Best cheap LED light bulbs

Having seen a lot of different brands and having the majority of them all fail far beyond the lifetime you might expect, whether open air or in enclosed fixtures, I’d say pick a source and/or a manufacturer that will still be there later to honor a replacement warranty. So many of these use a very basic capacitor dropper circuit and have poor heat sinking and cheap-o components all around….some are potted, which doesn’t seem to provide them any benefit, and some have some meatier heat sinks, which still don’t provide that much more lifetime. If there’s nothing better, I’d go with Home Depot’s house brand…they’re ok, not great, but they will honor the warranty if you keep your receipt (and if you bring one bulb back with a receipt they’ll more than likely just give you a new full pack of 3 or whatever they came as). They have quite a variety now, most in either 2700K or 5000K (kinda bluish “daylight”…), and some are available in a little nicer 3000K (I’d call them 3500K for the ones we’ve had). I would not buy at Lowe’s or Walmart….and Amazon will be a roll of the dice regardless of the brand. We’ve used and replaced a lot of LEDs at our office where they’re getting 10-16 hours a day of run time (most constantly on but several with on-off all day long). The TCP and Satco brands have been the better of all of them but they cost a little more and frankly I don’t think their lifespan has been appreciably longer to justify the higher cost over the HD house brand (but they do have a much wider selection of wattages, shapes, and temps). Even had a few boutique brands (can’t recall their names, though)…the only ones of those that were long lived were heavily finned Par-38 track bulbs (the Par bulbs generally seem to last much longer than typical home edison-base types…not sure why really). We did have some 18W A21 edison base that had big heat sinks, too, but I only saw those burn for about two years before they went home with the employee that purchased them…seemed good, though (EcoGreen possibly? They were $$$ for a bulb.).

So far I think Satco was the only one I’ve seen that had a better circuit topology inside and it looked like better caps and components…still didn’t last what it should have though. So…keep your receipt and hope they’ll be around. Most retailers will leave you hanging to deal with the company yourself, and in the great example that Lowe’s made not long ago, they’ll just leave you high and dry even if they have the product in stock still.