The cheap China stuff tend to fail in a few months, while I've only had two Hue bulbs in my collection fail ever, so Philips seems to be doing something right.
My LED lightbulbs change temperature based on the time of day and are dull red at night so you both don't wake up and you don't stub your toe. Show me a non-LED that can do that.
Many of use simply don't find LED lights, no matter the color they try to simulate, enjoyable.
I find my LED lights, including fancy decorative ones, bearable only because I always use one real, old-school, warm white (more like yellow really), incandescent (hence non-LED) light in my living room. And, yup, if you know what you're looking for, it's totally possible to still buy incandescent lightbulbs.
LED lights, no matter the shade/color always give such a fake / non-cosy feeling to just about everything.
I'm taking an actual candle + an incandescent lightbulb's warmth feeling any day over anything LED.
Now as I'm also conscious about saving the planet, I'll mix those with mostly LED lights. But having one incandescent lightbulb (and/or one candle) really creates, to many of us, a better atmosphere than pure LED lighting.
It's the old "you're eyes cannot detect more than 24 fps" all over again: "you cannot detect the flickering of a LED light". Except I can instantly tell if it's the cold (no matter how "warm white" the box says it is) light of a LED or the actual warm light of a proper incandescent lightbulb.
It probably also doesn't help that this would require industry-wide cooperation between companies which would much rather sell their own light fixture + LED combo which people have to replace regularly than a light fixture which people buy once and keep for life.
A 100 out of 100 success rate after 8 years.
Cree is now no more; the bulbs are just a brand for FEIT who imports the same unreliable Chinese white-label bulbs.
Hue is basically the only bulbs not being sourced from the same couple of white label manufacturers. Philips/Signify's rapidly shrinking line of dumb bulbs are being sourced from there too.
Never buy filament style bulbs. They are universally unreliable because of poor thermals with the emitters.
I had a bulb go bad once (out of almost 50 bulbs), but I called their support number and they shipped me a new one for free without any hassle.
If only that were true. Osram is a well-renowned brand so you'd think their - rather pricey - 'high-wattage' (10W) bulbs meant for outside lights here on the farm would last longer than about a year, all in different armatures, all with plenty of cooling (they're mainly used in autumn/winter/spring when it tends to be rather chilly here in Sweden). You'd think cheap bulbs go bad quickly but the cheap 'Biltema' brand bulbs I bought for some rooms just keep on going without marked loss of output.
All in all the average life time of a LED bulb seems to be around 2-3 years before it either has dimmed so much that it is no longer usable or it has failed outright. There are exceptions like the mentioned cheap bulbs which are still going strong after about 9 years of close to daily use or those Osram bulbs which fail in about a year or less or the (not mentioned) 'fluorescent tube replacement fixtures' which last less than a year before one of the 4 LED segment strips fails due to a failed LED. I repair these by replacing the failed chip, they work for a few months and then the things fail again.
I've used 'efficient' lighting since I bought my first house starting with jam-jar like Philips SL 'bulbs' (compact fluorescent tubes with all the related gizmos packaged in a single replaceable unit) for which I made fixtures out of birch plywood wood, 90° PVC drain pipe bends and E27 sockets because those things were heavy at about 500 grams. None of those SL bulbs had failed when I moved out 6 years later, I still have some somewhere in storage. Later I moved to the lighter PLC version which also tended to last a long time, some of them are still in use here. Then came LED bulbs which were supposed to last for tens of thousands of hours... and I suddenly started to have to think about replacing failed bulbs again.
I switched to all LED lighting many years ago. I've had a few that lasted less than a year, but by and large I'd say that nearly all the lights I've had have lasted at least on the order of years.
There was some sort of deal between Walmart and Puget Sound Energy that applied an instant rebate automatically so that they simply rang up on checkout for $0.17.
They are all still working fine.
Plural of anecdote isn’t data and all that but I think the several hundred quantity adds some weight. Also about 90 of those are in outdoor lamps so there’s a good amount dealing with weather and we’ve not had to replace any of those yet.
I don't know if it's the case with typical LEDs, but I used to have a lamp that I kept replacing bulbs for "all the time". I didn't understand why since the light bulbs claimed to last for years. One day I read the box more closely, and it said something along the lines of, "7 years life span at 2 hours per day" in small text (the numbers may be wrong, going by memory). Doing the math, the number of active hours claimed on the box turned out to be roughly true.
All of these are individually solved problems, you just can't buy a bulb that's an e26 retrofit that satisfies all of them for whatever reason. If LED bulbs actually lasted 10 years, then there'd be 10 year warranties. Yet even the most expensive boutique LEDs (e.g. from YujiLED) are only 3 years at best.
I've heard a theory that it has to do with genetics and lower eye sensitivity.
dybovalex•11h ago