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Whats your favorite E27 LED Lightbulb


Weasel

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I like the 14W Phillips bulb, they are helluva expensive light approaching R200 but I've measured them at twice the output of a 100W incandescent lamp! and the consumption was an actual 14W. All the ones i bought are still alive and well, which is more than i can say for some other LED globes.

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Don't know yet. The house is mostly MR16 down lights so that's where most LEDs are, but I did replace the first bed lamp cfl with a Pick and Pay brand LED. Cost R70. Rated at 7watts, makes way more light than the 11w cfl it replaced. Time will tell how long it will last.

Sent from my GT-I9195 using Tapatalk

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I bought 10 LED bulbs from Aliexpress for $10.90 including shipping.

They feel real flimsy but I recon that once they're installed they will be stationary so don't need to withstand abuse. Got about 5 of them installed for the past 6 months and they're still lasting.

For me paying >R100/bulb completely negates the saving. They need to run for about 9000 hours before breaking even against a CFL at that price.

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17 minutes ago, cvzyl said:

I bought 10 LED bulbs from Aliexpress for $10.90 including shipping.

They feel real flimsy but I recon that once they're installed they will be stationary so don't need to withstand abuse. Got about 5 of them installed for the past 6 months and they're still lasting.

For me paying >R100/bulb completely negates the saving. They need to run for about 9000 hours before breaking even against a CFL at that price.

I think when you look at solar and running on batteries at night every few watts you can save kind of makes up for the price 

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4 minutes ago, cvzyl said:

I agree viper, but why pay R100 for an LED if I can buy a Chinese one for R15? Maybe the Phillips lasts longer but I doubt it will last 7 times longer?

My problem is in actually getting the item here thanks to our lovely post office.
After a couple of orders of a few things that get's lost here it worked out more expensive than it would have for me anyway. Luck of the draw lately with getting your package or not. Some you get some you never do.

Courier is just way to expensive negates the saving

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2 hours ago, cvzyl said:

I agree viper, but why pay R100 for an LED if I can buy a Chinese one for R15? Maybe the Phillips lasts longer but I doubt it will last 7 times longer?

I can appreciate that but to me LED's are not so much a cost saver but more of a performance product. Like your carbon graphite titanium mountain bike. I'm not sure that a expensive light will last that much longer than a cheapie LED, its more that i don't want to compromise on brightness but i also dont want to use much power. You would be surprised the difference lighting makes on your mood and concentration. So that's a pass on the cheap china LED's for me, they will usually lie about the output and there are color variations and so on, also most use capacitive droppers with a undersized or missing smoothing causing subtle flicker that can give you headache.

 

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Nice to know tip is the finger test for checking for flicker. Stand under the light then look at your finger while you quickly swipe it side to side, don't look at the light it must be out of your field of view. if you see your finger more clearly in different positions your lights are flickering, if its smooth then they don't.   

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  • 2 weeks later...

Scamberlains has a special this weekend on some renesola brand LED's R30 bucks or so for a 6W. naturally i got one to test. First impressions is it passes the flicker finger test. seems like its running a little cooler than the cheap Phillips led and more or less the same brightness. i'm running some tests to know more.

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Test took a bit of time because i had to replicate conditions for each lamp and had to let them run as long as it took to get up to a stable temperature.

So each one was run until it stopped getting hotter and its light output stabilized, they ran in free air, in a luminary they'll get hotter.

I ran the following ones,

  • Renesola 6W LED warm white 
  • Phillips Plastic 6W LED warm white
  • Phillips 11W CFL cool white
  • Phillips 15W LED warm white

I don't have a Lux meter so i used a very sensitive light detection device (Solar panel) to measure the differences, the L unit is not lux or lumen its a custom :P i adjusted it in the end to give a somewhat accurate representation of lumen per watt based on the lights claimed output.

  Renesola 6W LED Phillips 6W LED Phillips 11W CFL Phillips 15W LED
Peak Light 2.6548 3.2255 1.0704 6.155
Light @ Temp 2.4368 2.4165 0.9793 5.866
Peak Power 4.5858 8.4125 10.2229 14.7784
power @ Temp 4.4911 5.7407 9.7748 14.3323
Stable Temp 52.9 76.3 94.6 59.6
Finger test PASS PASS PASS PASS
L per Watt 97.66515998 75.76950546 18.03351475 77.76421091

 

These are now my new favorite cheapie led. They are prettier than the Phillips 6W, they run cooler, they have a 2 year warranty, they are more efficient and finally they are a little cheaper. And they are on special now (28-29 May) for 30 bucks, bargain man. They don't touch my 15w LED's in terms of output, but 3 of them might kick its !@$ for less, hehe.

SAM_5340%20Small_zpsalmalpzw.jpg

 

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Got myself 14 now, well i say for myself but most is for my dad, i want to use 4 for outside lighting. But geez they where very busy!

i kind of want to hook them up all at once and see how much light i can get for 100W :D:D:D

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Ive seen the radiant ones but haven't really tried them yet. It would be nice to get all of the different ones to test out.

If you like them I'll give them a shot. But I'm pretty stocked up right now 😃😃

Sent from my SM-A500FU using Tapatalk

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So, while I was braving the traffic anyway to get to BW, bought a 4-pack of Eurolux 4W LED downlights too. When I installed the first ones in this house 5 years ago, I paid about R170 a piece. The 4-pack cost only R180 :-)

So I then shuffled my lamps around a bit so the uniontechs -- which are giving me the most failures -- are in rooms that are used less often. During that shuffle, I found that quite a few of the uniontechs crach open at the back. I'm guessing the heat makes the aluminium bit expand, and the plastic cap isn't too happy to follow :-)

uniontech.jpg

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interesting failure mode, only heat can be the cause. Are they able to pop back or is the plastic now undersized? maybe there was some aged shrinkage also from heat. if you haven't seen it check out bigclive on youtube, he takes apart heaps of electronic stuff. I love that sort of thing.

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1 hour ago, Weasel said:

interesting failure mode, only heat can be the cause. Are they able to pop back or is the plastic now undersized? maybe there was some aged shrinkage also from heat. if you haven't seen it check out bigclive on youtube, he takes apart heaps of electronic stuff. I love that sort of thing.

It has three self-taper screws holding the cap on. The plastic is broken, if you look carefully. I suspect the solution is probably as simple as using longer screws... :-) They are still in perfect working order, so I simply reinstall them.

I'm already subscribed to bigclive. Love most of his stuff... though occasionally he does something odd. Recently he reviewed an oddly shaped bottle of lubricant from Durex, for example :-)

Might be interesting to know who people follow. Perhaps better suited to another post.

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4 minutes ago, Weasel said:

shear line from a uneven heating cooling effect

Exactly. Aluminium expands, moving the screws outwards, causing a shearing force on the plastic. If the screws were slightly longer so they went into the plastic base, chances are it wouldn't have done this. I suspect they are hand-assembled, which might explain the particular method of construction.

The first batch of lamps had a grayish plastic in the back. Those do not do this. This is the second batch with the orange plastic, they all seem to do it after a few months.

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The same screws also pull the aluminium pc board towards the heatsink and if the plastic at the back fails, the crews are in actual fact not applying pressure to keep the pc board in good contact with the heatsink and that might result in less heat transferred from the pc board to the heatsink, which will cause the LEDs to overheat and fail prematurely.

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2 hours ago, superdiy said:

The same screws also pull the aluminium pc board towards the heatsink and if the plastic at the back fails, the crews are in actual fact not applying pressure to keep the pc board in good contact with the heatsink and that might result in less heat transferred from the pc board to the heatsink, which will cause the LEDs to overheat and fail prematurely.

With the uniontechs this is thankfully not the case. The screws on the front does that job.

1. The PC board sits on the heatsink (they even have some heatsink compound there).

2. 3 LEDs are on top of the PC board.

3. Then it has three plastic defusers that sits on top of the LEDs.

4. Faceplate on top screws into the aluminium, pushing down on the defusers, which pushes down on the board and holds it to the alumiunium at the bottom.

5. The three screws in the back just holds the plastic, so when they break, it's not too big a deal.

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Man... the search function on this site is useless. Searching for "e27" does not find this port.

In any case, wanted to report something interesting. The Radiant LED lamp I posted about, one of them is perfectly fine, the other one has a slight flicker, almost a like it dims slightly once a second, but ONLY when on the inverter. Works perfectly fine on grid power. Only the one lamp is affected, and I doubt it's the waveform given that I have a blue inverter in the garage... :-)

Edit: Okay, search function does find "favorite", I simply had to spell it in American. Seems search function does not index words that are too short.

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