re: Old man rant - the new “low watt” light bulbs suck

quote:

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bullshite. I find that I’m changing LED indoor floodlights every year. It’s bullshite.

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Are they in recessed cans? That’s part of the issue a lot of people have with LEDs - newer houses use a ton of recessed cans with flood bulbs, which require a little more consideration when installing LEDs.

The LED bulbs are very temperature-sensitive. It’s a bit counterintuitive as they also produce very little heat compared to incandescents. But the little heat they do produce can kill the driver boards if they aren’t properly ventilated.

The problem is that many recessed fixtures are not ventilated enough to run these bulbs. So if you put regular BR20 or BR30 LEDs in those fixtures, they will fail. Especially if they are fully enclosed cans.. those are 100% doomed. The solution is to either replace the fixtures with cans that are built for LEDs or use LED “puck” retrofit kits that install into the existing cans.

I have had no less than 25 Philips LEDs (not the Hue kind, just regular Philips bulbs) installed in track fixtures and table lamps in my living room for at least 6-7 years now and haven’t had a single failure. So I suspect a lot of folks are either fighting issues with can lights or are just buying really cheap bulbs.