5mm LEDs in fixed lighting = garbage?

[JohnR66]

Whenever I see a new lighting product put up that has 5mm white LEDs, I can comeback in about two months and the LEDs would have been faded and turned purplish blue.

It seems the LEDs are either over driven or have a shorter than advertised lifetime.

I can't see the average consumer becoming all that exited about LEDs if they aren't going to last very long.

I don't know exactly where the problem lies, but it is time for the LED and/or the product manufacturers to stop living for today and thinking about tomorrow or the consumer may shun LEDs.

 

[Illum]

no heatsinking whatsoever inside most of the lamps.
the small minature ones resembling low wattage halogens simply have a bridge rectifier on a little piece of PCB, two caps one for in one for out and the LEDs are connected in series to the ends of the rectifiers.

I've built my own clustered fixed fixture LED lamps and 5mms can put out more heat overtime than luxeons under the same wattage [I.E. they are less efficient]

 

[NX3]

Excuse my ignorance, do you mean the kind of LED as in this light ?

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5108

I've got a couple of GU10s with 60 leds which I got off ebay. I know they aren't amazing quality as its cheap stuff ebay stuff from china. However they are about 1 year old, still work (!!!) and colour is fine. They were only ever about 30 watts at a rough guess, not the 50 as advertised but I knew that when I got them. They don't get hot at all, not even warm really. Colour is somewhere between the halogen and the CFL.

They are in the kitchen and get used everyday on a 4 bar with a megaman 11w CFL GU10 and halogen 50w. It used to be 4 x 50w to power usage wise a big improve and the mix gets instand bright light.

I'll change the others some day when you can get a true 50watt replacement LED GU10s that are good quality.

 

[Illum]

yeah thats the one, of the 3 that I have the one I opened lasted about 3 days..turns out all I really need was to replace a burnt LED, but theres no way to do that without destroying it

 

[blasterman]

Yeah...I have a couple of those as well. Utter garbage.

Besides flickering like hell because of the Radio Shack conversion circuit mine get real hot. The Warm White one I tested was actually purple/green, depending on what part of the light cone you were looking at

The actual problem here is that most of things are engineered and built in good old china. Asian manufacturers are capable of producing inexpensive products, and being innovative in doing so. However, these products need to be designed by U.S. companies in the first place.

What makes things worse is that there are so many crappy LED retrofits on the market that they are diluting the actual good ones on the market.

I should add I have LED PARs I've installed on dance floors, and they are assembled in the States. 182 10mm LEDs in a cluster with a good power supply looks darn good, and worth the $100 a piece.

 

[Stromberg]

I have never seen 5mm fixed lighting that would be anything else than utter waste of money. Why? Tint = poor or downright disgusting. Amount of light = far from adequate. Beam quality = usually too directional or too floody at the cost of brightness. Lifetime = short, usually dims down significantly in few hundreds hours.

 

[SafetyBob]

This is exactly why I have chosen to start making my own lights whenever possible. Even with last years state-of-the-art LED, OK, two years ago stuff is light years (sorry) ahead of that old 5mm stuff.

Mild attention to heatsinking, drivers, and the like has always yielded me a terrific light....first version may not be pretty, but I guaranttee you by version 3........now were talkin beautiful.

Bob E.

 

[Illum]

the best 5mm Fixed lighting application is the night lights...driven at 25ma they last as long as the night for a couple of years

 

[SafetyBob]

Good point, they are very, very useful for night light applications.

Bob E.