How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?

I’ve bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said “up to 20,000 hours” which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don’t).

  • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
    28·
    1 month ago

    They’ve been sabotaged by design. LEDs should last 10+ years if built even half away reasonably, but unfortunately the manufacturers basically got together and agreed to build them in such a way they would fail. Same as regular light bulbs, they just have to work harder.

    I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks. They’ve been running for like 15 years now and not a one of them has failed. I spent several hundred USD replacing all my bulbs with those back in the day and they’ve done me well.

    Modern bulbs are trash by comparison. Not because the technology is limited in some way but because they refuse to make anything to that quality anymore.

    We need an alternate solution to this planned obsolescence bullshit. Light bulbs hit 50k rated hours long ago and they were talking about making ones that went 100k+ but these days you can’t find anything above 25k. And that’s setting aside the fact that a lot of these rely on apps that could be dropped at a moment’s notice.

      • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
        8·
        1 month ago

        One of the originators of the idea of “planned obsolescence”. Even after the cartel got killed the manufacturers never extended the life of the lights into (to an extent) CFLs and then moreso the days of LEDs.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 month ago

      I still have some of the earliest modern LED bulbs on the market–old Philips ones, the AmbientLED (i think) with the yellow casing and large heat sinks.

      I bought a couple of those for an enclosed fixture inside a skylight. The ceiling height there is 20 feet, plus another 2ft into the skylight tunnel. I bought those LED bulbs (at $40/each) because I never wanted to change them. Both bulbs were still fully functional 15 years later. I have since sold that house, but I bet they’re still functioning.