Duff lights

As everyone in here is into technology – and as that means you’re more than likely to buy LED lighting for your home, I thought I’d take this opportunity to issue a helpful warning – especially for those in 240v AC areas.

While I have generally had great success with modern LED lighting – there is a particular style of light I’d like to flag up here. See the photo – these are often referred to as CORN lights. They come in different sizes and from different suppliers, some Chinese, some home-grown – but from what I’ve seen they all look so similar that they must surely be made by possibly one manufacturer. I could be wrong.

I’ve purchased perhaps a couple of dozen of these over the past couple of years – and EVERY LAST ONE of them has ended up in the bin.  I thought at first I’d just had a bad batch and bought from a separate supplier…then I thought I must be using them in too enclosed an environment as we all know LEDs don’t like heat.

But no, this last one came out of an outside lamp – and right now it is cold in Britain – there is no way this overheated.  My suspicion is that the LEDs are not well matched and being wired in series, it only takes ONE dead LED to bring the whole lamp to a standstill. I assume they’ve done the power this way to save cost.

Either way these are not, as it were, worth a LIGHT. See the picture, you’ll note on a couple of the lights a little black dot in the middle – that is the beginning of the end.

They’re all gone now and I won’t be buying more. I hope that with this short write-up I’ll save others the hassle. They may well last a couple of weeks or a few months – but that in my experience is about it. Meanwhile the little GU-10 lights with three LEDS and proper power supplies I’ve had running 8 hours a day for well over 2 years now with not the slightest degradation – so it’s not LED as such  – it is just down to rubbish design. maybe if you’re on 220v you might get longevity out of these – I can’t say – but at 240-250v – avoid!