LED Lighting Woes - Suggestions?

I have 26 of the old cheap 4' shop lights in my shop. Over the last several years I have replaced the bulbs with the LED replacement tubes. I get the ones that bypass the ballast. It only takes a few minutes to rewire the fixture. I have also been doing the same thing in our church building - I haven't counted but I bet we have 100 or more there. I buy the bulbs by the case from 1000bulbs.com and have had very few failures.
 
It's funny, I haven't had problems with shop lights. Probably due to duty factor. I just don't have them on that long to accumulate the hours, in the same way as with house lights. My experience with LED bulbs as replacement tungsten filament bulbs is that they dim a lot. You think your eyesight is failing, but it's the bulbs fading instead. It's insidious really, because the effect is slow from day to day, then you wonder why it's so dark in the room.
 
I've got a dozen of these. Nice lights, lots of hours in 2 years, no sign of failure or anything. I bought 3 more for supplemental over the machines, but haven't gotten to it yet... Oh, these only work on high ceilings. Not sure what the minimum is, but it's probably 8-10'. My shop ceiling is 12'-6". Very happy with the amount and quality of light.

 
I use the corn cob type LED. 360' coverage, screws into a medium base socket been about 2 years no failures yet
 
LEDs don't like dirty power. A single spike can kill one. You might look into a low-pass filter for your lighting circuit.
 
WobblyHand said:
I'm thinking these bulbs are being over driven, and are baking to death.
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A very valid point. Vast majority of the LED bulbs are massively overdriven.

I happen to have repaired dozens of those bulbs during recent years (you can call me nuts), and in 80% of the cases it was just one led of the whole string burnt out, all the rest was still functional. The other 20% had to do with the driver circuit, some repairable, some not.

The way I fixed those bulbs: removed the faulty LED, shorted its pads on the PCB, then increased the current sense resistor of the driver chip by 15-20% to relax the whole circuit a bit. With that the total lumen output decreased too obviously, however barely noticeable to the naked eye. These bulbs got a second life, and some of them lived longer than before the breakdown.

I am not suggesting this is a method to follow - where your time costs more than the price of a bulb, it certainly may make no sense. On the other hand, every LED bulb that gets back to service this way helps reducing the global waste.
 
I had one LED shop light that failed where half of the fixture went out after about a week. I opened it up and started poking around to see how it was built and the dead part flickered on a few times. after more poking I found one LED with a bad solder joint. I re flowed that joint and everything worked. So I re flowed all of the solder joints put it back together and it has been fine for 4 years.
 
Chip Monkey said:
I'm getting tired of buying one or another $40 LED "shop light" (using term loosely...) when it seems like 20% of them soil the sheets within a year.

Does anyone have any experience with a specific type or brand better than the typical junk found in all the usual places? Looking for 4' strips. I'm tired of crap no matter how little it costs ;-(
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I purchased 4 from Horror Freight at 19 bucks each 5000 Lumens each and I have been pleased with them, they are on a motion sensor constant on/off and lasted for several years thus far.
 
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