upside down LED bulb?

elstimpo

Southend1 wrote: »

So you suspect that they may have something toxic in but aren't sure? What makes you think that?

Cfl bulbs have Mercury in them but that didn't stop anyone buying them!

I was recently at the Hong Kong Lighting show where these new LED filament lamps were being touted by pretty much every company. When specifics were asked about the gas that may be inside the glass, not a single company either could tell me or wanted to tell me.

I don't know whats in them, i do know that some or most contain a gas or a mixture of gases used to dissipate the heat.

elstimpo

Southend1 wrote: »

Why? Heat management perhaps?

Wouldn't it just be something like helium?

Yes, heat dissipation. I would have thought helium would be the most obvious gas but the amount of companies who told me it was a 'combination' of gases worried me slightly.

With these types of things it's best to be safe than sorry. A i think a lot of companies have simply rushed to get these new products to market without properly assessing them and understanding them first.

There is only one manufacturer of LED filament lamps on sale in the UK i would trust at the moment and they are sold through John Lewis and are very expensive.

elstimpo

Nilrem wrote: »

CFL bulbs typically have about two microgramms of mercury from memory, which is about what is allowed in fish that you eat

What worries me about a lot of chinese import stuff is how much of it is not tested to EU (let alone old BSI) standards, partly because from memory much of the onus on testing is left to the importer or manufacturer with little independent testing (TS are constantly on the back foot because they can't test enough, and tend to only test once there have been reported incidents).
Such self testing is fine for a big company like Asus, Antec, Phillips etc who have a reputation to uphold, and will be monitoring their manufacturers closely as they'll be around for years.
For a lot of stuff sold via ebay/amazon sellers/markets and small stores under their own brands it can be quite risky.

In the PC world there is a major issue with power supplies that don't meet the minimum standards for PC power supplies, let alone CE testing.

It's one of the reasons it's such a bad idea to leave cheap usb chargers etc plugged into the mains, a lot of them are not built with adequate safeties for when something goes wrong (and some are likely to lose the top half of the adaptor when you go to pull it from the wall, because they've used a cheap glue to hold the two halves together rather than a sonic weld, or screws).

I've noticed that the OSRAM bulbs I bought are massively heavier than the cheap Aldi/Tesco ones*, and despite claiming to have a lower light output than the Aldi ones, they seem to be about the same brightness.


*Mainly in the base, so I'm guessing that they've got a better heatsink than the cheap ones, as it's often heat that kills LED's.

This is an excellent post. I think there are a scarily high amount of LED lamps sold in the UK by apparent 'specialist' LED retailers don't actually have proper and authentic CE certificates.

There are so many different ways to dissipate heat in LED Lamps using different materials like Aluminium, plastic and ceramic. Some have fans in them, some use a fin designed to allow hot air out and cool air in. They can all be very effective. A heavy product is probably using a large amount of metal to dissipate the heat, but this doesn't necessarily mean a lighter product won't be as effective.

Cheap materials, lack of research and design and build quality are the reasons why heat will not be effectively dissipated and why it will cause the internal components to over heat 9which will probably over heat).

You look at the way most online LED retailers work, they buy incredibly cheap products in huge quantities and wack an overly inflated margin of 100% of more, then they market 20-30% discounts incredibly aggressively and incredibly frequently. Consumers think they are buying quality LED's at a great deal but the LED companies are making the high margins they intended to in the first place. But more than that, they have also accounted for replacing the product 2/3 times due to failure into their margins and to cover them for the warranty period (which they will advertise as something you don't get unless you fill out a separate form they don't tell you about).

I work in this industry and it really is one of the most dishonest and abhorrent industries around with very very few genuine and honest retailers selling quality items.

elstimpo

Nilrem wrote: »

CFL bulbs typically have about two microgramms of mercury .

Think it's an average of about 5 milligrams of mercury. But not an amount that represents a danger to anyone if one were to break.

Some manufacturers have actually reduced it to 1.5 to 2.5 though !

The real problem is that due to the mercury content they are not recyclable and most end up in landfill.

poppellerant

Eğer İngilizce yayınlanmıştır eğer silverled, senin sonrası daha geniş bir kitleye ulaşacak. Bu forumlarda kullanılan ana dilinde İngilizce.

Google translation: silverled, your post would reach a wider audience if you posted in English. English in the main language used on these forums.