Florescent Lighting Bans?

[MossRoad]

One of the 3 presented will be the option.

 

[MossRoad]

Well, yes and no. As someone mentioned upthread, longevity does not seem to be a high priority in the manufacturing of LED bulbs (of any type, not just fluorescent replacements). Yeah, there's all the hype that they'll last 2 million hours or some such nonsense, but the reality is they fail rather quickly. Some of it may be the cheap power supply components, but the lamps themselves don't seem to last very long either. We have a couple strings of "patio" LED lights (on a string, like clear Christmas lights) around the perimeter of our living room for ambient lighting, the bulbs don't seem to last any longer than the old incandescent ones did.
I love having them in my workshop...really bright, instant on even in cold weather, but if they don't last then there goes any savings in electricity.

I have a 6 year old building with about 500 LED fixtures. I've had ONE failure, and that was in the first few months, so defective from factory and replaced under warranty.

I have two more buildings that were converted to all LED fixtures 4 and 5 years ago respectively. I've had ZERO failures.

These are fixtures, not screw in or pinned tubes.

 

[Suburban Plowboy]

I have not had a tube fail, but the bulbs die fast.

 

[ultrarunner]

I have not had a tube fail, but the bulbs die fast.

I bought some first generation CREE Edison base LED for home use and only one failed and it was promptly replaced along with a prepaid mailer to return the old one for failure analysis.

Since then LED prices have dropped a lot and the weight of the physical bulb is now much lighter…

I’ve noticed the cheaper lighter bulbs not as long lasting as the original $15 bulbs.

Around the hospital we have 70W Metal Halide landscape and walkway lamps…

I eliminated the ballasts and replace each MH bulb with Costco 60 or 100W equivalent LED and 13 months later not one has failed on these dawn to dusk very heavy cast aluminum fixtures and bollards…

 

[ultrarunner]

When I needed long lasting Edison base light bulbs my goto was traffic signal bulbs…

They are marked 130v long life and never had one go bad…

They cost more and have a very robust filament and lumen output is less but they are true long life.

 

[Suburban Plowboy]

I wouldn't conclude anything based on 13 months. That's about around 5,000 hours, which is nowhere near the bloated estimates the greenies used to force us to buy imperfect LED's. I wouldn't be impressed by a car that ran 50,000 miles.

Everyone should Google "Dubai LED bulb."

 

[ultrarunner]

True but the MH bulbs are disappearing and were never cheap plus several also had bad MH ballasts also getting harder to find.

The $3 LED bulbs were a few snips to take the ballasts out of the loop and direct wire…

I figure at 13 months I’m ahead… plus lamp disposal also a factor…

 

[Suburban Plowboy]

None of this should be allowed to happen, but then yesterday my wife and I ate at the Cheesecake Factory, and we had to ask for straws. They gave us nice, leaky paper ones. To save sea turtles, which never, ever see American straws in the water. The world has gone nuts. It's all about the pose, not reality.

 

[WinterDeere]

I wouldn't conclude anything based on 13 months. That's about around 5,000 hours, which is nowhere near the bloated estimates the greenies used to force us to buy imperfect LED's. I wouldn't be impressed by a car that ran 50,000 miles.

Everyone should Google "Dubai LED bulb."

These rarely-achieved lifetime estimates are usually based on the LED itself, which will legitimately last damn near forever. The trouble is that any electrolytic or tantalum capacitors used in the driver circuit may have lifespans of just 10,000 - 20,000 hours. So what you end up with is a good LED array in a bad bulb assembly, which is just as useless as a dead LED array.

They're getting better, in fact they're already a heck of a lot better than they were 10 years ago. The high volume of sales in this industry is providing sufficient incentive to support the development of much better ceramic capacitors, which solve many of the lifespan problems of electrolytic and tantalum capacitors.

Even so, many cheap designs push enough power dissipation onto driver circuit resistors to both hurt overall efficiency and shorten lifespan, as lifetime and heat are generally inversely (log/log) proportional, in any electronic device.

 

[MossRoad]

When I needed long lasting Edison base light bulbs my goto was traffic signal bulbs…

They are marked 130v long life and never had one go bad…

They cost more and have a very robust filament and lumen output is less but they are true long life.

I have a 4 bulb fixture in our house. Only two of the bulbs have burned out in 30 years. They are 130V bulbs and very heavy glass. I'll be sad when the last one goes. (or maybe dead )