Lighting keeps blowing LED bulbs.

SRRAE

I bought a new ceiling light which uses 5 the R9 LED bulbs. Within a couple of days 3 of the 5 failed.  2 completely died and 1 was very dim.  I only had spare bulbs to replace 2 of them meaning I had 4 fully working bulbs in the unit and it worked fine for several days.
Tonight I replaced the final blown bulb and within an hours several bulbs were blown again.

Is the lighting unit faulty or is it more likely the wiring in my house causing these bulbs to blow constantly?

grumbler

What's R9? G9 maybe?

I think higher voltage is more likely to cause this. AFAIK, it can be as high as 254V in UK. Mains voltage is very unnatural for LEDs and the built-in transformers are too small to be reliable - especially in small bulbs like G9.

Homer_home

SRRAE said:

I bought a new ceiling light which uses 5 the R9 LED bulbs. Within a couple of days 3 of the 5 failed.  2 completely died and 1 was very dim.  I only had spare bulbs to replace 2 of them meaning I had 4 fully working bulbs in the unit and it worked fine for several days.
Tonight I replaced the final blown bulb and within an hours several bulbs were blown again.

Is the lighting unit faulty or is it more likely the wiring in my house causing these bulbs to blow constantly?

Can you show us a pic of how you wired it in?

FreeBear

grumbler said: I think higher voltage is more likely to cause this. AFAIK, it can be as high as 254V in UK. Mains voltage is very unnatural for LEDs and the built-in transformers are too small to be reliable - especially in small bulbs like G9.

230V +10% -6% - this gives a range of 216V to 253V.

Most LED bulbs use a capacitor to drop the mains voltage down to a usable level - Much cheaper than using a transformer. If these G9 bulbs are cheap Chinese ones, do not expect them to last - Quite frankly, the size of them is no where near large enough to use decent sized components that can dissipate the heat generated by dropping the mains voltage down.

fenwick458

how much did you pay for the bulbs, and what are they? 
it's extremely rare for a light fitting to cause bulbs or lamps to blow, the most common cause of them failing is the bulbs themselves..
when LED was quite new, about 5 years ago I was called to a house to investigate a lighting fault, the customer said there simply had to be something wrong with the wiring, all the bulbs were repeatedly blowing.
I asked where they got the bulbs from, they said they came from amazon and were £3 each!
this was back when a good compact flourescent was about £6, and LED's were not as bright and twice the price.
so obviously the homeowner was dis-satisfied of being told it was their own fault, i'll have probably said "you get what you pay for and laughed a bit!"
anyway, in order to prove my point, (as they clearly just thought I was an in-experienced electrician and not good enough to track down their electrical gremlin that had just appeared at the exact same time as the new LED bulbs from china) I left them 1 x brand new phillips tornado 23W CFL as I had one in the van, I said if it blows that let me know and I'll come back and have a look for the fault. I did go back but it wasn't until a few years later to do another job, and unsurprisingly (to me anyway) I was right.

dr_p_manning

SRRAE said:

I bought a new ceiling light which uses 5 the R9 LED bulbs. Within a couple of days 3 of the 5 failed.  2 completely died and 1 was very dim.  I only had spare bulbs to replace 2 of them meaning I had 4 fully working bulbs in the unit and it worked fine for several days.
Tonight I replaced the final blown bulb and within an hours several bulbs were blown again.

Is the lighting unit faulty or is it more likely the wiring in my house causing these bulbs to blow constantly?

I find most LEDs fail pretty quickly. I'm led to believe it's the power supplies. I've had expensive and cheap and same issues. 

neilmcl

dr_p_manning said:

SRRAE said:

I bought a new ceiling light which uses 5 the R9 LED bulbs. Within a couple of days 3 of the 5 failed.  2 completely died and 1 was very dim.  I only had spare bulbs to replace 2 of them meaning I had 4 fully working bulbs in the unit and it worked fine for several days.
Tonight I replaced the final blown bulb and within an hours several bulbs were blown again.

Is the lighting unit faulty or is it more likely the wiring in my house causing these bulbs to blow constantly?

I find most LEDs fail pretty quickly. I'm led to believe it's the power supplies. I've had expensive and cheap and same issues. 

I've not had a single LED bulb fail yet in the many years since I swapped over to them.

twopenny

I've had no issues with LED's and used them in a house with 1960's wiring and my current place with 1999 wiring. How old is the wiring in your house? Who fitted the new fitment?

Though I did look up what sort of wiring was suitable.

If you were sold the lighting fitment from a store I would suggest you go back and say it's got problems. If it was online then that's tougher but you could try and contact them.

The other option is to get an electrician to take a look.

grumbler

twopenny said:

I've had no issues with LED's and used them in a house with 1960's wiring and my current place with 1999 wiring. How old is the wiring in your house?

What does the wiring have to do with this? How exactly can it affect LED lights?

twopenny

When I looked up if it was ok to put LED's in my old house there was something about it not being suitable if the wiring was beyond a certain age.

Sorry, too late to try and find it and it was some time ago so my 'history' won't bring it up. But that came up again when I searched for safety before putting led's in my newer place.

Fair enough if that's wrong.

Carrot007

Wiring? Now come on the wiring either works or does not.

However as other people have said. The LED's never fail. The transformer will.

 Espeicially for mains voltage ones.

I have refitted a lot of standard byonet fittins (b22d?) since moving to led. And I do get smart colour temperature and colour changing ones. They work great.

I tried that with GU10's and they all died pretty quickly (flicker, transfomer going bad). However I can confirm normal led gu10's work great compared to wahtever was the traditional as they alwasy died ever faster than the many feature led ones. But for the price, it was yeah whatever!