Ebay LEDs - inconsistent color and brightness (and smoke!)

[bpsims]

Grabbed some cheap LEDs off ebay and finally got around to installing them.

They looked fantastic for about 58 seconds and then things started to go downhill fast!

The color and brightness start off excellent. Perhaps just slightly dimmer than the original incandescent bulbs but the color was nice and warm. About a minute after being on, I notice the color starting to look cooler and they appeared to be dimmer too. 5 minutes later and it looks like a completely different light! Very dim and an awful blue hue.

And then - they got so hot that they literally started smoking.

I put together a few time lapses which span about 7 minutes or so. Camera is a DSLR locked at f/2.8, 1/30, and ISO 400 for every exposure.





Smoke! These are supposed to run cooler!


What's going on here? Is this typical of the ebay LEDs? Anyone else notice the color/brightness shifts?

These are the LEDs

[JFNM]

bpsims wrote:
And then - they got so hot that they literally started smoking.

What is system voltage while this is going on??

I bought all my LED's from ebay and they work as expected so I would not be so quick to write off all ebay sellers and LED's.

[jfkmk]

bpsims wrote:
Grabbed some cheap LEDs off ebay.......

So what did you expect?

[azrving]

I have bought led from CW that worked fine. I also bought some from ebay that are ok but I also bought one particular led on ebay that started smoking and disintegrating. It was in the stove vent/fan so the little molten smoking pieces fell down onto the clear lens with no damage. I more recently bought some from Super bright led that seem good.

I had bought 2 of the led that started smoking so I took the other one outside and hooked it up to the battery and within a couple minutes it burned up too. I then went round and round to get a refund from people who cant have a conversation with me. Ya know what I mean?

[Chuck_thehammer]

like anything.. man made or by machine. ERRORS, Defects. poor handling...

I had a set of all White 16 feet LED arrive damaged. and both the bag and box was undamaged. so it was damaged before being packaged and shipped..

they sent replacement. with express shipping.

[RoyB]

I purchased a whole bunch of the ebay china $4.99 LEDs boards that had a DC VOLTAGE range of 12-14VDC specs. This was back in 2009 and they are still running... I think I have one board where three in a roll small leds are out. The price was so cheap I bought spare boards and they are still in the boxes. Never got to use them yet...

My highest DC voltage coming from my converter/charger is 14.4VDC so I worried that migh burn oout a few of the small LEDs bulbs but didn't happen... Some converter/charger units may put out in excess of 15VDC. Maybe that is what happed to you...

I hope you hooked these up to 12VDC DC and 120VAC...

My old install of the incandescant automotive 921 bulbs were very hot in operations and actually burned the wall under the lamp assys...

My LEDs run cool and put off a nice WARM BRIGHT light..

Of course the GIBBS RULE here is never buy a bunch of anything. Just buy one to try it out and they buy the other ninety nine next...





Roy Ken

[crcr]

Sorry about your bad luck. I've bought many many LED's off ebay for several different RV's and several vehicles, from numerous sellers, and have never had a problem with any of them. I am careful and only buy from volume sellers with 100% or very very close to it feedback rating.

[SCVJeff]

Try this:


It wouldn't hurt to see what the coach voltage is, but unfortunately with LED's you get what you pay for. That's one of the reasons all the LED's I have were bought in Quartzsite where I knew where the vendor was and could return them if needed. Color temp is another personal gripe and it took 10 years for them to get that right. Now you can't hardly tell the difference.