My smart LED bulbs don’t even say how long they last, but my experience with LEDs in general tells me they will last practically forever. Out of all the LED things I have, the only ones with any burnt out lights are a couple of cheap LED strips I have and I can’t even be sure the ones that are dead weren’t because of where I cut the strip. I’ve had those things for over 12 years now and they’re in my PC which is always on.

Afaik, the biggest threat to killing the LED is heat, and some cheaper LED bulbs have really poor heat dissipation. Technology Connections has a video about them, which may be more informative.

I’ve had sets of LED under-cabinet lights powered on 24/7 for about 14 years. I think one bulb went bad, out of 12.

What are the brands? What are the appliances? Have you tested the electricity coming out of those ports?

Mine are generally good for near 5

Generally because you’re buying cheaper ones that aren’t built as well. Heat destroys LEDs and the cheap bulbs generally use fewer individual LEDs running at higher power to produce a given output in lumens. More expensive bulbs use more LEDs at lower power to achieve the same light output so that they’re not constantly being overdriven and last much longer.

The bulbs themselves are amazing. There are good ones in cars and computers, the flash of phones etc.

The failure point is typically the electronic components that run or regulate it. And of course most companies want to sell more bulbs so they conveniently skimp on that stuff. So maybe the answer is a more expensive bulb that hopefully will last long enough to justify the extra cost?

What would you recommend?

Philips.

I still buy more halogen bulbs than LEDs - 4 fixtures in one room that I haven’t been able to convert go through more bulbs than the rest of the house of LED fixtures combined.

So far I haven’t bought any bulbs this year and have used only halogens, but I used up my stock of both.

My only real complaint about replacing LED bulbs is they change design more frequently than they need to be replaced - If I need to replace one bulb in a fixture, I can never find an exact match

Typically it’s not the emitters – the LED’s themselves – that fail. If driven correctly, those have lifetimes of tens of thousands of hours. That’s what the manufacturer is advertising on the box. Yes, an individual LED when driven correctly will probably last 20,000 hours. (Usually more, depending on how pedantic you want to get. The 20,000 hour figure often quoted is the point where the emitter drops to 80% of its original light output.)

LED “bulbs,” the type that replace filament bulbs in consumer fixtures, typically fail in their driver hardware. LED’s run off of low voltage DC and in the base of all of those LED conversion bulbs is a power conversion assembly that steps down and rectifies 120v/240c AC to whatever DC voltage the LED array in there expects. These are inevitably made out of whatever the cheapest passives and semiconductor components the manufacturer thinks they can get away with. These don’t last 20,000 hours, especially not in where they’re usually installed.

The main killer for all semiconductor electronics, which includes both LED’s themselves and their driver circuitry, is heat. This is often exacerbated by the fact that LED replacement modules are usually stuck in enclosed light fixtures designed for filament bulbs that have insufficient ventilation to get rid of the waste heat from the components in an LED module. The insides of those enclosed ceiling light fixtures, the ubiquitous “boob light,” gets hot, even with only LED modules installed. Filament bulbs don’t care because they don’t have any electronics in them and how they work is literally by getting so hot the glow. But LED modules in that kind of environment will invariably suffer an early failure.

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The same reason that filament based incandescent bulbs burned out. Planned obsolescence.

There’s a very real conspiracy (not just a theory) about the “arms race” in light bulbs for long lasting bulbs. Eventually, they made bulbs that lasted so long that they stopped making money.

Lighting manufacturers intentionally made worse bulbs to simply improve profits. They realized that they were driving themselves out of business. Everyone in the light bulb industry agreed to stop development of even longer lasting bulbs, just so they could continue to move units and make money.

Also, with LEDs, the thing that burns out fastest isn’t the LEDs (there’s usually a dozen… ish, in an LED bulb)… It’s the electronics. The power needs to be converted from line power to something the LEDs can handle, which is usually DC. So there’s a full power supply in the bulb to convert AC to DC, with a certain voltage to power the LEDs.

Sometimes this conversation is simple, a full bridge rectifier with little more than a filtering capacitor, other times it’s very complex.

The power supply in the bulb is usually what fails first.

Mine work for I think over 10 years now. Some of the actual LEDs inside died but you don’t really notice 1-2 of 200 inside the bulb being dark.

I have had the same light bulbs since 2012. One of them broke when I dropped it while moving. Otherwise, no issues at all. Philips brand that I bought a box of 12 of when I moved into an apartment that year. Maybe I’m just lucky, but still no issues.

FWIW, I’ve killed a bunch of Phillips hue bulbs through normal use

Can’t actually remember when or if I had a LED bulb die on me yet. Knock on wood …

My experience has been that they last for more years than I tend to notice which ones are which. I’m not mad at all about their longevity.

I had 2 LED bulbs that I know for sure that I bought prior to 2015 that only recently failed. Those bulbs lasted at least 9-10 years. The rest of my bulbs I haven’t kept up with but those 2 older ones looked very distinctive with aluminum heatsink material for their bottom halves.