A lingering question in my head about these Amazon and Home Depot bargain bin products. The ecosmart 80cent bulbs I have commonly fail by just becoming dim just like this guy’s. Well I can’t expect too much from bottom dollar quality.
TL:DW
- Amazon product that failed after 15 months with the seller nowhere to be found, didn’t work because of a bad connection.
- ecosmart likely a shorting resistor, not enough voltage from the driver chip getting to LEDs that are working just fine.
- utilitech pros had better heat dissipation and more parts, but found no clear failure mode and he busted the thing anyway diagnosing how it handled mains voltage.
I have a whole bunch of ceiling bulbs (19 of them) that I replaced with LEDs. In 3 years, 7 of them have died. That failure rate is comparable to incandescents. Unfortunately the sockets are kind of an odd socket type (BR30) that only a few brands make. I would really like to know which brands I can actually trust but I’m afraid the answer is likely “none of them.”
Several years ago I looked into importing LED Lamps from China into the EU as a business and exchanged some emails with manufacturers in China and analyzed some samples of their products.
Basically they compete on price and hence advertise for bulk purchasers (so basically the no-name and white label brands) the version of their product with the cheapest power converter they have, which is quite crap and more of a hack than a proper converter. However if you pay them a bit more (back then it was maybe 10c for a good LED light bulb that costed less than $1 from the factory) they’ll use proper power converters.
As a consumer and if you’re buying no-name brand lamps you can try and get the ones with the better power converters by buying “dimmable” LED lamps (even if not using a dimmer) because to get the LED lamps to react properly to the effects of a dimmer in the power that’s fed to them, the lamps need to have the better power converters (that do proper AC-DC with voltage step down conversion, rather than the sort of shortcuts used for the cheap converters). Unsurprisingly, dimmable LED Lamps cost more than the regular ones, though nowadays LED Lamps aren’t really expensive.
I have Philips bulbs and while they still work (though I also do not use them much), they’re buzzing pretty loudly for my ears.
Suggestions for best LED bulbs that are not a waste of money because they were designed to break would be enormously appreciated.
The big box store bulbs suck. Pay more for Phillips bulbs.
Seconding Philips. At HomeDepot the cheapest Philips bulbs are about 2.75 CAD each compared to 0.85 CAD each for the ecosmart and failure rates is under 1/5 the cheap brand for me. (Diabolically, the ecosmarts are cheapest when bought individually.) Philips’ dimmables are closer to $6 each but my dimmer switch lights use them and I like them a lot. My other lamps use El Cheapo brand because changing them out is quite easy.
Stuff designed for Europe which has a CE mark has since 2017 to have been tested for (if I remember it correctly) at least 20,000h of use and 10,000 on-off cycles with no more than 5% failures, plus there is also a maximum loss of brightness of the LEDs (as the light emitting diodes themselves tend to lose a bit of brightness with use after manufacturing) and rules about color quality.
The stuff I get here in Portugal, even no brand stuff from Chinese stores, has quite a low failure rate and I have been using LED lamps for ages (to the point that all the lamps more than paid for themselves in energy savings versus the other options back when I started)
So you might try choosing lamps with CE marks.
