In a screw base, maybe. But compare:
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/luminus-devices-i...
$25 for an excellent 700mA driver, 86% efficient.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bridgelux/BXRH-30...
$3.45 for a very nice, ~2000lm 97 CRI LED, about 99 lm/W. (Efficiency goes up quite a bit if you settle for 90 CRI.)
So that gives about 2000lm at about 25W, for <$30.
Wikipedia gives about 16 lm/W for incandescent, so 125W. At 10 hour per day, the LED options pays for itself quickly even at national average prices. In CA, it’s very fast.
To be fair, for high-end LEDs like this, the balance of the system is more expensive, because you need a heat sink. Incandescent lamps run very hot and don’t need heat sinks.
I think this is potentially promising, but I don’t think you can buy it:
https://tlo.mit.edu/technologies/high-efficiency-incandescen...
With Edison-style bulbs, anyway, the orientation they're mounted in makes a huge amount of difference. They're last a lot longer if they're oriented upright (base down) than in any other orientation because it reduces the heat buildup in the power supply.
If there was a "DC" light socket in the house we could have LEDs outlasting owners, and for cheap. Nearly all the expense of LED bulbs is the power supply. Everything else is dirt cheap. A single home DC power supply with ~200W of output could light an entire house, flicker free.
What's even more frustrating is I think we could fix it. A national regulation for DC light sockets would fix it. Mandate a voltage, shape, and max amperage and BAM, you'll get 1000 different manufactures making standard compliant bulbs and home power supplies that will last an eternity.
It's true that the power supply versions are so poorly designed and inefficient that heat is a problem. Design and quality control effort could reduce heat generated by the entire assembly to a fraction of what the socket, fixture, and wiring can sink.
It's more common now to find bulbs that have no power supply at all. They're literally a rectifier made of LED's in series. If the bulb flashes at 2 * mains frequency, that's likely what you have. They die out quickly because the LED strings add up to a maximum voltage a bit over mains voltage, but that's RMS not peak. It's a natural outcome, as using enough LED's to accomodate peak voltage reduces light output by underdriving them, increases obvious flicker from dwell time below minimum voltage, and increases cost.
Hotwired LED strings are cheaper to design, source, assemble, bad parts fail fast more consistently with no effort wasted on quality control, and the market's so flooded and volatile that there's no room for consumer side quality awareness effective enough to make the negative outcomes matter. Power supplies in these bulbs are going away. Ubiquitous 2 * mains frequency strobing, short-lived, hotwired LED bulbs is where the home LED lighting market is taking us.
This is a great idea and I would love it if you would post a Youtube how-to video. It might encourage a bunch of hobbyists to do something useful with those dead bulbs.
I've had a number of LED's fail after only a year or two, in fact more quickly than the average incandescent bulb. Seems like it defeats the whole purpose of "upgrading" and in fact may be more of a downgrade.
I have the exact opposite experience, virtually every single light bulb I have torn down - one LED (all in series) has a black dot, if I shorten it - it will 'work' again. The bulbs I have seen tend to drive the LEDs so hard that some of the latter fail, power supplies might have huge ripple but generally don't fail catastrophically.
Edit: now thinking, it can be a US thing, with the voltage being ~120. Lower AC voltages means worse efficiency for the power supply (and all of them tend to be universal, unless totally cheapen out on the primary capacitor [250V] for the US market). Generally speaking low AC voltages have mostly disadvantages.
If the bulb dies but you notice that all of the elements are still just barely on (like a dim spot of light in the middle of each one) then that's a good indication that you have a dead LED.
Otherwise, for probably at least 40 or so bulbs swapped for LEDs over the years, I've experienced maybe 4 or 5 failures. The vast majority of my bulbs have been Feit and GE. I never buy smart bulbs. My best experiences have usually been to just buy LED fixtures though, I replaced a lot of my flush mount ceiling fixtures and ceiling fans for ones with integrated LEDs and have not had a single failure so far after a few years, knock on wood.
I had some problems with my old dimmer switches, but upgrading dimmers to newer ones which advertised good LED dimming and ensuring I had bulbs which stated dimming compatibility it eliminated my noise and flicker issues. There's a recent standard out there, NEMA SSL 7A, which seeks to ensure good compatibility. I set my dimmers to this SSL 7A mode and I've had no problems since.
https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/asset/documen...
They're all in freestanding floor lamps installed in a horizontal orientation, which might have something to do with it. That seems like it'd dissipate heat a lot better than e.g. a pot light housing in the ceiling.
* bulbs with the UK-standard bayonet fitting in light sockets that are suspended from cables from the ceiling with lampshades -- these I don't think I've ever had fail on me yet
* 4.6W bulbs with a GU10 fitting in recessed spotlights -- these fail on me more frequently (perhaps every few years to every five years)
My assumption is that this is all down to the spotlight-fitting bulbs being in a confined space and getting a lot hotter. I use Philips bulbs in both cases.
- Older LEDs house bulbs were much worse than newer ones; far more prone to failure from "things". I had many of them fail after only a few months because our power was "flickery" and their power supplies could not handle it. That's _far_ less common now.
- The power supply / controller circuitry is not a fan of heat. Don't mount them upside down (so the heat floats up to the circuit) and never mount them in a recessed mount. The heat buildup will destroy them a lot quicker. That being said, this advice can be ignored is you're paying attention... mounts that have a way to heat to escape; bulbs that are designed to go in upside-down mounts (maybe?), etc.
- While you certainly don't want to always buy the most expensive bulb, you also don't want to buy the cheap ones. They are far more likely to be made from poor, failure prone components.
It’s not my fixtures’ problem.
It’s these crappy bulbs.
The way most people use lighting goes far beyond whatever the manufacturers want to foist.
I don't know if there are any regulations around the 10-year claim, but if there are then I'd expect that it's either an average or something like a one-standard-deviation threshold, like 68% last past that but 32% don't.
"Guaranteed 10 years" doesn't actually say anything about expected lifetime at all, just that they'll do a warranty replacement if it fails sooner.
Personally I'd want a durability guarantee to be more like two standard deviations, on top of replacement in case of early failure.
A lot of this topic smells like typical geek snobbery. They're lights, folks. Cheap consumer products have always been cheap. Halogen bulbs suck too.
First, this driver actually specifies flicker, and it has a credible number. Second, I own several and have tested them. Performance is excellent. It dims well, too. If you want a crappy driver, you don’t need to spend $25 for it :)
Second, this LED chip is a serious one, with a serious data sheet, intended for people building their own fixtures.
Sadly, with San Fran anywhere from 4.5x, or more than where I live (Quebec), and with LED products lastly barely longer than incandescent bulbs, it is typically a loss.
Maybe a 5 year warranty on LED bulbs should be a law, to ensure better quality control and build. The competitors can compete around that requirement.
I’ve had the dimmable coloured hue bulbs for a while and while expensive I can say none have ever died on me in ~5 years. Certainly no flickering.
10 hours per day sounds like a crazy amount of time to use a light. I think we use some lights in our house maybe 4 hours per day on average max. Maybe I just have a lot of windows and don't live in Alaska in the winter.
I think the Alaska point is close. Yet even in (for example) southern Canada, the sun just doesn't get high over the horizon in winter. So you have 7 hour days, but those days are mostly dim and dark.
Even without clouds.
A whole fixture with nice components like this is not cheap.
