Price of LED lightbulbs

[Andrew Gabriel]

Poundland have a selection up to about 5.5W IIRC. That seems to be the limit of what they can offer for a pound.

[alan_m]

Often what appears to be a single LED is in fact an array of LEDs in series requiring 30V across them to operate

[tabbypurr]

And as value goes, they're crap. I bought one, it lasted 1hr 40 minutes. It ran so hot one of the LEDs was burnt.

NT

[alan_m]

The problem is again that often price and quality don't equate. I'm currently staying with friends in for a short time in a different part of the country to where I live. The local supermarket(s) here are selling a brand of LED bulbs at 4x the price I can find the same brand at home from various "discount" stores.

I'm not sure why a LED bulb costing £1 should necessarily be inferior. It must have reached the stage now that the manufacturing costs of LED bulbs is starting to reach that of manufacturing costs of filament bulbs and they used to be on sale at much less than £1.

[Scott]

Funny that, it worked perfectly well when the 12 Volt LED spots were switched off. It works perfectly well with mains voltage spotlights. The one variable in the equation is the 12 Volt spots.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It could well be the LEDs present too low a load for a SMPS to operate correctly. So you may need to swop it for one designed for LEDs. Or replace the fittings with similar ones designed for mains LEDs. Not really sure using a low volt SMPS designed for 12v tungsten plus and an extra one in the LED makes any sense. It might even be possible to convert the existing fittings.

[Scott]

I was using a torroidal transformer, a long way from the radio. My research at the time suggested that the SMPS operating at 20x greater current (than mains voltage) was likely to be causing RF interference and as far as I can see that is what happened.

Using the same torroidal transformer with halogen bulbs caused on difficulties. I now have mains voltage LED bulbs with no difficulty.

Once again, the common factor was the 12 Volt LED bulbs. I blame them.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Ah - right. Although probably just poor design. No reason I can think of why a 12v AC SMPS to drive a LED should be any different to a 240v AC one, interference wise. But I've not got any 12v LEDs here.

[Johnny B Good]

I hate to burst your bubble but Home & Bargain have been selling B22 12W

1500Lm warm and cool white for nearly two years now (they also do them in ES27). :-)

[Scott]

I meant 'caused no difficulties'.

Apparently it's because it is carrying 20 times more current. The bulbs were Philips so not the cheapest on the market.