EcoSmart 5csbr650stq1d03 LED light

[jazzie366]

So these are dimmable LED bulbs. Well, they were great because you could get a bunch of them for 30$ and that was enough to replace most of the ceiling lights in my attic. Well, they are now dying off and are under 6 months old. Well, what the fuck is going on? One starts off dim, then goes full brightness while buzzing LOUDLY, it's like a 10W speaker with a 50db efficiency making an amplifier style hum.

The other one just goes dim for about 5 second, then goes full bright, no noise.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Wow, I wonder if most LED lights are a scam??? Getting reports of them not lasting longer than a CFL from the late Bush Jr. era and the early Obama era, IIRC!

I'm wondering if many LEDs can get outlasted by a T8 and T12 now???

It definitely looks like LEDs commonly get outlasted by possibly even a T12, on cheapo TVs, FFS!

[stj]

it's pretty simple,
leds arent suited to playing "bulb".

they need cooling.
custom fittings are great, but the "lamps" cram all the electronics INCLUDING CAPS right under the heatsink.
and the heatsink isnt much use because it's partly covered by the holder.

cfl's arent much different.
i used to use the candle-style ones with the mini-base.
75% of the times they died, i could fix them by replacing the burst electrolytic in the base!!

[RukyCon]

I've seen LEDs fail after a few months of use, it seems to be really common for that to happen.
But the worst case i had was the two feit electric lamps that fail within ten minutes of each other after a month of use, since then they have lower the quality of their LED lamps by making the heatsink smaller and using cheaper parts in the driver.

CFLs on the other hand seem to last a long time but it's getting harder and harder to find them thanks to LED.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by ruky con

I've seen LEDs fail after a few months of use, it seems to be really common for that to happen.
But the worst case i had was the two feit electric lamps that fail within ten minutes of each other after a month of use, since then they have lower the quality of their LED lamps by making the heatsink smaller and using cheaper parts in the driver.

CFLs on the other hand seem to last a long time but it's getting harder and harder to find them thanks to LED.

Feit is known to be shit here, too! IIRC, way back in December, 2010, had a new Feit CFL fail within 1 minute after taking the CFL out of the package!
It just suddenly dimmed and went out... Thank God no pop or the like!

[RukyCon]

Originally Posted by RJARRRPCGP

Feit is known to be shit here, too! IIRC, way back in December, 2010, had a new Feit CFL fail within 1 minute after taking the CFL out of the package!
It just suddenly dimmed and went out... Thank God no pop or the like!

I never had a CFL fail like that before and almost all of the feit electric CFLs that i ever used lasted more than a year. But their LED bulbs seem to be mostly crap.

[stj]

stick to big names like Osram or Philips.
they may cost more, but i bet they design them better.

lot's of teardowns on candlepower forums and utube anyway.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by stj

stick to big names like Osram or Philips.
they may cost more, but i bet they design them better.

lot's of teardowns on candlepower forums and utube anyway.

Heads up! It looks like Phillips shutdown their Holland plant and that all post-2015 T5s are made in PRC! Shit!

While OTOH, their F15T8 manufacturing appears to have been moved to Poland... Why didn't Phillips at least do that with their T5s???

I'm at least a bit stumped! The only non-Chinese T5s that I saw, are new-old-stock at the Claremont, NH Home Depot, LOL.

It's a punch in the face to folks that like T5s!

And Sylvania and/or Osram are guilty of tricking lighting newbies, with a bunch o' LED light bulbs in boxes with a logo bragging about 10 years, like it's something special! Something special=My ass! The laughably low 10 year rating is only 1 year more than the usual 9 year rating of fluorescent light bulbs!

[stj]

lol - philips do the 10year bullshit.
read the small print - it's 10years of use at x-hours per day!
they usually only do a year or 2 running 24/7

[RukyCon]

I remember at some point GE moved their F15T8 lamp production to indonesia and in the process the lamps lives were shorten by over 70%!! Going from a normal life span of 3 years to less than 6 months and that's on old magnetic gear. They did move production back to the US with all newer lamps being OEMed by Sylvania but recently they moved lamp production to china. Not sure if lamps lives were shorten so i guess that's something we will have to see.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by stj

lol - philips do the 10year bullshit.
read the small print - it's 10years of use at x-hours per day!
they usually only do a year or 2 running 24/7

Yes, Phillips has models with that bullshit. I forgot to tell the folks that! Oops.

But for a lot of their models, says that they can do 13 and that for their recessed versions, much longer, 20+.

In fact, even with a Phillips flood LED light bulb recently, just purchased on July 28, 2017, IIRC, it suddenly silently failed within only 1 week! Just won't come on anymore! Even when the year rating was 20 or the like, IIRC...

Like that cheapo CFL in December, 2010, IIRC, no pop or the like...

I really hope that LEDs dropping like flies won't be the norm! Like with some traffic signals! I heard that there was a big thing about that kind of bullshit with LED traffic lights! I hope that was just a late Bush Jr. era and early Obama era thing...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Originally Posted by ruky con

I remember at some point GE moved their F15T8 lamp production to indonesia and in the process the lamps lives were shorten by over 70%!! Going from a normal life span of 3 years to less than 6 months and that's on old magnetic gear. They did move production back to the US with all newer lamps being OEMed by Sylvania but recently they moved lamp production to china. Not sure if lamps lives were shorten so i guess that's something we will have to see.

There's a chance that they just moved F15T8 production to Indonesia in or close to 2013 and I think I got one of those in 2014 or 2013, and it looked good until it suddenly started flickering! Then one day in 2014 or 2015, the ballast was blazing! The ballast seemed to be over-amped literally at the same time the ends of the tube were getting real black! Then it looked like the ballast shut down due to overheating or the like!

Also, beware of suspicious looking ones, maybe I got one that resembled a Deal Extreme counterfeit, meaning that they were possibly made in PRC even when it said "Indonesia". There appeared to have been real suspicious looking ones sometime before 2017 or at least before 2016...

The ones that are suspicious:

GE F15T8 tubes with bad information printing, looks like a typewriter malfunction!

[stj]

the only way a ballast can overheat is if a starter welds closed.
rare - but i'v seen it.

[RukyCon]

Originally Posted by RJARRRPCGP

There's a chance that they just moved F15T8 production to Indonesia in or close to 2013 and I think I got one of those in 2014 or 2013, and it looked good until it suddenly started flickering! Then one day in 2014 or 2015, the ballast was blazing! The ballast seemed to be over-amped literally at the same time the ends of the tube were getting real black! Then it looked like the ballast shut down due to overheating or the like!

I think they moved lamp production to Indonesia before the 2010's and moved it back to the US around 2014 IIRC. The move to china was more recent being around 2016 to this year.

I remember that before one of my lamps failed the ballast started buzzing like it was getting over powered.

Originally Posted by RJARRRPCGP

Also, beware of suspicious looking ones, maybe I got one that resembled a Deal Extreme counterfeit, meaning that they were possibly made in PRC even when it said "Indonesia". There appeared to have been real suspicious looking ones sometime before 2017 or at least before 2016...

The ones that are suspicious:

GE F15T8 tubes with bad information printing, looks like a typewriter malfunction!

All of the lamps that i got look real but i've seen really cheap lamps with good looking print [and they also lasted longer than the GE Indonesia lamps. ]

[jazzie366]

Holy shit this thread blew up. Well I'm gonna add something else about the lightbulb:

For the one that buzzes, it has less than 20 hours of use. It's in a craft room for my mother that she uses in the daytime only.

The one that doesn't buzz but takes a bit to come on is on almost 24/7 as it lights a dark part of my bedroom (my bedroom has only one window, so unless it's morning to noon the sun doesn't cut it).

I'm thinking of tearing one apart this week to see what's actually gone wrong.

However I have my suspicions. There's a large manufacturer of LED bulbs in china called Anern. They make UL, CE, etc compliant LED bulbs for very cheap. I ordered samples from them ages ago. They worked good for about the same ammount of time and then did the same thing. The most common thing I saw happening was that there was one LED that went high resistance, as it was a series circuit. The problem being they got too hot. However, they never got too hot to touch, 140 degrees was the peak temp I got off of them. So I'm wondering, is 140 too hot for LED bulbs? Cause a lot of other ones even from good brands seem to run around there.

[stj]

that's far too hot, read led datasheets for the temp/life curves.

[jazzie366]

Originally Posted by stj

that's far too hot, read led datasheets for the temp/life curves.

Well after opening one up, I can see why it ran that hot!

The heatsink looked like a mini pie tin, NO THERMAL COMPOUND at all. What cause the fault? A 1/4 watt SMD resistor going high resistance after cooking itself. Also, there was no white sticky paste to hold things down. I found this out as when I hit it once with the hammer, the choke broke off completely. The bulbs are majorly overpriced as well. There are probably 1$ in components on the circuit board, even less when ordered in mass quantities.

There are 6 leds in series as was to be expected.

Here's a list of components:

Caps: Aishi NB series, 130C 50v 330uF and NB series 50v 10uF
Small choke labeled "5.0"
Main choke labeled: "KI.0<127>0.8"
Some inrush resistors and fusible link
An 8 pin chip labeled, "1696-20C"
And a 10S10 rectifier.

Now, there are a bunch of SMD components that I am not going to label, but the one that caused the failure is unreadable. However, it's circuit board spot is labeled, "R1" could you imagine that?

I'll upload some pictures later.

[stj]

if you look at big clive on utube he strips a lot of this stuff,
you may see the chip, and he finds the datasheets with schematics!

[jazzie366]

Originally Posted by stj

if you look at big clive on utube he strips a lot of this stuff,
you may see the chip, and he finds the datasheets with schematics!

I've been subbed to bigclive for awhile! I love him and his spudger (we all know he loves saying that word).

[stj]

we all need a vice-of-knowlege!
specially with crap small psu's