I'll stick with my ebay crap.

I've been using CFL's for the past 10 or so years but I decided it's time to go LED. At first I was going to get some Ebay bulbs and even though I've never had a problem with any of my many other Ebay no-name purchases over the years I decided - NO, do it right this time, I want these bulbs to last. So I bought a 4-pack of nice CREE 2700k warm whites, put one in my dining room, and left the other 3 in the box, waiting for the next CFL in the house to fail.

This light stays on 24hrs a day, it's basically the night light for the house, but I was very confident that it would outlast any CFL I've used here that lasts maybe 2-3 years and not once did I second-guess my purchase nor the huge price differential. I was so happy, even excited a little bit - until now, 6-1/2 months later.

Never again. Name-brand doesn't mean anything in this day and age. Everything is engineered to fail and these are no exception. What a waste of money. I'm so angry with myself right now. These things were not cheap by any stretch of the word. I could have had nearly 20 Ebay bulbs for the cost of these 4. I'm furious with myself. I didn't even want to put another one in but I don't have anything else to put in there. Oh my god I'm so angry.

You haven't mentioned the specific Cree lamps. My experience with the 100 watt daylight equivalent lamps has been a disaster. The first one lasted 20 minutes, the 2nd lasted 6 months. The two replacements ( each of which took 6 weeks to get from Cree) each lasted about 6 months. 3 have simply 'died', the 4th one, about a third of the LED's in the array had failed. When the most recent one failed earlier this year, I sent it back to Cree and asked for a refund (which they eventually provided) because it was clear they were never going to save me any money, in fact between the original cost and the postage back to Cree, they were exquisitely expensive. I have some 40 watt equivalents that seem to be OK, and my limited experience with the 60 watt equivalent has also been OK, but I am forced to conclude that the 100 watt equivalent product is just a bad product, period. With an average life of 1000 hours, and costing about $6 every 6 months to send back to Cree, I concluded the break even point on cost for the 100 watt lamps was the 21st of never. The closest experience to that with CFL was I bought a case of Philips CFL's when they first came out (more than 20 years ago). None of them lasted more than 6 months. When I complained to Philips, they sent me another case, which lasted a lot longer.

I put a 3-way Cree in the light on my nightstand. After about 6 months, it would flicker occasionally. A couple of months later, it went dark. I tossed it, and bought a Philips 3-way LED bulb. Don't know if it will be any better, but having had a 60W Cree fail as well, I think I'll give their products a rest.

I have had Cree LED bulb fail.
Shells fall off or crack. Start flickering and die. Took a few apart. Their connections between the driver PCB and LED PCB is a set of spring clips. Contacting the tined contact pads. Mine showed arching between the pads and the spring clips. I used some Deoxit to clean the contacts and they again worked. Though with no shell to put back. Was just an experiment to try and find the problem.

I have some Phillips LED bulbs that have been in use for over three years.

I had 3 of their 100W bulbs fail. But I've had 3 40w bulbs outside running 8+ hours every night for years now without a problem. And another 6 60w bulbs in nearly air-tight ceiling fixtures ran maybe 30 minutes everyday with no problems.

Overall, I won't be buying any more Crees.

I only buy Hyperikon 3000K or 4000K 90+CRI. About $4 per bulb in a 4-pack. Insane bargain. I've been running 6 of their 60W bulbs hard in my basement with no issues so far.

gotothelight said:

I put a 3-way Cree in the light on my nightstand. After about 6 months, it would flicker occasionally. A couple of months later, it went dark. I tossed it.

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Well son of a biscuit! I have one of those and it will occasionally flicker when on low. I hope it doesn't go dark. I've been using the Cree 60 watt equivalent bulbs since they came out. I have used around 100-120 of them. I've probably had 5 of those fail. I bought 3 of the 100w equals....2 failed, so I threw the last one on a garage shelf and used different bulbs.

My experience has been such that I think their failure rate is higher than it should be. Frankly, most of my failures were from the last generation of bulb. I don't think I have any of the newest ones.

Write Cree. Problem solved.

I wrote Phillips when one of their L prize bulbs went- I suspected a cap based on how it acted. I got a check for the purchase price a week later and a box to ship the failed unit back.

Only LED bulb that's given me any trouble is a 3M-branded unit. About 1/4 of the LED's failed at some point then the entire thing died not too long afterwards. It perhaps 1000 hours in it, mostly in an open flushmount fixture running a few hours a night. As heavy as that thing was, I expected more from it - seems they should have easily been able to channel the heat of the LEDs away from the electronics.

Otherwise, I have a variety of Crees (60W/75W equiv original/flood, 4Flow), some Philips bright white (likely the sketchy kind), a bunch of GE BrightStiks, and a smattering of less well-known bulbs such as Feit, LSG. All running steady.

All the Crees see brief to short use: the original models in ceiling fans tend to run for 30-60 minutes once or twice a day, The 4Flows see even shorter usage in bathroom vanity fixtures; the floodlight original occasionally runs for hours at a time, however it sits in a fart fan fixture, thus has a bit more margin than a typical can light. The Philips live in the guest room and are used for perhaps tens of hours a year. The Brightstiks live in the master bedroom vanity and see usage similar to the Crees in ceiling fans; the plastic base for these get tremendously hot and they blink out randomly for 25-50ms every couple of minutes ... but for the price I wasn't expecting miracles. I have two flavors of LSG: a 3000K (awarded to me as part of a recall for another 2700K unit) that runs pretty absurdly hot in a semi-reflector fixture in the kitchen, and some 5000K units that see heavy use (one outdoors that's been running for nearly 4 years in a coach lamp fixture, another in a shaded desk lamp that's used for 3-4 hours a night). The single Feit has been running for about 5 years with perhaps 5 days' total downtime in an almost fully-enclosed fixture; while I don't doubt that its performance has degraded, it still performs quite adequately. There are also some Feit or LSG bulbs (the OEM chose to eschew branding) in closets that and have outlasted the 3000K halogens I briefly experimented with by a huge margin.

my entire house has zero cfl or incan lights for the past few years. I use feit brand led's because they are available locally. I have only had a single led failure the entire time. maybe I am just lucky. I even have the small version in the refrigerator and I totally expected it to die but it still is going strong.

purduephotog said:

Write Cree. Problem solved...

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Four times over the past few years I've called Cree at 1-866-924-3645, explaining the failure, and they've never failed to simply send me a replacement bulb. The very first time they sent a box to send back the dead bulb; the other times they just said to responsibly dispose of it.

The problem I experienced with the early run of Cree 60w bulbs was the rubberized glass completely detaching. Some of them broke on impact and some didn't. I'd just return them to Home Depot for a replacement. It's only a guess, but I'd say about 20% of the ones I bought failed in this manner. It's been over a year since I experienced the problem.

~ Chance

I think it's pretty extreme to simply call off name brands like that... Cree does have lots of failure reports on their LED bulbs, and I think it's why they're slowly taken off shelves. In fact, your bulb is the older "classic" version, the current one is the 4flow filament bulbs. Are the ebay bulbs even UL listed?

Just as a counter point I've had nothing but trouble with cheap chinese bulbs and zero problems with Cree's bulbs. The bulk of the issue was massive amounts of flickering from thermal/mechanical stresses. If I take the LED array out of the chinese bulbs, the LEDs by themselves are fine and so is the driver. Pack them both into a bulb and some connection starts flexing and they all flicker.

With instant rebates the Cree bulbs were cheaper than the direct-from-china bulbs too.

My entire immediate family has been using the Cree LED bulbs. About four houses worth of them. We've only had a single failure, in a very tight fixture known for eating bulbs. So it gets fed the old CFLs that have been replaced instead. Everyone has been extremely pleased with the LEDs, mostly because they turn on instantly and have a much nicer color.

We're about 70/30 the older heat-sinked Cree bulbs and the newer 4-flow bulbs. The 4-flow have been used less than a year, but there have been zero failures so far. Everything is a mix of the 40W and 60W models. There is a single 100W bulb on a dimmer circuit so it isn't often run at full power.

I take that back, not quite everything is Cree LED bulbs. All of the nightlights are using "Triangle S6 0.36W" bulbs. The CRI isn't so great on them, but you can't have good CRI in a dim light anyway. Nothing but good things to say about those too. If you look really hard you can detect a small amount of flicker but I'm the only person who ever notices it.

I had the glass fall off of a couple 60w bulbs and numerous 100w daylight bulbs completely quit. Most of them were swapped out at HD. Cree sent replacements for the others. I haven't sent one back yet. I've had more problems with the Duracell bulbs. The only reason I got them was because they were the only 4000k bulbs I could find at the time.