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.
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"
FWIW, I've killed a bunch of Phillips hue bulbs through normal use
Yeah the drivers are shit on cheap products and heat can wear them out easily. I find that LED bulbs "burn out" by just being super dim rather than physically snapping like incandescent filaments. I have these 96 cent cheapass LED bulbs that I have no expectation of lasting long, and I have other 6 dollar dimmable bulbs that I hope I will last longer.
Are you sure you have the same set up for voltage and resistance? If you don't you'll pass more current and burn out faster. Similar to a laptop marketing saying 14hrs, but that's only if you leave it on low power, airplane mode, and don't do anything useful. I'm curious to see if someone comments the real answer.
What lasted forever for me...CFLs. downside is they just don't seem to put out as much light. But I had some in my house 10+ years old. They lasted so long that when one finally burned out and I didn't have a replacement of the intensity...I was pissed to learn they don't even make them anymore. I'm not a fan of LEDs because some of the cheaper ones are like mini strobe lights and really big my eyes. I had to go through like $60 work of LEDs to find a set I actually liked
I've had the best experience with the Philips LED lights, and secondly, the GE lights. I've seen some here say IKEA as well are good. Others just are too cheaply made and fail quickly.
I'm no scientist, but I think it has something to do with actually turning the light off and on that's actually stressful to most light bulbs. I mean check out the Centennial Light (wiki link). I know it's an entirely different type of lightbulb, but they have run that light almost continuously since 1901, and it's largely believed that continuous operation has kept it going for so long (though it has dimmed quite significantly).
I suspect that 20,000 hours operation is likely expected under continuous illumination, not ever turning the light off.
I still buy more halogen bulbs than LEDs - 4 fixtures in one room that I haven’t been able to convert go through more bulbs than the rest of the house of LED fixtures combined.
So far I haven’t bought any bulbs this year and have used only halogens, but I used up my stock of both.
My only real complaint about replacing LED bulbs is they change design more frequently than they need to be replaced - If I need to replace one bulb in a fixture, I can never find an exact match
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