Please don't apologize for making another Dooby video, they are always fascinating. They seem to be going to ever increasing lengths to cheapen them and bring down their service life.
Well, and it may not even matter how much cheaper it is, relative to how often they’ll be replaced. If only more people were more aware of planned obsolescence, and would avoid products like this.... (or, for those into government regulations, then if only there were regulations that LED lamps had to have an average lifetime of, say, 30 years or something, under typical conditions.
Pro tip: you can make the LED lights last even longer and use almost not power at all if you take out *both* resistors! As for the very existence of the 5-LED version... Mass retailers pressure OEMs to come up with products as cheap as they can get away with. A few cents saved per lamp means better retailer margin, who cares what's inside! "Quality" is measured in defect/returns vs. people keep buying them... so the lamps just need to last long enough for people to not return them, trash them when dead ("oh it must be just that one that's bad"), and keep buying more. Cycle works and self sustains. Just ignore the massive trash / recycling issue, that's a SEP (someone's else problem).
FYI E309772 is the UL file number for the registered manufacturer, in this case JIANGXI HONGYU CIRCUIT TECHNOLOGY CO LTD, Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, China. Please keep the LED lamp videos coming Clive!
Clive, your videos of L.E.D. lamps are never boring. I think that we should however start a petition to Parliament to get bulb manufacturers to supply us Dubai style bulbs. None of us are fans of landfill, which is what these cheap bulbs contribute to. Great share Clive, thank you. 👍
You can't make too many LED lamp videos. They were the reason I started watching your channel. I'd bought a Poundland bulb a few years ago and wanted to know how they made them so cheap. I searched and found one of your videos. Your clear and relaxed style got me hooked. I recently modified a couple of the new Poundland bulbs after watching your last video on the subject. Keep it up!
And a lot of people commented on that video saying Big Clive is pointing out the planned obsolescence of LED lights, and mentioned the Dubai bulbs. Because unfortunately Veritasium basically made it seem like all current LED lights are the solution to everything.
I've watched every one of your LED videos multiple times and have learned more from you in the last year about circuits than I have in 20 years of trying to understand basic circuits. Please keep hacking and sharing the results.
Please keep doing more of these dooby videos, I will never ever tire of them. Would love it even more if you do the lumens meter readouts and tabulate the efficiencies.
LED lamps episodes are highly welcome for me. You're not repeating, you're making it polished. Tech does not stop, cirquit changes are frequent, keep ppl updated. love this part of your channel about these lamps.
I know, of I were doing this I would have to have it written off camera and glance at it just before saying it so as to not say pink calculator. This is Cloves dedication.
Love the LED lamp videos Clive! I'm a regular viewer but I never tire of them - massively useful information that helps us consumers win out. Thanks for sharing as always.
Amazing! I took apart several of the LED bulbs I have in my house. I live in the US so we have 170V (120V RMS) power. Unfortunately, your calculation did not quite work out for computing the wattage draw at the end, but I can't complain about 1/2 the power with no detectable loss in lumen output. I did this modification on both Tenergy and Sylvania (Amazon Basics) bulbs rated for 8W output. For the Tenergy bulbs they used an 18 and 20 Ohm resistor. Before removing a resistor I was seeing 8.0W usage and 9.5 Ohms resistance. When removing the 20 Ohm resistor I measured 5.6W usage. When removing the 18 Ohm resistor I measured 5.1W usage. I could not tell the difference when comparing side by side, but after staring for 10-15 seconds my oldest son was able to tell the difference 100% of the time. Keep in mind the difference in light output is very small. When I tested with the Sylvania (Amazon Basics) bulbs the result was ever better. I went straight for the low power draw. The Sylvania's used a 24 and 18 Ohm resistor in parallel. The bulb measured 8.6W usage. I removed the 18 Ohm resistor. This dropped the power draw to 4.15W. I then did a quick test. I have 8 bulbs in the kitchen, all identical. I swapped in a low power Sylvania and kept 7 other unmodified bulbs. All bulbs were visible, with no coverings. I offered $20 US to anyone who could pick out the modified bulb from the 8. After 3 people took the challenge, including my oldest son who knew I was modifying the bulbs for lower power consumption, I still have the $20. Needless to say, I will be removing a resistor from all the bulbs in the house. I am curious though, how low could you go before being able to differentiate between bulbs. If anyone has tried, I am curious what resistor value works best with a Sylvania, aka Amazon Basics bulb in the US..
I think we all want MORE of these videos. Would be cool to set up a long-term experiment to measure the life of original LED lamps vs modified LED lamps.
It would be extremely long term, my LED lamps are rated at 50,000 hours, which is nearly six years continuous use. Cut the stress in half and you’ll have a 12 year experiment potentially.
This Regular is so much enjoying these lamp videos that he has been tinkering with them too. Found some at my local dollar type store of the 2P variety marked 13W and promptly cleared their shelf. Been working on a few to optimize for 24V off-grid PV use at 5W in addition to replacing most of the lamps in the house and just adjusting the value to the amount of light needed in the room. A few have earned a small potentiometer and knob for dimming. Found that, absent a proper hotplate, a clothing iron held base-up worked well to preheat the board while soldering. Slowly adjusting the heat setting until it reflowed and backing off a few notches got me the settings (yes, now marked "Reflow" and "Hotplate" on the dial) in just a few minutes.
Imsai Guy was playing around with a blue LED. He showed that you could get I tiny amount of light out with one microamp. For an encore he attached a small antenna to it and it gave out a tiny amount of light from the ambient RF (wifi, FM radio, mobile phone signals etc). Most interesting.
Wow! Thanks Big Clive! So now I understand why some LED bulbs I buy don't last long. They're mostly for closed bathroom fittings, so I guess they overheat and burn out. I imagine putting in only a few LEDs per bulb saves pennies, but if they sell millions of bulbs then they make a lot of money.
In Canada you can get these EcoSmart branded bulbs, 9W 2700K 800lumen, from Home Depot (12 for 20CAD if I remember correctly) and they are very hackable. They use the JW19813 linear regulator. They come 8led in series, on a board that can accommodate 3 parallel strings of 8. The JW uses an 18 and 33 ohm in parallel to sense. Back of the napkin calculation gives about 5W if you remove the 33ohm, 3W if you remove the 18ohm. Very, very simple to swipe off with an iron or snip out with junker snips. The main power supply is a 10ohm resister on live into a full bridge rectifier, with a 15uF electrolytic 200v in a push through socket and a 680k bleeder in series with a 0ohm jumper.
I honestly think they need to regulate LED lamps better to make them last longer. I feel like I replace them far more often than I did incandescent lamps (in fact the incandescent lamps that came with my house are all still working, but I've probably replaced every single LED lamps more than once now).
@@spacewater7 Maybe, but I don't have power supply issues in general - every time I've check the voltage seems to be almost always dead on 120v. The lamps I've pulled apart the LED's just look like they've overheated and been driven too hard.
In my place LEDs tend to last several years (long enough that I can't remember the last time I replaced one) while incandescent lamps that saw daily use had to be replaced about twice a year. 25 W ones do last a very long time but the 60 W one in my lounge ceiling light I had to replace quite often.
Could you please maybe/perhaps exhume a few more complicated devices for your next few videos? This would greatly increase at the very least my own and probably everyone else's viewing pleasure. Something more complex, such as a gizmo or a gadget, with a larger and more densely populated PCB, and without any solar panels preferably. Pretty much anything would do honestly, assuming it is either electric and/or electromechanical and used for anything than illumination, of course 😉 I think I'm speaking for pretty much every single regular viewer watching this video when I say that any such video of yours would be a very welcome addition to their subscription feed! And as an added bonus it would certainly ameliorate this LED stagnation syndrome we regular viewers are *current* -ly experiencing! (see what I did there, Clive? 😂) Thank you for your daily super entertaining vidjeohs bro! It is always a great pleasure to see a notification pop into my inbox when you upload something new 😁👍 Kind regards from the Netherlands. I hope you have a great weekend!!
Thank you for this video Clive. For any Aussies, the cheapy Osko and Luci-Belle lamps at bunnings have this sense-resistor circuitry that you can hack at. Again, thanks so much mate. Love the channel and you're a total legend.
You've taken apart a lot of cheap lamps, why not take apart a "brand" quality lamp to see if there is any difference in construction and driving current.
I've taken apart some 'brand name' lamps, including from a certain dutch company, and they by-and-large run the LEDs very hard too. not _as_ hard, mind you, but still enough to shorten the lifespan of the LEDs considerably.
Thanks Clive! So much detail! My experience is the same with these cheaper lamps. It is strange that far more expensive lamps fail quicker and have construction that make this hack impossible. As a facility maintenance worker, I have been trying many many lamps until I found these generic ones ( Bought at Home Depot, Box of 12 )to be the longer lasting ones right out of the box. The mod works so well that I may never need to change our more precariously mounted outside lights in my lifetime!
Cut open an LED lamp sold under the ACE hardware brand. The pcb #E323980 this is a 12s1p design. The parallel resisters measured 11 ohms. With 24 and 18 ohms in parallel. Removal of the dome required a hack saw. I've cut the 24 ohm out to reduce power to 60% of the original value. Thanks for the information.
Based on your video I hacked a labeled 4.9 Watt LED Bulb (actually 5.8 Watt based on my wattmeter) that used to work a little bit hot (it has 9 LEDs). Now it works as 2.5 Watt LED Bulb, just a little bit darker (I would say 20%-30% less brighter) and working much colder than before. Can't wait to try it on another bulbs, thank you for your tips. Greetings from Brazil.
Clive, you're one of maybe 30 channels on TH-cam that make the world better and not worse! So keep on rocking what you're doing, I assure, nobody minds a bit. If they do, they're probably just used to watching some douche show off how disturbingly in debt he is to keep up the appearance of 'cool'. 🤣 Losers Clive, they're losers... 🤣 🤣 THANK YOU KIND SIR FOR THE AWESOME YOU PROVIDE US PEASANTS! 😁
Well, I'm subscribed to over 300 channels, all of which make the world a better place, and I reckon that's only a tiny fraction of all the good channels out there. I try not to waste time on the kind of channels you criticize, and to waste no energy on thinking about them being losers.
I never ever get tired of lamps and bulbs and tubes. What ever happened to "The Tubes"? They had a great song that is my new Aphasia anthem, "Talk To Later" -Good tune. Good times
As a regular viewer, even though you have put out a large number of the LED videos, there's still more that we're learning. Even yourself, finding the resistor constant, are discovering new things.
@@NiyaKouya I still would have no trouble backing a kickstarter for clive to design his own board and have a company in Guangzhou produce them. Infrastructure is already there and most of the design work is already done. If he were to build a "9w" in normal parlance and drive it about 6w and a 6w. driven at 3-4w) i think it would get them off the razors edge well enough to be okay for a LONG time. I do think the board does need airflow though somehow because in inverted fixtures (i.e. decorative lamps) it tends to make a heat reservoir. A few basic upgrades would make a bulb that is certainly marketable at a higher MSRP but produce significantly less waste and frustration. I'd pay for a bulb with a real warranty! Also, if Clive were to become quite wealthy just imagine the cool stuff he could take apart for us :-) "Today I'm on my yacht in international waters and we are going to examine the guidance system of a vintage 60's soviet air to air missle"
I'm waiting to see how long the Philips 13W LED bulb in my bedroom lasts. One generation on, but looking similar to the L Prize winner, it weighs 250g (about 9oz) and most of that is finned heatsink. They were well over £10 new though.
@@MrDuncl when it has/needs such a large heatsink to operate that should already tell you that the LEDs are driven way harder than what would lead to a long-lasting lamp ;) But then again, even those hard-driven lamps can last for years which is already a huge improvement over incandescent lamps (on top of the improvement in "light per watt").
@@NiyaKouya Are you familiar with the L prize ? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Prize One of the requirements to win it was "Over 25000 hours life". While 13w is high the heatsinking should make sure that requirement was met.
Recently took apart an E14 LED lamp that we decommissioned because it started to flicker. Compared to the ones you took apart it was quite the oddball, glass cover, separate LED board, discrete diodes for rectification and no chip/regulator, just 2 large capacitors, so I guess it (still) uses a capacitive dropper. And I (probably) also found the reason for it flickering, one of the LED modules had the "black spot of doom". Thanks a bunch for all of your videos about LED lamps and how they work, even if you "repeat" certain topics a few times it never gets boring, so please keep doing them!
Not to worry, I will never be bored of LED related videos, I love them, they are so interesting you always find something new with every product you find
Sometimes it's a serial/batch number, sometimes it's a date code, sometimes part numbers or order numbers from 3rd party suppliers. As another user said, one of the numbers on here is a UL registry number for the manufacturer.
You apologise for 'deja vu' Clive, I 'm at that age now where I forgot what I had for breakfast! They're your streams, you do as you will. You apologise for 'deja vu' Clive, I 'm at that age now where I forgot what I had for breakfast! They're your streams, you do as you will. You apologise for 'deja vu' Clive:- Hmmmm! Wait a minute!?
Are you kidding me? Your dooby videos are amazing, including doobying an outdoors LED lamp with a series film capacitor. I had bought a bunch of 15W E27 lamps for 1.2€ after I noticed they have hackable chips inside. I hadn't seen this exact video of yours at the time, but I see the components are 99% the same. Now I have a bunch of 5W lamps than run just warm to the touch, are brighter than a scalding hot 8W lamp, and have softer startup / shutdown. Any regrets I have is I bought just 12 of them !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As you showed earlier, the I=0.6/R and P=V*I. So if you do P*R and plug all in you end up getting V*0.6, which does not depend on the resistor. That's why you get always the same number I think.
"sick of these LED lamps" no you silly, that is one of the reaons for liking your channel. You reviewing the progress of these lights over time is darn interesting. Please just do as you fancy.
i got some dollar tree bulbs that were "hackable" and quite pleasant for a bedroom light with one of the two resistors cut... got another one and it's a much different design...
Hi again.. I’ve watched few videos of you in the past.! But recently I followed every LED video and learned many things! Thank you. I actually brought few LED lamps back to life which were on a dark corner of the house.! Thanks for answering my stupid questions in other videos too🤗😇. Much appreciated.!
Some of the auto-generated subtitles are hilarious: "...the capacitor and the smaller lower power one is 3.3 megafart versus about 5.6 microfarad." :-D
I worked as a two radio tech for 20 years, troubleshooting to the component level, and enjoy all your videos. Now with the Rona, and not much to do but kill time, I take everything to bits if nothing else but to see how cheaply something is made. I have got the idea to pop the globe off of the LED bulb over my kitchen sink that I have on all the time (so I never come home to a dark house) and see if I can chance a resistor and make it last longer.
So how long until the lightbulb manufacturers start adding things to detect if the bulb has been tampered with for 'safety purposes' requiring more elaborate modifications?
Great video as always. Yeah so much for long life LEDs. Plus overheating because these flimsy joke of an Al heat sink/circuit base can't do much to really lower the temp especially with the lack of air flow.
Just taken a Poundland rated 5.5w bulb down to 3.2w using this trick. Dunno about heat yet but given the power drop I've probably given it a nice life expectancy boost. Good stuff
Love this video. I am in the USA. I have a stash of these dollar store LED lamp bulbs, and must of them blink or shimmer at this point. They didn't last more than a few weeks each. I opened up one and these use an actual surface mount capacitor can soldered on to the SMD traces. The cap is bulged and so I think the manufacturing run has bad caps for all the bulbs I have. My first goal is to get them running right with new caps, then turn down wattage for longer life. Thank you for this video! :)
Yeah, I'm a regular, and I'm learning a lot from it. Maybe include a deeper explanation for different parts in each video. E.g.: Why is the resistance of two resistors in parallel equal to the highest minus the lowest value? In the Poundland lamp 82 Ω - 51 Ω = 31 Ω.
I love these video's. Im an apprentice, this really gets me into little circuits and teaches me stuff I can apply in the field tomorrow. This really helps me apply Ohms law in real life. Im a very visual person. I need to see what it does to put it all together. Just mashing out calculations on paper does nothing for me. Thanks and keep it up 😁👍👍
A resistor of course always cost something but if gives them a large range of possible values by using the cheapest possible series of resistors, without going into special valued single ones.
@@stevenspmd They added the extra resistor to be able to precisely make up the resistance they desire for regulating the lamp precisely where they want it. It just so happens they want the lamp to run hot.
I recently bougt 14w 1521lm lamps from the hardware store and converted them to 4w ones by changing the resistors. They have 36 leds inside and now producing a lot of light by not even getting warm. I installed one in my room and it outlasts 2 old 4w ones. Thanks for the informations on your channel. Now we can make ever glowing lights by our own. They lights were from Hagbaumarkt and branded Shada. I also tested the capacitor mod in series and it also works on these. Hapy hacking :-)
from the very early days, light bulbs were made to have shorter life spans, the big boys in game made sure they all stuck to an amount of hours and would have to send a bulb to tested and were fined if theyre bulb lasted longer
I've randomly found this video in my TH-cam recommendations and am so glad I have. I've only got a rudimentary knowledge of electrical but keep toying with the idea of stripping down elements of corn bulb style led bulbs and powering them from a USB powerbank (with appropriate additional components add). I'm going to look at more of these videos as I feel I may learn what I need from them
The planned obsolescence is infuriating. Companies that do stuff like this will be the death of us all. That said, thank you both for exposing that, and also showing easy ways to modify these do last longer... very cool.
I just opened a 9W V-TAC lamp from Germany and it has a very similar board inside. Differences I spotted: no fuseable resistor on the board (have not checked in the base), capacitor discharge resistor is split into two 510k resistors in series, and the smoothing cap is SMD-soldered on the topside instead of being hid inside the base of the lamp. Also one LED position can be used for either one LED bridging 2 positions or having 2 LEDs there, probably to fine-tune the voltage rating? So it can run either with 15 or 16 LEDs in series
The formula for series resistors is Rt=R1+R2+... and for parallel resistors it’s Rt = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+...) That works out to 24.32 ohms for the lamp you modified with the edison fitting, within tolerance of your measurement.
As much as you might think you're doing these to death, I really appreciate them. For one thing, I'm learning how to extend the life of lamps that should have been longer lasting than they actually do, for another, you're teaching someone who knows next to nothing about electronics a bit more about electronics. I love it. Consider yourself subscribed. Nicely done.
I rather like that you're making these videos, Clive, even if they're repetitive. Especially as they cheapen these lamps, making an easy hack like this widely known becomes important. 👍
i really hate these led bulb styles.. enclosed cap. lets also put plastic over the aluminum cause eff cooling them so they die faster. always say on the package to never put them in enclosed fixtures.. well maybe they should take note of that them self's rofl. sadly no end to it. sure can get the filament like ones don't get hot if at all usually but still driven hard. get these and still driven hard but now napalm edition. mean while my fin ribbed metal leds out in open from almost 8 or 9 years ago still function in one of my rooms...
I have a string of filament bulbs outside the house, 24 bulbs in total at 15W each. Yes, they look pretty, but 360W to look pretty is quite a lot. Plus whenever the bulbs blow, they trip the RCD and cost a lot to replace (if you can even find them for sale). As well as the ES GLS bulbs, Poundland also sell mini-globe LED lamps with ES threads which make them a perfect replacement. From their rated 5.5W (on just five LEDs, so I imagine they won't last long at that rating), I can cut the lowest value resistor out and make them run at just 2W. 48W for the whole string at around the same brightness as the filament bulbs is much more reasonable. Thank you for the hack!
I always appreciate these videos, no matter the content. This one in particular is quite justified for posterity; the manufacturer insight alone is quite interesting to me :)
I just bought an el Cheapo light to do a Clive on it. Not exactly the same but very similar with positions for 2 resistors in parallel. Only one resistor fitted (22 ohms) and obviously hand soldered. My unit is labelled 9 Watts but 5 W ones were available. The cynic in me suggests they are probably the same units but with a different resistor value. No attempt at fine tuning to save the cost of a resistor. GREAT inspiration Clive, I never miss your videos although I have 2 Sat nights live to catch up on.
My local DollarTree Store now sells 2pks of SunBeam LED lights and they are just like the bulbs you show with different value resistors(im in the USA so 120vAC). I have modded all my lights with your video. Before the mod the lights would get hot enough to scold you. I removed the larger value resistor and left the lower value. Now the lights are warm but will not burn you and are still plenty bright enough to use. Thanks! I love the videos like this that anyone can go get the thing and do it too.
I love Clive. Don't you? He is one of the best channels on TH-cam. His voice is mellifluous. If Star Trek is real then I think he must be Scotty's grandfather.
I have no problem with you keeping me on track of that issue. It's good to know the latest shenanigans of manufacturers to achieve planned obsolescence. Having your information makes it very convenient to mod these lamps as desired. For example, I judge the power I want to drive, by the size of the lamp base/heatsink. And in that case I would not want to push it above 3W. Often there is no noticeable brightness gain when pushing LEDs hard, as the lowered efficiency eats up the gains.
Clive, many thanks for your work in this area! I have an application in my midwestern USA home with two indoor flood lights configured as downlights (bases up). The kitchen is about 4 years old and I've had to replace each of the lamps (best I could buy--GE Reveal, 90w) FOUR TIMES! They work for the majority of the year and then most often go to pulsing on and off with a duty cycle ranging from a couple of minutes all the way down to 30 seconds or less. I've taken them apart and the failure has always been in an individual LED chip. I've always thought the problem was heat related and have tried drilling holes in the case to introduce a chance for less heat pooling up around the lamp's PCB (base up, remember). After the bulb has been illuminated for 30 minutes, it really is getting too hot to touch in there. I've contacted GE about the problem and always get a kindly sounding voice that profusely apologizes, sends me a couple of coupons for replacement lamps for my trouble, but "no, we know of no general case problem with these lamps." Your work opened my eyes to the REAL issue here--it's not really a heat problem, per se, but one of pushing too much current thru those LED modules! I'm of a belief at this point that running the PCB naked (without baffle, base or additional cooling) would still result in the same problem eventually--the LEDs are cooking until they fail internally! So, anyway, using your exploration as a starting point, I opened up two new GE basic indoor floors and although the circuit design is different than what you demonstrate in this video, it wasn't hard to find two PCB resistors in parallel draining a little controller to ground. I scraped off the smaller of the two, as per your experiment and total wattage in the lamp went from 13W down to 6, which means each of the 30 LED chips went from almost half a watt down to below a 1/4 watt! Reduction in light was certainly noted, but hardly enough to worry about (my guess is 10%?). I went ahead and drilled a series of 1/4" vent holes high up in the base, just down from the screw base, just for grins. Anyway, thanks again! I'm pretty confident that I'll be buying far, far fewer LED bulbs in the future. I'm going to now routinely modify all LED bulbs as per the "Clive Protocol!"
Thanks for your extensive explanation. I too am hoping to learn to routinely fix broken LED lights, by removing one of the resistors by scratching it out or breaking it with small long nose pliars. And drilling holes in the base to enable air movement and heat dissipation in the aluminium base. Another from watching videos is that internal lights last longer when the plastic light defuser is removed. Because the LED's don't heat up as badly when the bulb cover (plastic defuser) is removed. Apparently it's beneficial if the LED's don't get hotter than 80 degrees celcius or 180 Fahrenheit. I'm not sure, how much extra life the Light has, with the drilled holes, 1 resistor removed and the plastic bulb removed (plastic light cover defuser). But, I'd like to think that it helps reduce landfill with the Light lasting longer. Just some info for older people who remember using Watts as there guideline for lighting strength. Gauging The Brightness Of LED Lights 60W = 800 lumens. 75W = 1100 lumens. 100W = 1600 lumens. 150W = 2600 lumens. So from the above old Watt values we once used, it's obvious that even lowering the Wattage in a new LED Light, we're still much much better off lighting wise than we were many many years ago. Thanks again.
I became a patreon supporter today heavily because of these useful hack type videos. I don't care if you post daily dooby videos, I'd watch every one of them. I have found that on some Edison base bulbs the screw on the bottom tend to pop off when removing the plastic some, which is annoying. I found using a scratch awl works too make new crimp points if the original crimp holes give out during disassembly.
Please don't apologize for making another Dooby video, they are always fascinating.
They seem to be going to ever increasing lengths to cheapen them and bring down their service life.
Your comment was left 6 days ago but this video came out today? Something seems odd here!
@@neilwilliams2907 Patreon.
Well, and it may not even matter how much cheaper it is, relative to how often they’ll be replaced. If only more people were more aware of planned obsolescence, and would avoid products like this.... (or, for those into government regulations, then if only there were regulations that LED lamps had to have an average lifetime of, say, 30 years or something, under typical conditions.
Was going to say the excact same thing, but you beat me to it lol.
@@jaytee8188 Ahh! Gotcha :-)
Never get tired of Led Lamp video. Another fine video. Cheers from almost warm kansas.
Ayyy, I’m in Kansas too, what up brotha
Me three, aka also in Kansas, hello all.
I love these lamp videos because the schematics are simple enough for me to understand and it's always interesting to see what components they use.
I found your channel originally for this content - don't ever apologize for being you!
Pro tip: you can make the LED lights last even longer and use almost not power at all if you take out *both* resistors!
As for the very existence of the 5-LED version... Mass retailers pressure OEMs to come up with products as cheap as they can get away with. A few cents saved per lamp means better retailer margin, who cares what's inside! "Quality" is measured in defect/returns vs. people keep buying them... so the lamps just need to last long enough for people to not return them, trash them when dead ("oh it must be just that one that's bad"), and keep buying more. Cycle works and self sustains. Just ignore the massive trash / recycling issue, that's a SEP (someone's else problem).
"I got a 3000 lumen lamp! Annnd its on fire."
._.) I have tried to remove both resistor and it simply just turned off..
@@XanderProduction so the LED will last forever...
@@regmigrant essentialy becoming Dark LED Diode..
@@regmigrant lol 😂
FYI E309772 is the UL file number for the registered manufacturer, in this case JIANGXI HONGYU CIRCUIT TECHNOLOGY CO LTD, Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, China.
Please keep the LED lamp videos coming Clive!
No reason at all to apologize for the video! We are happy to watch whatever content you choose.
Clive, your videos of L.E.D. lamps are never boring. I think that we should however start a petition to Parliament to get bulb manufacturers to supply us Dubai style bulbs. None of us are fans of landfill, which is what these cheap bulbs contribute to. Great share Clive, thank you. 👍
You look at as many lamps as you like, I could listen to you read a weeks worth of shipping forecasts, your voice soothes me! :)
I Have Never Owned An LED Device That Has Outlived The Actual Lifespan Of The LED's In It.
The return of the Kink Palculator, I love it. 😊🤣
I'm choked lmao 😂😂😂
Cink Palculator
AKA _LotR 3_
You can't make too many LED lamp videos. They were the reason I started watching your channel. I'd bought a Poundland bulb a few years ago and wanted to know how they made them so cheap. I searched and found one of your videos. Your clear and relaxed style got me hooked. I recently modified a couple of the new Poundland bulbs after watching your last video on the subject. Keep it up!
Vertasium recently did a video on lightbulb planned obsolescence which is very interesting
"This is why we can't have nice things"
And a lot of people commented on that video saying Big Clive is pointing out the planned obsolescence of LED lights, and mentioned the Dubai bulbs. Because unfortunately Veritasium basically made it seem like all current LED lights are the solution to everything.
@@dionamuh Our Rob or Ross
@@EggBastion the snake eventually eats it self
I've watched every one of your LED videos multiple times and have learned more from you in the last year about circuits than I have in 20 years of trying to understand basic circuits. Please keep hacking and sharing the results.
You know you are "economy minded" when you spend half an hour watching Clive hack a 30p per-year lamp into a 10p per-year lamp. :) Thank you Sir.
Economy minded? I would rather say anti throw away minded.
Never enough of this content sir. Saving landfill and energy. Thank you.
They will grill the LEDs...then WE shall resist!
"The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udun!"
Fucking nerd.. I LOVE it 😂🤣
@@Deiphobuzz I thought I heard Homer Simpson yelling.
As long as you keep on pulling things apart and explaining how they were I'll be here!
Please keep doing more of these dooby videos, I will never ever tire of them. Would love it even more if you do the lumens meter readouts and tabulate the efficiencies.
good idea!!!
LED lamps episodes are highly welcome for me. You're not repeating, you're making it polished. Tech does not stop, cirquit changes are frequent, keep ppl updated. love this part of your channel about these lamps.
Ahh the _kink palculator_ , every time Big Clive said it I'd let out a small chuckle as to how smoothly and seriously he says it.
I know, of I were doing this I would have to have it written off camera and glance at it just before saying it so as to not say pink calculator.
This is Cloves dedication.
@@welshdave5263 yeah haha
At first I thought I'd misheard it. Then second, 'Oh yeah!'.
And nanofarts. There's plausible deniability in that one. Not that Clive would deny it.
I love this term! I really admire our all favorite BigClive! Big electrical hugs from edison-screwed germany.
Love the LED lamp videos Clive! I'm a regular viewer but I never tire of them - massively useful information that helps us consumers win out. Thanks for sharing as always.
Amazing! I took apart several of the LED bulbs I have in my house. I live in the US so we have 170V (120V RMS) power. Unfortunately, your calculation did not quite work out for computing the wattage draw at the end, but I can't complain about 1/2 the power with no detectable loss in lumen output. I did this modification on both Tenergy and Sylvania (Amazon Basics) bulbs rated for 8W output. For the Tenergy bulbs they used an 18 and 20 Ohm resistor. Before removing a resistor I was seeing 8.0W usage and 9.5 Ohms resistance. When removing the 20 Ohm resistor I measured 5.6W usage. When removing the 18 Ohm resistor I measured 5.1W usage. I could not tell the difference when comparing side by side, but after staring for 10-15 seconds my oldest son was able to tell the difference 100% of the time. Keep in mind the difference in light output is very small. When I tested with the Sylvania (Amazon Basics) bulbs the result was ever better. I went straight for the low power draw. The Sylvania's used a 24 and 18 Ohm resistor in parallel. The bulb measured 8.6W usage. I removed the 18 Ohm resistor. This dropped the power draw to 4.15W. I then did a quick test. I have 8 bulbs in the kitchen, all identical. I swapped in a low power Sylvania and kept 7 other unmodified bulbs. All bulbs were visible, with no coverings. I offered $20 US to anyone who could pick out the modified bulb from the 8. After 3 people took the challenge, including my oldest son who knew I was modifying the bulbs for lower power consumption, I still have the $20.
Needless to say, I will be removing a resistor from all the bulbs in the house. I am curious though, how low could you go before being able to differentiate between bulbs. If anyone has tried, I am curious what resistor value works best with a Sylvania, aka Amazon Basics bulb in the US..
Hands up who though Big Clive was going to test the resistor on the picture? C'mon, you know you did!
Actually it did happen in the past.
@@kjur18 I think I remember that!......
🤣 yeah I thought he will do it again.. But didnt happen..
@@XanderProduction He was slightly drunk that time if I remember correctly.
It crossed my mind.
I think we all want MORE of these videos. Would be cool to set up a long-term experiment to measure the life of original LED lamps vs modified LED lamps.
It would be extremely long term, my LED lamps are rated at 50,000 hours, which is nearly six years continuous use. Cut the stress in half and you’ll have a 12 year experiment potentially.
This Regular is so much enjoying these lamp videos that he has been tinkering with them too.
Found some at my local dollar type store of the 2P variety marked 13W and promptly cleared their shelf.
Been working on a few to optimize for 24V off-grid PV use at 5W in addition to replacing most of the lamps in the house and just adjusting the value to the amount of light needed in the room.
A few have earned a small potentiometer and knob for dimming. Found that, absent a proper hotplate, a clothing iron held base-up worked well to preheat the board while soldering. Slowly adjusting the heat setting until it reflowed and backing off a few notches got me the settings (yes, now marked "Reflow" and "Hotplate" on the dial) in just a few minutes.
I (and I'm sure many others)would love to see how you implemented the pot for dimming.
Imsai Guy was playing around with a blue LED. He showed that you could get I tiny amount of light out with one microamp. For an encore he attached a small antenna to it and it gave out a tiny amount of light from the ambient RF (wifi, FM radio, mobile phone signals etc). Most interesting.
Read his note at the beginning. It was April 1st
Wow! Thanks Big Clive! So now I understand why some LED bulbs I buy don't last long. They're mostly for closed bathroom fittings, so I guess they overheat and burn out.
I imagine putting in only a few LEDs per bulb saves pennies, but if they sell millions of bulbs then they make a lot of money.
When you were having trouble with that resistor it made me want to say: Resistance is Futile.
You will be assimilated....
In Canada you can get these EcoSmart branded bulbs, 9W 2700K 800lumen, from Home Depot (12 for 20CAD if I remember correctly) and they are very hackable. They use the JW19813 linear regulator. They come 8led in series, on a board that can accommodate 3 parallel strings of 8. The JW uses an 18 and 33 ohm in parallel to sense. Back of the napkin calculation gives about 5W if you remove the 33ohm, 3W if you remove the 18ohm. Very, very simple to swipe off with an iron or snip out with junker snips. The main power supply is a 10ohm resister on live into a full bridge rectifier, with a 15uF electrolytic 200v in a push through socket and a 680k bleeder in series with a 0ohm jumper.
As a regular, I do not mind at all that you cover a lot of these lamps, it’s great content!
As a regular I'm still loving the led lamps. You've actually inspired me to make some diy capacitive droppers for my own LEDs at home
I honestly think they need to regulate LED lamps better to make them last longer. I feel like I replace them far more often than I did incandescent lamps (in fact the incandescent lamps that came with my house are all still working, but I've probably replaced every single LED lamps more than once now).
Maybe you get power surges often.
@@spacewater7 Maybe, but I don't have power supply issues in general - every time I've check the voltage seems to be almost always dead on 120v. The lamps I've pulled apart the LED's just look like they've overheated and been driven too hard.
Have you seen the vid on cooling LEDs to make them last longer ?
Make a dive into the Phoebus cartel of 1924
In my place LEDs tend to last several years (long enough that I can't remember the last time I replaced one) while incandescent lamps that saw daily use had to be replaced about twice a year. 25 W ones do last a very long time but the 60 W one in my lounge ceiling light I had to replace quite often.
Could you please maybe/perhaps exhume a few more complicated devices for your next few videos? This would greatly increase at the very least my own and probably everyone else's viewing pleasure.
Something more complex, such as a gizmo or a gadget, with a larger and more densely populated PCB, and without any solar panels preferably. Pretty much anything would do honestly, assuming it is either electric and/or electromechanical and used for anything than illumination, of course 😉 I think I'm speaking for pretty much every single regular viewer watching this video when I say that any such video of yours would be a very welcome addition to their subscription feed!
And as an added bonus it would certainly ameliorate this LED stagnation syndrome we regular viewers are *current* -ly experiencing! (see what I did there, Clive? 😂)
Thank you for your daily super entertaining vidjeohs bro! It is always a great pleasure to see a notification pop into my inbox when you upload something new 😁👍 Kind regards from the Netherlands. I hope you have a great weekend!!
Keep the led lamp modification videos coming as they are very interesting. Also love the led solar lamp builds.
Thank you for this video Clive. For any Aussies, the cheapy Osko and Luci-Belle lamps at bunnings have this sense-resistor circuitry that you can hack at.
Again, thanks so much mate. Love the channel and you're a total legend.
You've taken apart a lot of cheap lamps, why not take apart a "brand" quality lamp to see if there is any difference in construction and driving current.
I agree! A lot of people swear by a brand like Cree and I'd like to know more about what makes them tick.
@@BcuzAndy Cree is an mainly an LED, they do make full lights but you don't see them around so much.
@@drsquirrel00 Because they have a physical retail exclusivity contract with Home Depot so that is the only place you'd see them in person.
I've taken apart some 'brand name' lamps, including from a certain dutch company, and they by-and-large run the LEDs very hard too. not _as_ hard, mind you, but still enough to shorten the lifespan of the LEDs considerably.
Hw might get a cease and desist.
Thanks Clive! So much detail! My experience is the same with these cheaper lamps. It is strange that far more expensive lamps fail quicker and have construction that make this hack impossible. As a facility maintenance worker, I have been trying many many lamps until I found these generic ones ( Bought at Home Depot, Box of 12 )to be the longer lasting ones right out of the box. The mod works so well that I may never need to change our more precariously mounted outside lights in my lifetime!
Cut open an LED lamp sold under the ACE hardware brand. The pcb #E323980 this is a 12s1p design. The parallel resisters measured 11 ohms. With 24 and 18 ohms in parallel. Removal of the dome required a hack saw. I've cut the 24 ohm out to reduce power to 60% of the original value. Thanks for the information.
Based on your video I hacked a labeled 4.9 Watt LED Bulb (actually 5.8 Watt based on my wattmeter) that used to work a little bit hot (it has 9 LEDs). Now it works as 2.5 Watt LED Bulb, just a little bit darker (I would say 20%-30% less brighter) and working much colder than before. Can't wait to try it on another bulbs, thank you for your tips. Greetings from Brazil.
Por algum motivo, as lâmpadas da Taschibra são perfeitas! Quase não esquentam, não piscam (flickering), e o espectro é muito bom
Clive, you're one of maybe 30 channels on TH-cam that make the world better and not worse! So keep on rocking what you're doing, I assure, nobody minds a bit.
If they do, they're probably just used to watching some douche show off how disturbingly in debt he is to keep up the appearance of 'cool'. 🤣 Losers Clive, they're losers... 🤣 🤣
THANK YOU KIND SIR FOR THE AWESOME YOU PROVIDE US PEASANTS! 😁
Well, I'm subscribed to over 300 channels, all of which make the world a better place, and I reckon that's only a tiny fraction of all the good channels out there. I try not to waste time on the kind of channels you criticize, and to waste no energy on thinking about them being losers.
I think «Look, they're still buying!» is the most inspiring motto for them, ever.
I never ever get tired of lamps and bulbs and tubes.
What ever happened to "The Tubes"?
They had a great song that is my new Aphasia anthem, "Talk To Later" -Good tune.
Good times
As a regular viewer, even though you have put out a large number of the LED videos, there's still more that we're learning. Even yourself, finding the resistor constant, are discovering new things.
Too many? Never! Until a company makes a bulb that lasts 10+ years, the WORLD NEEDS YOU Clive :-)
Well, Philips does, but "Dubai only" ^^; So we "just" need Clive until a company sells such LEDs worldwide :P
@@NiyaKouya I still would have no trouble backing a kickstarter for clive to design his own board and have a company in Guangzhou produce them. Infrastructure is already there and most of the design work is already done. If he were to build a "9w" in normal parlance and drive it about 6w and a 6w. driven at 3-4w) i think it would get them off the razors edge well enough to be okay for a LONG time. I do think the board does need airflow though somehow because in inverted fixtures (i.e. decorative lamps) it tends to make a heat reservoir. A few basic upgrades would make a bulb that is certainly marketable at a higher MSRP but produce significantly less waste and frustration. I'd pay for a bulb with a real warranty!
Also, if Clive were to become quite wealthy just imagine the cool stuff he could take apart for us :-) "Today I'm on my yacht in international waters and we are going to examine the guidance system of a vintage 60's soviet air to air missle"
I'm waiting to see how long the Philips 13W LED bulb in my bedroom lasts. One generation on, but looking similar to the L Prize winner, it weighs 250g (about 9oz) and most of that is finned heatsink. They were well over £10 new though.
@@MrDuncl when it has/needs such a large heatsink to operate that should already tell you that the LEDs are driven way harder than what would lead to a long-lasting lamp ;) But then again, even those hard-driven lamps can last for years which is already a huge improvement over incandescent lamps (on top of the improvement in "light per watt").
@@NiyaKouya Are you familiar with the L prize ? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Prize One of the requirements to win it was "Over 25000 hours life". While 13w is high the heatsinking should make sure that requirement was met.
Recently took apart an E14 LED lamp that we decommissioned because it started to flicker. Compared to the ones you took apart it was quite the oddball, glass cover, separate LED board, discrete diodes for rectification and no chip/regulator, just 2 large capacitors, so I guess it (still) uses a capacitive dropper. And I (probably) also found the reason for it flickering, one of the LED modules had the "black spot of doom".
Thanks a bunch for all of your videos about LED lamps and how they work, even if you "repeat" certain topics a few times it never gets boring, so please keep doing them!
Long live the doobyage! It's a revolution against the LED cookers! 💡
Not to worry, I will never be bored of LED related videos, I love them, they are so interesting you always find something new with every product you find
Bulb videos are like LEDs, can never have too many.
When do we see a "test" of how much harder the LEDs can be driven?
I find it lovely. Amazing. Helpful.
Anyone who shares any hack against programmed obsolescence is worth my love.
I have always wondered if those circuit board serial numbers actually meant something besides just being date codes or production numbers
Sometimes it's a serial/batch number, sometimes it's a date code, sometimes part numbers or order numbers from 3rd party suppliers. As another user said, one of the numbers on here is a UL registry number for the manufacturer.
As a non regular I was thankful for your patience! It was very informative to watch some of your Videos again
"over 200v in it, and that hurts if you stick your finger on it! I've done it" 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
I just sent off my first PCB for prototyping today, thanks Clive for the knowledge and inspiration.
Another Great LED Video and allegedly the possibility of a burning smell from a l*oundland special included :-)
Cheers Clive. I've just "adjusted" some bulbs down to 1W to get me through the winter.
You apologise for 'deja vu' Clive, I 'm at that age now where I forgot what I had for breakfast! They're your streams, you do as you will. You apologise for 'deja vu' Clive, I 'm at that age now where I forgot what I had for breakfast! They're your streams, you do as you will. You apologise for 'deja vu' Clive:- Hmmmm! Wait a minute!?
Are you kidding me? Your dooby videos are amazing, including doobying an outdoors LED lamp with a series film capacitor.
I had bought a bunch of 15W E27 lamps for 1.2€ after I noticed they have hackable chips inside. I hadn't seen this exact video of yours at the time, but I see the components are 99% the same. Now I have a bunch of 5W lamps than run just warm to the touch, are brighter than a scalding hot 8W lamp, and have softer startup / shutdown. Any regrets I have is I bought just 12 of them !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can just imagine a room or a hall in your house looking like a Crystal cave.
I won’t tire of anything you decide to do I enjoy your content.
As you showed earlier, the I=0.6/R and P=V*I. So if you do P*R and plug all in you end up getting V*0.6, which does not depend on the resistor. That's why you get always the same number I think.
P*R = V² ( V squared)
195 = V(power supply) * 0.6
"sick of these LED lamps" no you silly, that is one of the reaons for liking your channel. You reviewing the progress of these lights over time is darn interesting. Please just do as you fancy.
i got some dollar tree bulbs that were "hackable" and quite pleasant for a bedroom light with one of the two resistors cut... got another one and it's a much different design...
Hi again.. I’ve watched few videos of you in the past.! But recently I followed every LED video and learned many things! Thank you. I actually brought few LED lamps back to life which were on a dark corner of the house.! Thanks for answering my stupid questions in other videos too🤗😇. Much appreciated.!
Some of the auto-generated subtitles are hilarious: "...the capacitor and the smaller lower power one is 3.3 megafart versus about 5.6 microfarad." :-D
I worked as a two radio tech for 20 years, troubleshooting to the component level, and enjoy all your videos. Now with the Rona, and not much to do but kill time, I take everything to bits if nothing else but to see how cheaply something is made. I have got the idea to pop the globe off of the LED bulb over my kitchen sink that I have on all the time (so I never come home to a dark house) and see if I can chance a resistor and make it last longer.
So how long until the lightbulb manufacturers start adding things to detect if the bulb has been tampered with for 'safety purposes' requiring more elaborate modifications?
Or just a blob of epoxy over the resistors. Wouldn't surprise me if they did, can't have the customers cutting into the profit margin now, can we.
Making it a single resistor would also cause some interesting problems.
Great video as always. Yeah so much for long life LEDs. Plus overheating because these flimsy joke of an Al heat sink/circuit base can't do much to really lower the temp especially with the lack of air flow.
I freaking hate amazon basics light bulbs after taking a broken apart, 5 LEDs, 1 resistor and a dodgy capacitor with no uF rating
Just taken a Poundland rated 5.5w bulb down to 3.2w using this trick. Dunno about heat yet but given the power drop I've probably given it a nice life expectancy boost. Good stuff
Ah yes, everyone needs a Kink Palculator. 1 screw up during a stream and it's stuck :p.
Love this video. I am in the USA. I have a stash of these dollar store LED lamp bulbs, and must of them blink or shimmer at this point. They didn't last more than a few weeks each.
I opened up one and these use an actual surface mount capacitor can soldered on to the SMD traces. The cap is bulged and so I think the manufacturing run has bad caps for all the bulbs I have.
My first goal is to get them running right with new caps, then turn down wattage for longer life.
Thank you for this video! :)
Could these be hacked for lower AC voltages like 12/24 AC supply? or even DC?
Never to many bulb videos Clive ,
Yeah, I'm a regular, and I'm learning a lot from it. Maybe include a deeper explanation for different parts in each video. E.g.: Why is the resistance of two resistors in parallel equal to the highest minus the lowest value? In the Poundland lamp 82 Ω - 51 Ω = 31 Ω.
I love these video's. Im an apprentice, this really gets me into little circuits and teaches me stuff I can apply in the field tomorrow. This really helps me apply Ohms law in real life. Im a very visual person. I need to see what it does to put it all together. Just mashing out calculations on paper does nothing for me.
Thanks and keep it up 😁👍👍
Wouldn't adding the extra resistor increase costs? I guess as you said it is designed to fail.
A resistor of course always cost something but if gives them a large range of possible values by using the cheapest possible series of resistors, without going into special valued single ones.
You can buy SMD resistors from Mouser for pennies per hundred. I’d imagine that the Chinese companies have cheaper sources and get volume discounts.
@@howlingwolven Sure. I guess my point was more that the manufacturer added the extra resistor/cost on purpose so it would fail faster.
@@stevenspmd They added the extra resistor to be able to precisely make up the resistance they desire for regulating the lamp precisely where they want it. It just so happens they want the lamp to run hot.
Current reel pricing (qty 10000) at LCSC for typical 0603 resistors is US$0.0014/ea. and with 0201 that drops to more like US$0.0008/ea.
I recently bougt 14w 1521lm lamps from the hardware store and converted them to 4w ones by changing the resistors. They have 36 leds inside and now producing a lot of light by not even getting warm. I installed one in my room and it outlasts 2 old 4w ones. Thanks for the informations on your channel. Now we can make ever glowing lights by our own. They lights were from Hagbaumarkt and branded Shada. I also tested the capacitor mod in series and it also works on these. Hapy hacking :-)
from the very early days, light bulbs were made to have shorter life spans, the big boys in game made sure they all stuck to an amount of hours and would have to send a bulb to tested and were fined if theyre bulb lasted longer
the sort of cartel that would be illegal today and yet law makers never go back to them to ask, wtf!
@@regmigrant hahaha law makers actually defending the public. What a joke you almost had me there.
I've randomly found this video in my TH-cam recommendations and am so glad I have. I've only got a rudimentary knowledge of electrical but keep toying with the idea of stripping down elements of corn bulb style led bulbs and powering them from a USB powerbank (with appropriate additional components add). I'm going to look at more of these videos as I feel I may learn what I need from them
11:18 - I thought you had forgot yourself and were about to measure the resistors on the printout!
The planned obsolescence is infuriating. Companies that do stuff like this will be the death of us all.
That said, thank you both for exposing that, and also showing easy ways to modify these do last longer... very cool.
Guy promoting led lights: Led lights are going to last forever
Pound land lamps and others like those:
Hold my beer
I just opened a 9W V-TAC lamp from Germany and it has a very similar board inside. Differences I spotted: no fuseable resistor on the board (have not checked in the base), capacitor discharge resistor is split into two 510k resistors in series, and the smoothing cap is SMD-soldered on the topside instead of being hid inside the base of the lamp. Also one LED position can be used for either one LED bridging 2 positions or having 2 LEDs there, probably to fine-tune the voltage rating? So it can run either with 15 or 16 LEDs in series
The formula for series resistors is Rt=R1+R2+... and for parallel resistors it’s Rt = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+...)
That works out to 24.32 ohms for the lamp you modified with the edison fitting, within tolerance of your measurement.
Don’t forget within tolerance of the resistors in question.
As much as you might think you're doing these to death, I really appreciate them. For one thing, I'm learning how to extend the life of lamps that should have been longer lasting than they actually do, for another, you're teaching someone who knows next to nothing about electronics a bit more about electronics. I love it. Consider yourself subscribed. Nicely done.
Those crystal covers remind me of Doctor Who and the squeaky cave spiders that scared the bejaysus out of me.
I rather like that you're making these videos, Clive, even if they're repetitive. Especially as they cheapen these lamps, making an easy hack like this widely known becomes important. 👍
i really hate these led bulb styles.. enclosed cap. lets also put plastic over the aluminum cause eff cooling them so they die faster. always say on the package to never put them in enclosed fixtures.. well maybe they should take note of that them self's rofl. sadly no end to it. sure can get the filament like ones don't get hot if at all usually but still driven hard. get these and still driven hard but now napalm edition. mean while my fin ribbed metal leds out in open from almost 8 or 9 years ago still function in one of my rooms...
🥺 oh.... Antique LED Bulbs..
lmao. ikr but i like old stuff so its just me. i still use T12 florescent tubes as well so yeah im one of these people eheh.
I have a string of filament bulbs outside the house, 24 bulbs in total at 15W each. Yes, they look pretty, but 360W to look pretty is quite a lot. Plus whenever the bulbs blow, they trip the RCD and cost a lot to replace (if you can even find them for sale).
As well as the ES GLS bulbs, Poundland also sell mini-globe LED lamps with ES threads which make them a perfect replacement. From their rated 5.5W (on just five LEDs, so I imagine they won't last long at that rating), I can cut the lowest value resistor out and make them run at just 2W. 48W for the whole string at around the same brightness as the filament bulbs is much more reasonable.
Thank you for the hack!
I don't think I'll ever get tired of the LED bulbs. In fact this non-destructive modification is exactly what I've been hoping for.
20:20 Ok, This sold me and I am happy i stayed and watched ! Love the Crystals look to them !
This is a great follow up to using the capacitor dropper for the floodlights. Great work, keep 'em coming! :D
You know you're in for a good time when the Kink Palculator makes an appearance.
I always appreciate these videos, no matter the content. This one in particular is quite justified for posterity; the manufacturer insight alone is quite interesting to me :)
I just bought an el Cheapo light to do a Clive on it. Not exactly the same but very similar with positions for 2 resistors in parallel. Only one resistor fitted (22 ohms) and obviously hand soldered. My unit is labelled 9 Watts but 5 W ones were available. The cynic in me suggests they are probably the same units but with a different resistor value. No attempt at fine tuning to save the cost of a resistor. GREAT inspiration Clive, I never miss your videos although I have 2 Sat nights live to catch up on.
My local DollarTree Store now sells 2pks of SunBeam LED lights and they are just like the bulbs you show with different value resistors(im in the USA so 120vAC). I have modded all my lights with your video. Before the mod the lights would get hot enough to scold you. I removed the larger value resistor and left the lower value. Now the lights are warm but will not burn you and are still plenty bright enough to use. Thanks! I love the videos like this that anyone can go get the thing and do it too.
I love Clive. Don't you?
He is one of the best channels on TH-cam.
His voice is mellifluous. If Star Trek is real then I think he must be Scotty's grandfather.
I have no problem with you keeping me on track of that issue.
It's good to know the latest shenanigans of manufacturers to achieve planned obsolescence.
Having your information makes it very convenient to mod these lamps as desired.
For example, I judge the power I want to drive, by the size of the lamp base/heatsink.
And in that case I would not want to push it above 3W.
Often there is no noticeable brightness gain when pushing LEDs hard, as the lowered efficiency eats up the gains.
They can do whatever they want, but they'll never stop us from taking everything to bits, investigating it all and reusing what we can.
Cheers!
Clive, many thanks for your work in this area! I have an application in my midwestern USA home with two indoor flood lights configured as downlights (bases up). The kitchen is about 4 years old and I've had to replace each of the lamps (best I could buy--GE Reveal, 90w) FOUR TIMES! They work for the majority of the year and then most often go to pulsing on and off with a duty cycle ranging from a couple of minutes all the way down to 30 seconds or less. I've taken them apart and the failure has always been in an individual LED chip. I've always thought the problem was heat related and have tried drilling holes in the case to introduce a chance for less heat pooling up around the lamp's PCB (base up, remember). After the bulb has been illuminated for 30 minutes, it really is getting too hot to touch in there. I've contacted GE about the problem and always get a kindly sounding voice that profusely apologizes, sends me a couple of coupons for replacement lamps for my trouble, but "no, we know of no general case problem with these lamps."
Your work opened my eyes to the REAL issue here--it's not really a heat problem, per se, but one of pushing too much current thru those LED modules! I'm of a belief at this point that running the PCB naked (without baffle, base or additional cooling) would still result in the same problem eventually--the LEDs are cooking until they fail internally!
So, anyway, using your exploration as a starting point, I opened up two new GE basic indoor floors and although the circuit design is different than what you demonstrate in this video, it wasn't hard to find two PCB resistors in parallel draining a little controller to ground. I scraped off the smaller of the two, as per your experiment and total wattage in the lamp went from 13W down to 6, which means each of the 30 LED chips went from almost half a watt down to below a 1/4 watt! Reduction in light was certainly noted, but hardly enough to worry about (my guess is 10%?). I went ahead and drilled a series of 1/4" vent holes high up in the base, just down from the screw base, just for grins.
Anyway, thanks again! I'm pretty confident that I'll be buying far, far fewer LED bulbs in the future. I'm going to now routinely modify all LED bulbs as per the "Clive Protocol!"
Thanks for your extensive explanation. I too am hoping to learn to routinely fix broken LED lights, by removing one of the resistors by scratching it out or breaking it with small long nose pliars. And drilling holes in the base to enable air movement and heat dissipation in the aluminium base. Another from watching videos is that internal lights last longer when the plastic light defuser is removed. Because the LED's don't heat up as badly when the bulb cover (plastic defuser) is removed. Apparently it's beneficial if the LED's don't get hotter than 80 degrees celcius or 180 Fahrenheit.
I'm not sure, how much extra life the Light has, with the drilled holes, 1 resistor removed and the plastic bulb removed (plastic light cover defuser).
But, I'd like to think that it helps reduce landfill with the Light lasting longer.
Just some info for older people who remember using Watts as there guideline for lighting strength.
Gauging The Brightness Of LED Lights
60W = 800 lumens. 75W = 1100 lumens. 100W = 1600 lumens. 150W = 2600 lumens.
So from the above old Watt values we once used, it's obvious that even lowering the Wattage in a new LED Light, we're still much much better off lighting wise than we were many many years ago.
Thanks again.
I became a patreon supporter today heavily because of these useful hack type videos. I don't care if you post daily dooby videos, I'd watch every one of them. I have found that on some Edison base bulbs the screw on the bottom tend to pop off when removing the plastic some, which is annoying. I found using a scratch awl works too make new crimp points if the original crimp holes give out during disassembly.