Experts Answer: Why Our LED Lights Die So Quickly
Today's LED lights offer warm colors, smart connections -- and higher prices than old incandescents. That's what makes it so disappointing when they suddenly fail after a year or two of use even though they're promised for years of low-energy performance.
It's happened to me and many others, too, so I asked the experts to figure out what's going on. It turns out our home LED bulbs fail for very specific reasons and there are steps we can take to keep them lasting as long as they should. Here's what's going on.
1. LED lifespan ratings are a broad average, not a promise
Not all LEDs last the same.The numbers you see on the box don't always work out in real life. LED bulbs do last longer but those claims about five to 10 years are estimates based on internal testing -- and companies are always looking for ways to show their bulbs in, well, the best possible light.
So if the packaging says the bulb lasts seven years, that means testing showed an average of seven years, and you don't always know the math applied to get that result. Thomas Grable, from the LEDvance product technical team, said that when LED bulb averages fall within a normal distribution chart, about 95% of the values fall within two standard deviations of the mean. That still means some LED lights will experience short lifetimes -- and as Grable points out, we're more likely to remember the lights that flicker and die right away than those that plod on.
Plus, companies may use sneakier language, like "up to seven years," which means they're probably doing serious weighting toward the very top performers in their bulb testing, making it more likely you'll see bulbs fall short.
And don't forget to check LED bulb details for how the manufacturer is defining a single day of use in these year calculations (if it says). Some companies use a more honest 6 to 8 hours of use for a single day. Others may use two to three hours of use to greatly inflate their lifespan numbers.
All that said, Grable reports that incandescent bulbs have an average of about 800 hours, far shorter than the average of most LED bulbs, so you should still be getting your money's worth unless something goes wrong. That's where other factors come in.
2. LED drivers overheat and fail
Temperature plays a key role in LED life.
Getty Images
The LED, or light-emitting diode, is very unlikely to fail, and if it does, it goes out slowly over years. Instead, it's the other electrical bits in LED bulbs that fail and cut off the bulb's light. LED bulbs use DC power, which requires a converter and drivers to switch from standard AC power in homes.
That means inside every LED bulb are tiny circuit components -- and their soldered contact points -- which are far more vulnerable than the diode itself. The Lighting Research Center of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reports that research shows the delicate soldered points are most likely to fail in harsh conditions.
Heat, in particular, can cause these components to quickly break, so installing an LED bulb in a hot corner of your home or in a deep-set socket with poor ventilation can cause the lights to go out far sooner than expected.
You can help prevent these issues by looking for LED bulbs that have weighty aluminum heat-sink materials but ultimately LED bulbs won't perform the same in high heat conditions.
3. Your home electrical power may not be 'clean'
Chris Wedel/CNET
In electrical grid terms, clean power is steady and reliable, with very accurate alternating current and few unexpected spikes in amps. But not all electricity is like that. Depending on the electrical infrastructure near your home, your power may be on the dirtier side, with tiny spikes in power, and other problems.
LED bulb converters need to manage all those small discrepancies, which can quickly wear them down and cause them to overheat. If you seem to frequently lose bulbs around the home for no good reason, you could have a dirty power supply.
4. Sockets may be old or installation may be poor
An Ecosmart dimmable bulb against a wood surface.
Tyler Lacoma/CNET
Even if your electricity is clean, a bad installation could yield the same effects as dirty power. Old, dirty sockets won't transfer electricity as smoothly, creating burnout issues. And screwing in an LED bulb too loosely or too tightly can also create problems. Aim for a firm but gentle installation process in a clean socket for the best results.
5. Your home may have high humidity
High humidity is bad for electrical connections that bulbs use.
Olga Dobrovolska via Getty
Humidity teams up with heat to wear down LED electrical components even faster. If you live in a wet area with high moisture content in your indoor air, LED bulbs aren't as likely to last their full lifespan. Luckily, CNET has several dehumidifier recommendations to help dry out your home.
6. LED bulbs and old dimmers don't mix
LED bulbs might not work well with older dimmer switches.
Treatlife
Many LED bulbs can dim, but that doesn't mean they play well with older home dimmer switches. As LED installer Torchlight mentions, old dimmers are made to work with high-wattage incandescent bulbs. They don't really know what to do with low-wattage LEDs, which leads to burnout issues.
You can either install an LED dimmer switch or -- my preferred option -- choose a smart LED bulb with self-dimming features you can control via app rather than relying on old-fashioned dimmers.
7. Quality control issues can be a factor
LED bulb installation and manufacturing quality are key.
Getty Images
Finally, the manufacturing quality of LED bulbs will affect all the issues I've discussed above. Many manufacturers have serviceable diodes but try to save money on cheap drivers and converters (as well as sloppy assembly techniques), which is a major cause behind early failure.
When picking an LED bulb, it's best to stick with well-known, reliable brands, even if you have to pay a bit more. For smart bulbs, our testers have found some of the best results from Philips, Wiz, Govee, Nanoleaf and Cree.
To find the best LED bulbs for your home, visit our guides to the best LED bulb for every room in your house, what to consider when switching to LED bulbs, and the best LED floodlight bulbs we've tested.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Bloomberg
12 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Mitsubishi to Invest $3.9 Billion in US Solar Power, Nikkei Says
Mitsubishi Corp. will invest $3.9 billion to boost solar power generation in the US through its unit, the Nikkei newspaper reported. The investment will help Massachusetts-based Nexamp Inc. scale its solar power capacity to 2.9 million kilowatts by 2028 from 1.1 million kw now, the newspaper said on Saturday, without saying where it got the information.
Forbes
19 minutes ago
- Forbes
As Shares Skyrocket, Will Creator Deals Drive Netflix's Next Growth Run?
(Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Netflix has been on an epic stock market run the past year, share prices up 81% to nestle comfortably above $1,200 apiece as it reaps the rewards of definitively winning the Streaming Wars of the past several years, with analysts setting target prices as high as $1,600. Give credit to management's willingness to pivot, after a disastrous Q1 earnings call three years ago, into ad-supported tiers, a password crackdown, videogame and live events/venues initiatives, and investments in local productions in 50 centers around the world. It's paid off massively for the company and its investors. This week saw Pivotal Research set a Street-high target price of $1,600 for Netflix shares. Netflix shares have skyrocketed the past 12 months, to north of $1,200 a piece But where does the streaming giant go from here if it wants to keep driving growth? The ad tier is launched, and growing slowly, but already bringing in higher average revenue per user than Netflix's traditional ad-free offerings. The password crackdown's boost to subscriber growth is likely largely exhausted, though we won't know going forward, because the company stopped r0utinely reporting subscriber adds before the last earnings call. In that call, the company said it added a whopping 13 million subscribers to puff the global total to 301 million, far larger than any competitor. So where to go to grow? Analysts have some thoughts, mostly about the vast collection of wildly diverse talent pumping out episodes on YouTube and other social media, receiving a share of ad revenue and otherwise monetizing their productions with merchandise, sponsorships, live events and other strategies. That approach has paid off massively for Alphabet-owned YouTube. Nielsen's The Gauge estimates more than 12% of total watch time is devoted to YouTube programming. Roku released stats that were even higher, as much as 18% of view time. Wells Fargo analysts released a note earlier in the week setting a $1,500 target price for Netflix, but suggesting it find ways to be a bit more like YouTube. Wells Fargo Sr. Equity Analyst Steven Cahall said Friday in a CNBC interview that YouTube content, which costs YouTube nothing on the front end, is increasingly grabbing view time with young and even middle-aged consumers. And that's exactly the kind of programming Netflix should be adding to its portfolio. 'Some of this very, very high value, professional short-form seems like a natural in-between where it still has a big impact on consumers but it's not quite the really short, mobile-native, user-generated content,' Cahall said. To grab some of that view time back, Netflix should take a page out of its own playbook from about a decade ago, when it cut nine-figure exclusive deals with prominent showrunners in traditional television such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, Cahall said. The splashy deals put the industry on notice about Netflix's ambitions to create high-quality premium content that could contend with anything on broadcast or cable. 'The argument here is they can do the same thing," Cahall said. 'They can go find these really large-scale creators who put a lot of content on YouTube, get a lot of views, and make a lot of money, and they can say, 'Hey, come to Netflix, you have the same size audience. We'll pay you money, and you don't have to take a risk on advertising.' Such deals will 'take money,' though nothing like those Rhimes and Murphy deals of a decade ago. More importantly, Cahall said, 'it's not the same risk profile.' The creators bring their own audience, and deep knowledge about how to connect with and nurture that audience, removing most of the risk of partnering with them. Certainly, there are plenty of big, long-time online creators who are producing good-quality content at remarkable velocity. In recent months, I've interviewed or moderated panels with leaders from such long-time venues as Smosh, Dhar Mann Studios, Buzzfeed Studios, and Dhar Mann CEO Sean Atkins, a long-time cable TV veteran, said he gives a few tours a week of the company's extensive production studios in Burbank, Calif., just a couple of miles from the studio lots of Warner Bros., Disney and NBCUniversal. There's an 'oh, sh--' moment on the tour for most of the folks, Atkins said, when they see Dhar Mann's operations are sprawling enough to need the same golf carts to get around the grounds as on the traditional studios. At last week's StreamTV Show conference in Denver, I interviewed Trey Kennedy, an Oklahoma-based comedian who started telling six-second jokes on the long-gone social-video site Vine. Kennedy has long since migrated to TikTok and YouTube for his humor, building an audience big enough that he cut a deal with Hulu for a one-hour comedy special released in January. He has a national comedy tour set for the fall. Also at The StreamTV Show, I interviewed Laura Martin, managing director and sr. internet & media analyst for Needham & Co. To her mind, the 100-plus exhibitors and dozens of niche networks on display at the conference are largely ignored by Wall Street because they're not able to compete at a big enough scale with the two companies that matter most, Amazon and YouTube. Amazon's links between advertising and directly selling those advertised products to its couple of a hundred million or so Prime Video subscribers make it one powerful path for the future of video. And YouTube has married oceans of user-generated content with television's highest-value programming, the NFL, which is available through YouTube TV. 'On the content side, they're sort of blurring the lines, we sort of think that's where the world is going writ large,' Martin said. Wall Street looks at the smaller players and wonders, 'Why aren't you talking about short-form, omni-device and influencers, plus -premium content. There's a real disconnect." Martin said both Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery are stuck in a 'distracted' place. Paramount is trying to negotiated a lawsuit settlement directly with President Donald Trump over alleged 'election interference' for editing a Kamala Harris interview last fall on 60 Minutes. The delays in settling that suit are in danger of putting controlling shareholder Shari Redstone's National Amusements in default before it can complete an $8 billion sale to a group led by David Ellison and Skydance Entertainment. WBD, meanwhile, announced last week that it would go ahead with a widely expected split of the company, putting its legacy cable channels such as CNN, TNT, TBS, and Discovery in one unit, along with most of WBD's $34 billion in debt and a share of the spun-off Studios & Streaming unit. That latter group would include the Max (soon to be renamed HBO Max) streaming service and WBD's production studios for film, TV and games. Shepherding that split to reality will leave WBD leadership distracted for a year, Martin estimated, then will have to wait another year before doing any deals, because of tax-minimization strategies. 'I think it's the wrong strategic move,' Martin said. 'We're not going to be talk about either of those companies for the next two or three years." That leaves a 'competitive set' of serious streaming players of just four: Netflix, Amazon, Alphabet/YouTube, and Disney. 'The question will be if Disney is too small to compete,' Martin said. 'Its (market valuation) is $200 billion, Netflix is $500 billion and the rest are more than $2 trillion.' For Netflix, grabbing more content from YouTube's stable might just be a way to keep driving growth, and perhaps even slightly slowing the YouTube juggernaut, mostly by being a bit more like what YouTube has become.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Spot Crypto ETF Filings for XRP, SOL, DOGE Among Those With Overwhelming SEC Approval Odds: Bloomberg
Odds are stacked that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approves most of the filed crypto exchange-traded funds, including the various XRP ETFs, by their respective deadlines, according to Bloomberg Analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas. 'We are raising our odds for the vast majority of the spot crypto ETF filings to 90% or higher,' Bloomberg Intelligence's James Seyffart said in a post on X. 'Engagement from the SEC is a very positive sign in our opinion.' According to the analysts, ETFs for assets like Litecoin, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, and Cardano all now sit at or above the 90% mark. These estimates reflect growing optimism from ETF specialists following a wave of 19b-4 acknowledgements and S-1 amendment requests from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Analysts view this back-and-forth process as a signal that the SEC is now more willing to work with issuers. The only asset lagging behind is SUI, filed solely by Canary. Bloomberg assigns it a 60% chance of approval, citing a lack of regulated futures and regulatory uncertainty. Bettors on Polymarket are also feeling optimistic. They are giving a 98% chance that an XRP ETF gets approved this year, and a 91% chance a SOL ETF gets the green light. It's also likely that a DOGE ETF gets a go-ahead, with bettors giving that a 71% chance of happening.
