Around 2012, our family got a few LED light bulbs partly because I was intrigued by them. They were still pretty expensive at the time, but we got three to put in the most used fixtures. Fast forward to last year, now that LED bulbs are everywhere, and we finally did a huge overhaul of our lights, replacing all the CFLs that were showing signs of being about to die, with LEDs.

The old ones from 2012 still work fine to this day, keep in mind they were in the most commonly used lamps in our home and got more than their fair share of being turned on and off in rapid succession, left on for long periods, and general abuse you’d expect in a house with a lot of people in it, but they still work perfectly. BUT, we’ve replaced like five or six of the NEW ones over the last year and a half they’ve been in use! The failure mode is almost always that they would start flickering, and because we prefer not to live in a disco studio, we’d have to get them replaced ASAP. We’ve even had one of the replacements fail in less than a year!

And it’s not like we got them from the dollar store, we got the middle shelf ones at the hardware store, and while they were cheaper than the original ones from 2012, but they weren’t that cheap.

What the hell is going on? You’d think over the last ten years, they would have gotten better as the technology matured, but it seems to me that they’ve gotten much worse. The second biggest selling point of LEDs after efficiency was that they last way longer than any other type of light, but the new ones we’ve gotten don’t even last as long as an incandescent anymore!