LED lightbulbs that last

February 4, 2022 2:19 PM

Everyone says you can buy LED lightbulbs that last for decades. Then how come I keep having to buy new ones? Is there a brand that is that much more reliable than buying whatever is at Target? Ideally on the warm toned side.
posted by advicepig to Home & Garden (15 answers total)

Best answer: Cree LED bulbs have a 10-year replacement warranty.

Some people say the quality dipped when the original company was sold, but then it seems like some people always say that when that happens.
posted by box at 2:29 PM on February 4, 2022

I've never had an LED lightbulb die - I use a mixture of Hyperikon and Halo LEDs in my house, but those were not chosen with any particular view towards reliability.

Are you using dimmers on your LED lightbulbs? Only a subset of dimmers are compatible with LED bulbs.

How are your LED bulbs failing?
posted by saeculorum at 2:30 PM on February 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

LED bulbs seem to fail for me when they're in fixtures that allow them to get hot--I have a few in a ceiling fan that go out every couple years, but I've had the same ones in my bathroom fixture since I bought them.

(These are spendy, but very pretty. I have a couple of them in desk lamps and such, but don't intend to outfit my whole house with them.)
posted by box at 2:34 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

There are some reasonable arguments to be made that it’s the result of planned obsolescence.

I had three Sylvania medium base incandescent replacement bulbs that I bought all at the same time all fail within a week in very different fixtures five years after I installed them.
posted by jamjam at 2:48 PM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

This might be a price tier up from what you want, but I bought my ~9 Philips Hue lights in 2014-15 and haven't replaced a single one.
posted by advil at 3:50 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

After a bunch of replacing LED bulbs once a year or so because the half-life on brightness on the incandescent replacements seems pretty short, I started putting in flat commercial LED panel lights, and so far have been super happy with the decision.

The first few we got were like 3/4" thick, and those have been fantastic, but more recently we've only been able to get the 2" thick ones that you'd put in a drop ceiling, so I've been building wood frames for those.

You can get a 10v dimming unit off of AliExpress for pretty cheap (the US retail available Sylvania ones are horrendously expensive, though I've ordered the exact same dimmer product 4 times and every time the link to the last one I ordered is "no longer available", so I have to find it again), and they require replacing the fixture (or, in the case of the thicker ones, building or otherwise obtaining a fixture), but I am not sad to see the end of the consumer bulbs in my house.
posted by straw at 5:05 PM on February 4, 2022

Best answer: I bought one of these Philips EnduraLED 17W bulbs for my desk lamp in 2013 after they won the L-Prize, and it's done about 30,000 hours in daily use happily so far. But it's big and incredibly heavy, because it's basically all heatsink.

Cheap supermarket LED bulbs, by comparison, die after 3 years for me. I dismantle them for parts and the failure mode is always that one of the LED dies has burned out - they have no heat dissipation other than a moderately thick circuit board.

It looks like Philips now do a professional range that are rated at 25,000 hours and look a bit more conventional...
posted by offog at 5:54 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've always had good experience with IKEA bulbs, and feel like they have sourced from above average manufacuturers.
posted by nickggully at 7:00 PM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps (Big Clive, YouTube, 32m16s)
posted by flabdablet at 7:50 PM on February 4, 2022

Not IKEA. Every LED bulb I've had from them has died within a few years, in far fewer than the number of hours advertised. A couple even failed within their 365 day replacement guarantee, but the Returns dept at my local IKEA couldn't find the bulb in their active product catalog, and thus wouldn't return/replace them.

These days I just buy the house brand at the big box hardware stores, and since you can get 4 or 5 bulbs for $5-ish bucks, I don't care that much how long they last. I think HD has EcoSmart and I've been happy with those. They come in all color temps.
posted by MonsieurBon at 7:59 PM on February 4, 2022

Heat is always the biggest issue for a bulb's life. If they're in cans with no venting they will die. Buy cheap with this expectation.
posted by ptm at 8:33 PM on February 4, 2022

We have two 14" square LED fixtures in our kitchen - multiple small LEDs in each one. One began failing: it would come on, then go off, if you flipped the switch it would come on for a while. The duration of 'a while' gradually decreased to zero. Turns out it was the circuitry that converted the 120 AC to what the LEDs needed that failed. The other is still working. My point is that it might not be the LEDs per se, but other circuitry in the bulbs
posted by TimHare at 10:05 PM on February 4, 2022

Most of our LED bulbs are from IKEA, and there have been one or two of them that have failed. When we came to live here ten years ago we kicked out all the CFLs and most of the incandescents, and while we already had a few LED bulbs from various brands (both cheap and notsocheap) IKEA was a) close by and b) only slightly notverycheap. We also had a few from the other brands fail, but nearly all nonames and even those between 3 and 5 years, so not too bad actually. The first IKEA bulb that failed did so after 7 years or so; could even have been more if it was one from before we moved.

And yes, LED bulbs do like to have sufficient ventilation to stay cool.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:59 PM on February 4, 2022

I have a circuit that's got dirty power that just eats up LED lights and until I get that sorted I think it will just continue to wear them out quickly.
posted by zenon at 9:02 PM on February 5, 2022

We bought our house in 2018 and one of the first things I did was kit the entire thing out with Hue White Ambience (that is -- not color-changers, but temperature-changers). I needed various kinds of bulb and a rack of 7 (!) of them in my office wound up being Gen1 bulbs. Over half of them have had to be replaced since, and I expect more of them to fail.

I put up another 14 Hue Gen2 floods for the recessed cans peppered throughout the house. None have failed. I put recessed-replacement kits in 3 places, two of which were outdoors. None have failed.

I bought another 3 or so different brands of no-names for a couple of fixtures that were hard or pointless to Hue-ify -- PAR30 track bulbs, bulbs for the ugly bathroom fixture I'm gonna replace anyway, security lighting, some walkway bulbs that were probably not going to reliably mesh into the ZLL because of location -- and so far only one has failed and one has been iffy. One of the PAR30s occasionally has a very minor flicker for a few seconds while warming up.

This is all to say that in a home jam-packed with brand new LED bulbs in every corner of the property using products from contractor grade "upgrade packs" to faux-bougie there's no rhyme or reason. It's not so much that one product line is discernibly better than another (other than Gen1 Hues which apparently are a disaster), it's that from one bulb to the next you're pretty much rolling the dice.

The Hue bulbs are all warranted, which is great, but they make it such an expensive pain in the ass to get a replacement (you have to mail them the dead bulb) that I haven't found it worth my time to take advantage of the coverage. Warranties are worthless and state nothing about the reliability of the product when it's impractical to use the them. I would not use warranties as a purchasing guide.
posted by majick at 7:04 AM on February 6, 2022