These were installed in my home about 3 years ago, and within 1.5 years about 5 of them had died out of 16. I opened one of the dead ones up and found an obese capacitor. It looked in terrible shape. Is it worth just swapping out the capacitor for a new one? Anyone know what LEDs these are? This was bought from an Australian seller who sold out of his home/online. Sold as 9 Watt bulbs but clearly not. They were one of the more expensive bulbs at the time of purchase which we took to mean as being higher quality. Well we were wrong about that!
Normal problem with LED installations - the emitters are good but the driver components are cheap and poor.
The potted drivers seem to be much more resilient by my experience. But that also means bigger footprints by default. I suspect it may be the heat that’s accelerating the components demise, where in potted drivers the heat is spread more evenly.
I would not change the components - often when I fixed something like this, it only takes a couple of days for something else to go bad. 3x1W drivers are plenty, not so expensive, and saves you the headache.
Those are late-model Cree XR-E LEDs, you can tell because they have the newer EZ900 die with a little red outline around it. XR-E is old news at this point of course. EDIT: and for the record, the XR-E is a 3W LED, whether those three are driven at 3W or not is up to the driver of course.
I disagree about fixing it, you can often replace a dead cap and be done. That’s assuming it was a low quality cap to start with.
Sounds like a plan. If you’ve googled Capxon you probably realize their rep. Any nice brand cap is probably better, but I’ll refer you to the gurus at badcaps.net. If it’s Low ESR you should replace it with another Low ESR cap. Check the datasheet if you care that much. I wouldn’t care that much, I’d just grab any old thing rated for 400v and 6.3uF or close. Kids, do not try this at home EDIT: 6.8uF, it doesn’t matter that much though. Pretty close is obviously going to work since the cap was able to degrade so much before the bulb died.
I’ve got some capacitors on order and I’ll be changing them and see how that goes. They’re being ordered from a quality supplier (RS Components) so no more cheap stuff.
Hmmm... a 9V battery has 9V exposed directly on it's terminals... And it can push out more than 3W...
I think this bulb (as related to the current voltage condition) would be safer than a 9V battery laying on a table. Just sayin' yo. YMMV.
I'm just a couple of hours North of Houston and didn't realize that it was H-Town... I pass through that area every now and then... Doesn't mean I liked it... (other than the good Mexican Restaurant I found there).