NiceEShop Recessed LED panel review and teardown: the future?

Many of my Youtube videos over the last year have been on LED bulbs. It's an interesting emerging market with lots of innovation on the engineering and business fronts.


To date, however, many of my tear downs have been on "A19" bulbs...the level of innovation has been over-the top in trying to squeeze LEDs into a package designed for a tungsten wire and glass envelope.


On a completely different axis is this product: a recessed lighting panel. Here the vendor takes design freedom to repackage LEDs without reference to the past. It's a good looking product and it performs quite well (other than, I suspect, efficacy).


Over the very long term (> 20 years) as old lighting is retired it would not be hard to imagine products like this owning the market. The life-span of these panels should be a good-as or greater than the economic life of a typical renovation/build (i.e. they will not stop working before someone decides to renovate or move).


An interesting Amazon purchase from a shop called "niceeshop".


Video below:

electronupdate said:

Many of my Youtube videos over the last year have been on LED bulbs. It's an interesting emerging market with lots of innovation on the engineering and business fronts.


To date, however, many of my tear downs have been on "A19" bulbs...the level of innovation has been over-the top in trying to squeeze LEDs into a package designed for a tungsten wire and glass envelope.


On a completely different axis is this product: a recessed lighting panel. Here the vendor takes design freedom to repackage LEDs without reference to the past. It's a good looking product and it performs quite well (other than, I suspect, efficacy).


Over the very long term (> 20 years) as old lighting is retired it would not be hard to imagine products like this owning the market. The life-span of these panels should be a good-as or greater than the economic life of a typical renovation/build (i.e. they will not stop working before someone decides to renovate or move).


An interesting Amazon purchase from a shop called "niceeshop".


Video below:

Click to expand...

Nice tear down and review.

I'm using 2 of the 3W round versions, look almost identical to these as in-cabinet lights. They cost almost nothing (less than $10) including the driver, way way less then anything from a store. I bought 3200K color temperature. They look amazing compared to the ugly xenon/halogen pucks that were in the cabinet for. Very happy.

Home Depot's marginal-quality Commercial Electric brand has released a series of purpose-built LED fixtures that - like A19 retrofit bulbs - are transitional in nature. I use the term "transitional" deliberately because they strongly resemble - if not outright replicate - A-socket fixtures that Home Depot presently sells. Combined with familiarity of the form-factor, I think that the generally sub-$30 price point will be attractive to homeowners replacing utility lighting (closets, back hallways, utility spaces) where the lack of a bulb to replace and instant-on will be appealing enough to overcome the higher initial cost and any color-quality concerns.

Were it not for my dislike of the omnipresent ~2700K "warm white" in residential lighting, I would have sourced a few to try out for myself rather than taking chances on some of Ecosmart's 3000K bulbs that do not seem to feature heatsinking any more.

I had a ceiling fixture in a basement hallway that was all wonky. When I went to change the bulb, I found that the fixture was held on by only one screw: the screw holes were too close together and did not align with the junction box, so there was only one screw [barely] holding it up. Truth be told, the light fixture was old, ugly (someone hadn't bothered to remove it when painting the ceiling, so there were brush strokes on the side), and enclosed (so no CFL or LED bulbs).


So I took a chance and bought one of the Commercial Electric fixtures with built in LEDs (HUI8011LL/BN). It was way brighter than the previous fixture, which used only one 60-watt bulb, and it looked much nicer. So, for $25, I got a descent looking fixture that saves a lot of electricity and will hopefully last decades before the leds burn out. An equivalent builder's grade 2-bulb flush mount would have cost me $10-15 w/o bulbs. Yes, the light looks nice, with no noticeable flicker, but it is on the warm side (2819 is supposed to be the color temperature, but it looks much warmer than the 3000k light nearby).