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.
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
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.