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How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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I fix my LED bulbs when they stop working
How so?
Just Google "how to increase my fire risk to save $2 on a new LED". Should be a how to guide or two out there.
Some people like tinkering. Big Clive has a series of videos on Dubai led bulbs. The government mandates that the bulbs be extra efficient and last extra long, so they are built with more filaments driven at a lower current. They run cooler and last longer. You can do a similar thing with American bulbs if you're handy with a soldering iron.
Honestly, with how poor many of these things are mass produced, opening them up yourself is practically a personal form of quality control. Whether you modify it or not I bet it's less likely to die prematurely or burn your house down than those of a regular person who doesn't open them 🤷♂️
No, shorting a dead LED in a series chain of 10-20 will NOT burn your house down, it's barely a difference to the driving circuit. Unless you're buying knockoffs, there is a fuse in the base that will blow at like 0.5 A, no matter what you do to the circuitry. However, the other chips will likely not last much longer than the first dead one (unless you dooby the bulb, see below), so it's not worth doing, and a poorly reattached plastic globe can come off and expose mains voltage. If all chips are OK, you can cut it open to check the inductor between smoothing capacitors and replace it if it has failed open circuit, or short it if you accept a little extra flicker and/or electrical noise.
I've seen power supply boards of LED bulbs that literally burned themselves down to the crisp (never in ones that I modded) but the housing contained the fire thanks to its heat-dissipating design.
In many bulbs, you can adjust the value of a current-sensing resistor (usually one or two in parallel, about 2-30 Ω) to make your own "Dooby" lamp with lower power and way longer life. Of course, you need to know something about electronics.
What can burn your house down is still using incandescent and halogen bulbs. You may lay a piece of paper on top of a lamp and it can fall in when moved by the hot air, touching the bulb...
Well I've done it just twice, I don't even remember what I did, I just soldered things that seemed broken.
I'm not al electrical engineer whatsoever but the heat unglued the cover of the bulb exposing the circuits so I was like "lemme try"