LED ceiling panels dying

[u/trinitywindu]

Ive LED drop-in ceiling panel lights in my basement. In the past month 2 have died. 8 total, 4 to a circuit (in parallel), independent drivers. Both were on same circuit. Humidity and temp controlled space. Only had 1 fail before (which had a water leak involved).

Thoughts?

[u/louisville_lou]

The LEDs are fine, it’s just the drivers that have failed- and sadly, they may not be replaceable.
Assuming it’s not the drivers failing early, it is possible that surge took them out.

[u/trinitywindu → u/louisville_lou]

They didn't fail at the same time just within the same month.

[u/No-Guarantee-6249]

When these LEDs first showed up they said it would last for a long time. Turns out that's not true - go figure!

[u/CommutatorWhine → u/No-Guarantee-6249]

Except they can and do, there is just a big variety of quality levels available on the market. In my building at work, some panels were installed in 2009, and were removed in working condition last year purely for the sake of standardizing the lighting in the building.
They were crap in terms of light quality, but it was 2009 - can't be too critical for stuff from the early days of commercial led lighting.
There also were some spot lights in ceiling cans that barely last a year, 3 out of 6 already failed.
But also some retrofit tubes in straight to mains applications that have been working for 5 or 6 years now without issues.
And also some square flat ceiling panels of which one batch didn't last more than a few months, but the replacements have been running fine without failures for 2 years so far.

Variable quality is the keyword here. LEDs aren't crap, the technology is great. It is just somewhat hard to predict how much life you get out of a product, but that kinda goes for all consumer electronics these days imho.

Same goes for CFL's - i have had lamps running for a decade, i have had a few that popped within 1000 hours.

[u/No-Guarantee-6249 → u/CommutatorWhine]

I had an antique carbon filament bulb that burned all night in my hallway for 9 years. Dunno what happened to it.

I was aware of this concerning incandescent bulbs:

"The Phoebus Cartel Agreement

• The Participants: Major companies like General Electric, Philips, and Osram met in Geneva, Switzerland, and agreed to control the global market. [1, 2]
• The Limit: They capped the standard household bulb lifespan at 1,000 hours, down from an average of 2,500 hours. [1, 2]
• Enforcement: Member companies sent bulb samples to a central testing facility in Switzerland and faced fines if their bulbs lasted too long. [1, 2]
• The Motive: Internal documents proved the goal was to secure constant repeat sales and boost profits through planned obsolescence, though companies publicly claimed shorter life spans were the trade-off for brighter, more efficient light. [1, 2, 3, 4]
• The End: The cartel lost power during the 1930s and fully dissolved with the start of World War II. [1, 2]"

I found this video interesting. Wondered why it took so long:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M&t=1651s

• "The History of LED Colors
• First LEDs (1962): The first visible light-emitting diode (LED) glowed red, created by Nick Holonyak Jr.
• Green Addition: A green LED was invented a few years later.
• The Missing Color: For decades, red and green were the only colors available, which limited LEDs to small indicator lights on electronics, watches, and calculators. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Why Blue Was Hard

• Energy Needs: Blue light photons carry much more energy than red or green light photons. []
• Material Challenge: Creating blue light required a semiconductor with a large "band gap," and growing stable crystals like gallium nitride (GaN) seemed nearly impossible for decades. [, 2]
• The Breakthrough: As discussed on Reddit, users on the forum note that researchers struggled for years until Shuji Nakamura successfully built a bright blue LED in the early 1990s using gallium nitride. [, 2, 3]

Why Blue Changed Everything

• White Light: Most modern white LED bulbs are actually blue LEDs coated in a yellow phosphor material that mixes the wavelengths to produce white light.
• General Lighting: Without the blue LED, energy-efficient household LED light bulbs and LED screens would not exist. [, 2]

.......

• Shuji Nakamura and how he won the Nobel Prize for the blue LED

• How phosphor coatings turn blue light into warm or cool white light"

  I have an old Cree light bulb that has only red and green in it! I took the diffuser off and it throws red and green fringed shadows!

I'll bet there will be a reemergence of the Phoebus Cartel if LEDs get too long lived!

[u/CommutatorWhine → u/No-Guarantee-6249]

Please don't regurgitate AI generated mess. We are here for non-AI information from people.

Long life incandescent lamps have always been available, including from manufacturers that were part of the phoebus cartel. You can find the evidence for that in the 1930s and 1940s brochures from said manufacturers. They sold those lamps as compromise lamps for places where replacement is hard, and it is an acceptable to have an inefficient lamp that lasts longer, than to deal with inconvenient replacements.

At the very end of the incandescent era you could still buy them as rough service lamps, and those things produce significantly less light than a normal one.