How to modify the LED light bulb and make it almost eternal
If you want to save money on your utility bill, then you should definitely replace all the bulbs with LED ones. This is by far the most economical choice. Energy consumption is reduced by almost 10 times. The only problem is the lifespan of this device. It is strange, but with the claimed long life, LED lamps do not last as long as we would like them to. And who, tell me, counts 30 thousand hours of warranty, and if it’s been only 26 thousand – goes with the package to change the lamp? No one does, and that is what the unscrupulous manufacturers take advantage of. Meanwhile, there is not only a way to fix the LED light source with your own hands, but also make it almost eternal.
Why do LED bulbs burn out
Let’s start with the obvious: the failure of the LED light fixture is associated with its overheating. “What kind of overheating,” you might say, “if it’s just LEDs that get almost no heat?”
But look at the housing of such a lamp: it is a sealed construction made of plastic.
PHOTO: stema-orel.ru And during prolonged operation, even with minimal heat emission, it all really overheats
And on top of this, manufacturers make more and more powerful lamps to attract consumer demand, adding LEDs, and the more of them, the worse the situation with overheating. And even special ventilation holes, which are made in some models, do not save the situation.
LED lamp can be repaired: how to do it?
LED lamp – a repairable device, and not many people know about it. To fix such a lamp, it is enough just to have an ordinary soldering iron. The reason for the cessation of operation is most often that one of the LEDs burns out. It opens the circuit, and all the others do not burn. So to repair it is enough to exclude it from the circuit.
PHOTO: YouTube.com Disassembling a lamp is not difficult: you just need to carefully with an assembly knife or a regular knife to hold the joint between the transparent and opaque parts of the bulb, and then these parts can be separated
PHOTO: YouTube.com Inside the bulb you will see several small LEDs connected in a chain. One of them is burned out, you need to find it
PHOTO: YouTube.com You can identify a blown LED visually – it will have a spot or dot on it. Or you can – with the help of a simple homemade tester
PHOTO: YouTube.com It is easy to assemble it, using a power supply for your phone or notebook as a base
PHOTO: YouTube.com Blown LED just need to be removed and short-circuited by soldering
PHOTO: YouTube.com After such a procedure the circuit will be closed and the other LEDs will return to work. But practice shows that they, too, will soon fail – alternately, one by one
How to make an LED lamp forever
As you have already understood, if you lower the current, the LEDs will stop overheating and fail. This will reduce the wattage of the bulb, but will make it last almost indefinitely. Again, if you have a soldering iron, you can solve this problem yourself.
PHOTO: YouTube.com To remove the chip with the power supply, you must first unsolder the power wires
PHOTO: YouTube.com The pin on the plinth is simply removed with a knife or other sharp object
PHOTO: YouTube.com After these manipulations, the contents of the lamp can be easily removed from the housing. Be careful not to damage the construction
PHOTO: YouTube.com Note – there are two resistors on the chip. They look like this or slightly different, but the principle remains
PHOTO: YouTube.com To reduce the current, you just need to unsolder the larger resistance from the existing ones. This will require a soldering iron. Remove the microscopic part and solder the circuit at that point
PHOTO: YouTube.com After that all you need to do is to reassemble all the parts of the bulb and solder the power back to the LED circuit and reassemble the case
As a result of this conversion, the lamp will receive a reduced current, this will contribute to the fact that the LEDs will not overheat. The light will become dimmer, but the device will serve indefinitely, and this was the main task.
Making an eternal light bulb
The packages of LED bulbs indicate a lifetime of 30, 40 or 50 thousand hours, but many bulbs do not live even a year.
Today I will tell you how to modify the bulb in five minutes without any tools so that its life is greatly increased.
First of all I remind you that all LED bulbs have a warranty of one to seven years. If the bulb fails during the warranty period, it can be exchanged at the store where it was purchased. Large stores like Leroy Merlin won’t even need the receipt and packaging to exchange it.
In Lamptest.ru I test the light parameters of lamps, but I cannot test reliability. I’m well aware that for most customers it’s more important that the bulb works long, not what parameters it has.
The causes of failure of lamps are mainly two – burnout of LEDs and failure of capacitors.
If you reduce the lamp power by a third, the life of the LEDs will increase significantly (of course, the brightness of the lamp will decrease). This is what we will do.
In the cheapest lamps are used very bad capacitors, which do not live even a year. There is no point in modifying these lamps – they will not live long anyway.
For the modification it is best to use mid-priced lamps (there is a chance that they have better capacitors). The higher the power, the better (because after reducing it, the lamp should shine brightly enough). Lamps of 15 W are optimal. Of course, it is better to take a lamp with a pulse driver, which has a built-in stabilizer and they shine equally bright at any line voltage.
There are two types of lamp design – traditional two-board design (driver board inside the housing, above it a round board with LEDs) and single-board design (driver is located directly on the board with LEDs and capacitors are soldered to this board behind). For a simple and quick modification, you need a lamp with a single board design.
From my stock I found a lamp ideal for the modification – Navigator NLL-A60-15-230-4K-E27 with issue date 0419 (I hope the modern lamps of this type have the same design). This lamp has real power 13.66 W, gives 1210 lm of light, has color rendering index CRI(Ra) 83, it has no ripple at all. The lamp is equipped with a pulse driver. These lamps can be found on sale at a price of 120 rubles.
Of course, you can also take the model with warm light NLL-A60-15-230-2.7K-E27. The first thing to remove the cap. With this lamp it can be simply ripped off by hand (it will take a lot of effort). Under the cap there is a single board. On it we are interested in the resistors R1 and R2, they set the current of the LEDs.
The resistors are included in parallel, their ratings are 2.7 ohms and 5.6 ohms. Carefully break resistor R2, trying hard not to break everything around the resistor.
That is all. You can put the cap back on.
The lamp power went down from 13.66 W to 8.83 W. Luminous flux has decreased from 1210 to 925 lm. The lamp is now capable of replacing an incandescent 85W bulb, which is not bad either. The efficiency of the lamp has also increased considerably: from 89 lm/W to 105 lm/W.
Most importantly, the lamp has become much “cooler”.
The body temperature of the unmodified lamp reaches 67 degrees, the modified lamp has only 52 degrees.
The temperature of the LEDs turned on the thermal imager does not show it correctly, but it is quite possible to compare.
The difference in temperature on the LEDs is very large – 21 degrees.
The LEDs in the modified lamp will now work very long, it’s up to the capacitors (they, by the way, will also be lighter because of the lower temperature inside the lamp). If they do not fail, this bulb will work for decades.
