The lifetime of white LEDs is touted by manufacturers and sellers as 100 thousand hours.\u00a0 From my own tests, I’ve found that to be far, far from the truth.\u00a0 I’ve purchased white LEDs on eBay from manufacturers in China and Hong Kong, and set them up on a power supply to test their lifetimes.\u00a0 I usually put four on so that I don’t get misled by a single bad one.<\/p>\n
I have put the following types of white LEDs on 24\/7 test:<\/p>\n
3mm white LEDs<\/p>\n
5mm everyday common white LEDs<\/p>\n
8mm “superflux” four-legged white LEDs<\/p>\n
“strawhat” white LEDs<\/p>\n
10mm 5-chip, 1\/2 watt white LEDs<\/p>\n
10mm 1 watt white LEDs<\/p>\n
Most of these were bought on eBay from foreign sellers, typically in China.\u00a0 I put them on a power supply set for constant current, typically at half their rated max current.<\/p>\n
About 2 months after I have put the LEDs on 24\/7, I found them to be getting dim.\u00a0 They have lost more than half of their brightness.\u00a0 A month is about 730 hours, so 2 months or actually 62.5 days is equal to 1500 hours.<\/p>\n
To give you an idea, the lifetime written on the side of a 75 watt incandescent light bulb package is 1200 hours.\u00a0 The LEDs are not doing much better as far as lifetime is concerned.\u00a0 A CFL has a much greater lifetime, something over 10 thousand hours.\u00a0 This comparison shows the LEDs have very short lifetimes.\u00a0 The main difference is that incandescents and CFLs usually\u00a0 don\u00b4t fade away, they abruptly end their life with failure.\u00a0 Instead, LEDs just get dimmer until they no longer emit enough light to do the job.<\/p>\n
Here is one of my blogs<\/strong><\/a> about the lifetime of 10mm1 watt single chip white LEDs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The lifetime of white LEDs is touted by manufacturers and sellers as 100 thousand hours.\u00a0 From my own tests, I’ve found that to be far, far from the truth.\u00a0 I’ve purchased white LEDs on eBay from manufacturers in China and Hong Kong, and set them up on a power supply to test their lifetimes.\u00a0 I <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-led","category-lighting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}