What is remarkable about this is that it is completely unnecessary from an engineering standpoint. LEDs, if operated within their design specification and packaged in a way that can dissipate the heat they generate, can last twenty, thirty, or more years. The short lifetime of mass market LED bulbs is almost always due to:
- Overdriving, to get more light out of fewer and cheaper diode elements
- Poor thermal design (inadequate heat sinks, poor thermal conductivity), often compounded by overdriving
- Failure of cheap driving components
- Poor quality of diode elements
What make this doubly inane is that overdriving LEDs not only reduces their life (dramatically), but wastes energy, as overdriving converts more of the electrical energy input into heat, not light, negating the supposed energy savings from LEDs.
On the old SCANALYZER I wrote on 2021-01-14 about Philips LED lamps which, at that time, were sold only in Dubai. These lamps use more light emitting elements run at lower current and have a much longer lifetime and better energy efficiency. They also have internal voltage regulation, so they don’t flicker with changes in mains voltage (for example, when your furnace burner kicks on or off).
Here, on 2022-04-22, I posted about “Philips ‘Ultra Efficient’ LED Bulbs”, which had just come onto the market in Europe. They use the same strategy as the Dubai bulbs, but use a cheaper electronic drive circuit without the regulator. They claim to have a lifetime of 45,000 hours and use 60% less electricity than regular LED bulbs of the same light output. So far, I have not seen these for sale in Switzerland.
The whole plague of shoddy LED bulbs makes we wonder if we’re seeing a return to “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy” in which the Phoebus cartel agreed to reduce the average lifetime of incandescent bulbs to 1000 hours from the 1500 to 2000 hours previously the norm. This stayed in effect from 1935 through 1939 when the outbreak of war broke up the cartel’s operations.