Wow! 22 years! That went by fast. That’s how long those LED light bulbs are supposed to last.
However… today we had one literally fall apart while we were using it. The bulb was in this desk lamp.
I turned the lamp on, and the glass globe that covers the LED’s fell off…. onto the floor… and shattered. Look at this.
It appears that the glass was glued in place, and the glue let go. The light was still on after the globe fell off. So I turned it off an took out the remaining bits.
As you can see in the photo, I have this funny habit of writing the dates on things like batteries and light bulbs when I install them (ya… go ahead…. call me crazy). So when I took out the remaining part of the bulb, there was the installation date.
In case you can’t see it in the photo above, here is a closeup.
By my reckoning, the life of this bulb was about 3 1/2 years, which is approximately 15.9090909091% of its estimated life span. That doesn’t sound like a very good deal to me. And to top it off, another bulb of this same brand failed last week. It was installed on 2015/01/04 in an open ceiling fixture. That was just over 2 years ago. These are store brand bulbs from a major HarDware store, which shall remain unnamed to keep me out of trouble with the lawyers.
In case you were wondering what is inside those new-fangled LED light bulbs, I took advantage of the busted bulb to snap some photos of the guts.
Now, that’s a Star Wars® looking device. Here’s a closeup of the business end of the bulb.
Those are the actual LED’s, hooked onto their heat sink. There are 20 of ’em. They are even numbered….. or maybe that is Alien Speak for “Take Me To Your LEDer”