Monday, March 20, 2023

LED Lamps and Life Expectancy

DIY.

LED lamps use less energy and last much longer. Though, perhaps, not as long as often suggested.

Ikea suggests their LED lamps can last up to 20 years. Well... probably... if you leave them off.


Real hours?

Many lamps in my house are between 5 and 7 years old, but some have given up before that. Take this lamp:  9w 800 lm, I'd say around 4 years old, on average on 12 hours per day. So, that's 4x12x365 = 17000 hours. Regular bulbs would do about 1000 hours, but I'm not reaching the 100000 hours some sources claim.

The lamp below is an older series, 9w 800 lm. It started to get dim lately, so I decided to replace two of them. (These are two lamps above the kitchen table.)


The bulb from the other lamp, 7w 600 lm, still seemed good, but as you can see from the image below is has some heat related discoloring. It also runs much hotter than the 9w lamp (?), or at least when it comes to the socketed part which really, really runs hot (can't touch the metal when just removed)...



I don't recall why I used two different lamps (probably had nothing else laying around 😇) so I decided to replace both lamps this time.

Unfortunately I only had 1000 lm laying around, so gotta' pick up some new ones this week.

You know, I have a few MiLight lamps still gathering dust... tempting...

Still... 100000 hours? No way. And indeed, even Ikea doesn't claim those numbers. This is from one of their leaflets:




Other regular bulbs, for example the Solhetta, are listed as 25000 hours. I'm not sure I'll ever reach those numbers in reality, but I can live with 17000.

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