Nearly 3 years ago I bought several 13W LED bulbs from Messrs Ryness lighting in Old Compton St in London. They were expensive, £11-99 each, but I was reassured to see that they had a 3 year guarantee.

Last week one of the 3 started flickering: not a great loss of light output, but very distracting to anyone using it and probably a sign that it was about to fail. I had, being so doubtful about LEDs, kept the receipt and dug it out to find it was only 2 years 11 months and three weeks since purchase. So I took it back and I managed to persuade the manager of Ryness to replace it. Even more amazingly, the price of these has now gone up from nearly £12 to £18. Maybe that's because so many have failed and had to be replaced. I have to assume that the claimed lifetime of 50,000 hours (a decade or two at our typical usage) is just a wild extrapolation from their testing programme and wouldn't rely on that at all.


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Clive Page