I’m curious… how reliable have LED bulbs been for all of you?
I’ve been using LED bulbs since they first became available. Overall, I like them. However, real life expectancy has often fallen short from the rated/box label life expectancy, sometimes by a large margin.
I’ve had failures from Feit, Cree, Philips, and a few others. Age does seem to make a difference, but it’s different by brand. With Feit I’ve seen a lot of infant mortality, wherein the bulb dies within the first 60 days. I’ve had up to an 80% failure rate on these so I stopped buying them.
I have some ancient, flicker-y LED bulbs which have been in use every night for 15+ years and they’re still going.
At the same time, I had plenty of failures of the original Cree bulbs (metal heatsink + glass/rubber globe). Usually when these failed only about half the LEDs went out or became flicker-y. Cree’s plastic ventilated models were more reliable but still had failures. Their recent ones have been quite reliable so far.
With Philips, I find their oldest LED bulbs to be the least reliable, with their newer ones being solid.
In contrast, with CFLs, I find the older (15+ year old) bulbs were solid, whereas the stuff produced today is absolute junk and doesn’t ever come close to reaching the rated life.