Does anyone know where to find actual good LED bulbs? All of the Feit bulbs from Costco I bought eventually died within two years. I tried buying Phillips (non hue) off Amazon, and they are also starting to die in about a year to a year and a half. They really try to sell LED bulbs as lasting "forever", but in reality they seem to die just as fast.
You might want to check your home for electrical issues (specifically spikes). I've yet to have a single LED light bulb die ever, some have already exceeded their supposed 10 year lifespan.
And that's not one brand. I have GE bulbs, Philips (Hue and not), and random brands from Amazon.
Were they selling cheap LED bulbs over 10 years ago? By my recollection they were all expensive back then. It seems plausible yours were expensive and higher quality than all the cheap ones everyone is buying nowadays.
Speaking for myself, I've bought a variety of brands over the years. Some brands seem to die after a year or so. Others are still going fine after 3-5 years.
Same here. I put 2700K philips all over my house 5 years ago and I haven't had any issues, but I have no idea of the quality of the power coming into my house from my provider.
(Anyone know how good Austin Energy's electricity on the west side is?)
Could also be fixture choice. My Feit can lights from Costco have had a couple failures so far, a few years after I bought them, but mostly when I have an LED bulb fail it's been in one of my enclosed fixtures. That's my choice, though, I take the risk. I buy decent quality bulbs, but I like them bright so I end up with 1600 lumen bulbs in an enclosed fixture, which is toasty. They only last a couple years before malfunctioning. Sometimes I can get more time out of them by moving them to table lamps.
I monitor the electric service at my house and it's very steady at 240V.
I replaced the mish mash of bulbs in my house with all GE "Reveal HD" LED bulbs of different temperatures. Nothing super fancy, just name brand hardware store bulbs.
In the variety of old bulbs, the Feit ones in particular were causing issues with dimmers and also getting slightly discolored and buzzy. Only one had outright died, but seemed that more were on their way.
All the new GE ones have been great so far (only a year), but I'll let you know in 10 more years.
Refreshing all the lighting in the house with modern, matching, actual-dimmable LED bulbs (along with nice dimmer switches) has been a really nice ambiance upgrade.
I've had good luck with Cree, Home Depot's brand. I don't think any of them have died since I converted about five years ago.
Lowe's is stocking GE these days, but I'm not familiar with their quality. The reason I'm not familiar is that they exclusively stocked Feit initially, and yes, those things are pure garbage. They had high failure rates and were not "instant on" compared to others. I stopped buying them and switched over to the Home Depot brand.
I've tried a few of the GE bulbs over the years, and the quality and CRI is always not that great (sometimes easy to tell by taking photos with a good camera and seeing how little color you can get out of certain channels). Cree bulbs have always been pretty good, and Phillips bulbs have been the best.
There are a few other brands you can get online that have better rendering (CRI), and are more accurate to the stated color temperature over time, but they cost sometimes double what even the Philips bulbs cost.
I also wanted to add a data point that I've switched every light in our house to LEDs over the past decade, and only had two bulbs (out of maybe 50+) fail in that time—both were in outdoor fixtures which range from 10-100% humidity, and -10°F to 110°F through the year (quite a torture test).
Just another speck of anecdata: I've had to replace almost all of my < 10 years old, <~10k hours of use Cree bulbs. The last 5 years of LEDs (feit, Cree, GE) haven't failed yet.
one other concern not mentioned by others, vibration. this can come from being too close to a door or being mounted on something with moving parts, ceiling fans and garage door openers.
Also tulip like lamp shades where the base is at the top can concentrate heat and wear the electronics down; canister mounts do the same if no venting.
