How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years?

I’ve bought and replaced a lot of light bulbs, and I noticed that all of them said “up to 20,000 hours” which would be about 5 years given 12 hours of daily use (which we definitely don’t).

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      LEDs can take quite a beating. The only thing that degrades then is being on, and being hot. For all purposes unless it’s inside a restaurant kitchen or they’re on, they’re not hot.

      Other packaged electronic components follow the same rules. Except wires and solder that can oxidize without being used.

      So no, I think that’s a grift if you can’t reach 5 years. When domestic LED lighting was in infancy we’d hear all power LEDs, like for cars, should last 10 years.

        • trolololol@lemmy.world
          2·
          10 months ago

          Mechanical things suffer a lot of stress from turning on/off. But even spinning disk storage turns off automatically if desktop is idle for a certain time, it’s a balance between switch vs continuous operation, they have overlapping kinds of wear and tear.

          Top of mind, you can expect 10k cycles from typical buttons and it’s hard to be less complex than a button. Because metal parts are subject to fatigue.

          Flash based drives would certainly fail faster or slower depending on the number of write bytes over its life.

          Then there’s erosion caused by electrons, which is my biggest suspect for the problems of last generation of Intel CPUs. You have to royally screw up to start selling something that overlooked this.