therefore in my opinion 'ruddy' fantastic.
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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!
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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