One thing that was not discussed in this article is whether Tony was using an enclosed fixture. If so, you need to buy LED’s made for an enclosed fixture or it will shorten their life. Here is one article on the subject:
I had problems with LED bulbs several years back. But for the ones I’ve purchased and installed since 2020 they seem to work well and haven’t gone out.
For exterior lights I especially like the ones that are dusk-to-dawn and those with built-in motion detectors.
Enclosed fixtures or not, they don’t last anywhere nearly as long as advertised. It’s the same scam manufacturers pulled with CFLs: claim a ridiculously long life so that the economics would work early on (i.e., bulbs were initially quite expensive, but if the bulb would last ten years, a small savings per year offsets the bulb cost). We’re now at the point where the economics work even with the actual life, yet the fake lifespan claims persist.
I wonder if the reason for premature CFL and LED bulbs is power surges. Incandescent bilbs were only a filament wire which would heat up and emit light. The newer bulbs have electronics in them and electroncics ned good power conditioning which is not really cost-effective in cheap electronics. I can only speak for my state but we often have power outages, surges (when power swirches off and on multiple times, and so on.
I used to work with large mainframe computers. We installed a building UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) which insulated us from peak, sags, dropouts and noise on the power lines. We noticed a dramatic drop in unexplained computer crashes once the power was clean. These mainframes had good filtering to start with but still, the change was dramatic.
I finally bought “enclosure rated” LEDs for my four chandeliers. [20 bulbs] That was two years ago, and not a single failure. so far