"Wild_Bill" wrote:


I have yet to see a CFL lamp last longer than 2 years, and the majority of
them that I've owned haven't come cloe to that (I mark the date on the bases
when I put them into use).
I have some approaching the 3 & 4 year marks, but I largely agree. I
recently had to replace the last incandescent in that same area. It
started out 50/50.

I too have started marking the date.

These are CFL lamps of various brands (not the cheapest I could find) that
are packaged as 5 year or 7 year useful life lamps.


Flashlight batteries don't produce power spikes or surges the way AC power
sources do, and without good suppression and/or regulation components
driving up the manufacturing costs, the LED lamps will likely be too easily
damaged to make them practical in many applications.

I think that traffic lights are a good model for this. The are
essentially screw in bulb replacements, operating off of 120V with no
special filtering. They do seem to last, and the failure modes
usually seem to be portions of led on the "bulb" rather than total
failures.
[ But those partial failures seem to be a lot more frequent than they
were supposed to be.]


The other advantage to battery power is it's already low voltage which is
what LEDs operate on.. dropping spiking/surging 120VAC to a low DC voltage
requires stable circuitry.. which is only reliable if better quality
components are used, not bottom of the barrel, minimumally adequate
components.
jk