The Lamp Room

https://www.ledsmagazine.com/manufactur ... k-magazine

Some interesting parts:

"Many more succumb to peer pressure and play the middle ground, playing the same games with lifetime claims while being somewhat transparent about it. A whole lot of manufacturers are doing what their competitor does while knowing full well that it’s wrong. They take the same shortcuts seemingly for short-term gain — no matter the potential for long-term pain resulting from today’s bad choices."

"In a great many other instances, however, manufacturers have either doctored LM-80 data to skew projections to their advantage, selectively enforced TM-21’s calculation requirements, or maybe just made up a bunch of crap. It’s not hard to find the offenders. There’s no shortage of street lights marketed with lifetime claims of 150,000, 200,000, 250,000, or 300,000 hours to L70. That last one — 300,000 hours to L70 — translates to more than 34 years of continuous operation. At 12 hours on/12 off per day, that would be more than 68 years. Some LED manufacturers’ product lifetime claims are now in the territory of average human life expectancy for many countries of the world. How about a wall pack from a corporate multinational rated >560,000 hours to L70? That’s nearly 128 years at 12 hours per day. I’m a believer in SSL technology and appreciate that with thoughtful engineering, testing, and design iteration one could conceivably achieve decades of reliable operation, but today’s SSL market has run amok with overrated LED lifetime claims that make direct or implied (“L70”) reference to TM-21, the very industry standard that cautions against statistical invalidity, while conveniently ignoring the standard’s most important statistical tenet and glancing over more obvious weak points like LED driver failure."

No surprise there at all - we've all known this for years. It's a pity a few more people don't wake up to this fact - such as the people who specify these fittings as bulk replacements for perfectly serviceable older technology which it tried and tested and we know does last. With proper maintenance, older fittings still piss all over the lifetimes that most LED fittings manage. Fact.

I'd add to that the fact a lot of the enclosures these LED packages are housed in are just not up to the job either. All well and good supplying a long-life LED product, but if you house it in something that will be full of water in 2 years, or will have corroded to the point of failure in 5, makes no difference if the LED's themselves could last say 10 years, as they'll likely never get the chance.

Exactly, most of us on here will own living proof of how fluorescent lighting can last decades and are able to see through the false lifetime claims of many LED lights. I have a 2 x 8w sign light with a manufacturer date of 9/1978 and the light was running 24/7. I know a place with load of sign lights from the 80s too which are still working and run 24/7! Those fittings will have done well over 100k hours.

I think only the very best LED fittings and street lights will be lasting 100k hours. Many LED emergency bulkheads, battens, emergency lights, fittings will be lucky to be working fine at the 50k hours mark because they often use cheap parts and run hot.

I have a Robus LED exit sign on test. It's been going since 24/03/2018 and on September 2021 it will have hit around 30k hours which is what it's rated at. We will see how long it lasts.