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Living Room / Re: Our experiences with LED light bulb replacements
« on: May 20, 2014, 04:52 AM »
I replaced 13 GU10 Incandescent lamps (a mix of 25 / 50 Watts) in my kitchen with warm white LED spots. Each spot contained 3x1W LED's. The resulting light output was a bit less but still quite satisfactory.
Unfortunately the LED spots have a very limited life. Basically these are Chinese rubbish, the design and manufacturing are really poor. I've had two sets now and in the first set the LED's overheat and eventually one fails causing the drive circuit to destruct. In the second set the LED overheats and fails but the drive circuit survives so I've taken to unsoldering the working LEDs in one broken lamp to replace the failed one in another. It brings them back to life for a few months at least.
The root cause is that they are over-driving the LEDs to achieve light output and this radically shortens the LED life. Typical specmanship over reliability commonly found in cheap Chinese cr*p.
The replacements I'm buying now are a 'known' brand and appear much better but time will tell. Sadly any money or environmental savings have been lost many times over due to the greedy supply chain. So I recommend to spend a little more and avoid 'bargain' prices based upon imports.
Unfortunately the LED spots have a very limited life. Basically these are Chinese rubbish, the design and manufacturing are really poor. I've had two sets now and in the first set the LED's overheat and eventually one fails causing the drive circuit to destruct. In the second set the LED overheats and fails but the drive circuit survives so I've taken to unsoldering the working LEDs in one broken lamp to replace the failed one in another. It brings them back to life for a few months at least.
The root cause is that they are over-driving the LEDs to achieve light output and this radically shortens the LED life. Typical specmanship over reliability commonly found in cheap Chinese cr*p.
The replacements I'm buying now are a 'known' brand and appear much better but time will tell. Sadly any money or environmental savings have been lost many times over due to the greedy supply chain. So I recommend to spend a little more and avoid 'bargain' prices based upon imports.