Absolutely crap LED G9 bulbs...who makes ones that *last*?

[Michael Kilpatrick]

Gosh, I am SO SICK of buying SMD LED G9 bulbs for our living room lights. They are all shit. Half of them fail within a month or two. I bought another batch of 8 from

on 1st March and half of them have already dimmed to half the original brightness and are flickering.

They are supposed to be money-saving. They are supposed to last for tens of thousands of hours and consume one quarter of the energy of the halogen bulbs they replace. Yet clearly it's impossible to get any that live up to the expectations.

What a scam.

Michael

[JoeJoe]

I bought 15 of these

back in November.

none has failed so far.

[Lobster]

On 27 Mar 2015, Michael Kilpatrick grunted:

So just send them back and get replacements or a refund, then.

I don't know anything about the supplier you mention, but LED lamps are very varaiable in quality, and you might fare better going to one who's well-known and recommended. Personally speaking, I currently have about a dozen LED downlighters, the oldest of which has been in place for 2-3 years; haven't had a single failure yet. Most have come from LEDhut; the oldest was from Toolstation.

[harryagain]

I have had a GU10 for about five years. (SFD) It has about twenty separate diodes. One diode has failed in the cluster.

[Brian Gaff]

I'd return them after such a short time as they are clearly not working properly. Brian

[Muddymike]

Gosh, I am SO SICK of buying SMD LED G9 bulbs for our living room

Complain, send them back! I did and got my money back.

Mike

[Michael Kilpatrick]

Well, obviously.

But the point is that I should be able to buy ones that don't fail within 30 days. Or even within a year. However, this is not the first bad experience I've had with such bulbs. How on Earth do I tell a good supplier from a bad one?

Michael

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Michael

I've had similar experiences with GU10 Leds from ebay - they simply don't last - I was replacing GU10's in our shop every week - we have 60 or so of them. Somebody here pointed me at

- and so I relamped the back half of the shop with their 4watt GU10's (some time in September) - and, so far, I've not had one failure. They also offer a proper guarantee!

I've no connection with them, other than as a satisfied customer. Seems all leds are not created equal.

Adrian

[DerbyBorn]

I have some halogen G9 bulbs and the connections to the holder sometimes give apropblem - they are a wire loop. The LED ones look like a slightly smaller flat spade. Could they be a poor connection?

[harryagain]

This is the new technology, due to be in the shops soon apparently.

Still LED though.

[Michael Kilpatrick]

Don't know, but all eight bulbs (two per each of the four identical wall lights) all started off looking exactly the same and nice and bright. Now I have one light in which both bulbs are flickering at half-brightness and another two in which one of the two bulbs are likewiese. The connections seem good.

Michael

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Only advice on that I could give is buy from a decent supplier like TLC.

I remember buying some GU10 fittings from B&Q which came with bulbs. All failed in short order. Which made me question the wisdom of using mains rather than low voltage. But the replacements from TLC were fine.

[Martin Brown]

It is more likely that the bulbs are OK in the right sort of fitting but that you have installed them in fittings designed to protect the fabric of your building from the heating effects of quartz halogen lamps. This combination is not at all good for LED lamps and they quickly cook their control electronics leading to premature failure.

You need to have some airflow past the heatsink to keep them happy.

I suspect you may have had a bad batch or the insulation on the fixtures is particularly good which means all the waste heat from the LED units remains trapped and they get to warm in continuous use.

The ones in hotel ceilings seem to fail this way too.

You are lucky that only one has failed often they are in strings 3 to 5 across a somewhat larger constant current supply voltage.

[F]

Got mine from LED Hut and they've been fine for over 12 months now.