So, recently I had a couple of my LED bulbs here in my house actually go out on me and
I was like, well, instead of just chucking them, let's tear them down and look at it.
And as I was looking for bulbs to use, it was pretty fascinating to look.
So these, I'm going to use them to represent 800 lumen bulbs.
This is actually bigger than 800 lumens, because I didn't have another Cree 800 lumen bulb,
but this is a Philips bulb that I bought 10 years ago, a Cree bulb that I bought about five
years ago, and another Philips bulb that I bought about one to two years ago, they are
all 800 lumens.
The first Philips both from 10 years ago was 12.5 watts, whereas the 800 lumen Cree bulb
from about five years ago was 9.5 watts.
And then the Philips 800 lumen bulb that I bought about two years ago, is 8.5 watts.
So it's really fascinating to see how much more efficient they've gotten, and also how
much lighter they've gotten. This first Philips from 10 years ago, this thing's a beast.
So with that out of the way, let's look at what a Cree bulb looks like inside.
Again, this is a bigger version than the 800 lumen watt bulb that I have torn
down here.
But you can see that it is got these big heat sinks right there.
And you can't tell but this is actually like an epoxy coated glass right here.
So to get into the bulb, I had to put this in a bag, hit it and clean it really well.
And there's still a little bit of glass, and it's making me quite nervous.
But this is real glass.
And this feels like steel or something along those lines - it is a very heavy duty bulb and came
basically in three parts.
There's the base here that clicked in here.
But inside that base was this PCB, all the electronics, and the electronics slid up in
between, and they made contact, there's these little springs that made contact here and
then powered these LEDs on the outside.
Now it's interesting because you know - a bulb - you want omni directional light, but it's just
this single row of LEDs.
And there's a bit of thicker glass on them.
And I'm wondering if that's where the diffusion from the light coming from the LEDs mostly
happens is as it's coming out of this square right there, it's very interesting to see
the mechanical aspects of these LED bulbs, with the heat sinks right there.
And it's very, very heavy duty.
But then also, there's not really much of a mechanical connection between the heat sinks
and the electronics themselves.
So I don't understand how they thought this was going to have very good heat dissipation
because normally, if you do heat sinks on a board, you want things to be touching, because
conduction is so much better than convection.
And I'm wondering if that's why this burned out is because something happened, the electronics
overheated, because despite these massive pieces of metal here, there was just really
no way for the heat of the electronics to get out.
So it was interesting to see that this five year old bulb was built very heavy duty,
epoxy covered glass pieces of metal here, and then a rather large circuit board.
So let's get into the electronics of this Cree bulb it actually has 2014 written on it.
So that was five years ago.
As we look at the PCB, you can see the contacts up here that I was talking about where it
goes up through that center portion, and makes the connections with the LEDs.
But as you look at it, you kind of think that seems like a lot of wasted space. It's not
a big deal,
but on consumer products, where they're trying to save just pennies on everything,
I'm surprised at how big this is, compared to how few components there are.
Now this one is a dimmable LED, so I was expecting more logic in it or something along those
lines.
But it seems like they got that all figured out with just the electronics themselves.
So as you look at it, there's this massive electrolytic capacitor on the back.
And I'm just assuming that's to smooth the DC signal after it's been rectified.
And then on the other side, you have two inductors and some other capacitors.
And then some little electronic devices that I am assuming are rectifier for this, all
of this in this package just takes that 110 or 220 AC signal and turns it into
a DC signal that your LED can actually use it.
So I was surprised at the electronics of this and the simplicity of the electronics for
being dimmable and for how heavy duty the mechanical portion are.
That is the Cree bulb.
And that was five years ago.
And again, pretty robust, pretty heavy, but almost seems over engineered in some ways.
And under engineered in other ways.
Let's move on to the Philips bulb.
So the Philips bulb, this is exact same one as what I took apart.
So on this, it's plastic in the construction of this is actually a lot of plastic and a
lot of glue compared to this one where you didn't really see much of that.
And for this, I just was able to use a Dremel cut around there and pop off the top.
And once you pop off the top, what you're looking at is basically this right here and
all of these LEDs, and it's these LEDs that are just flat, and they don't have the defusing
glass or plastic over the top.
So what happens there is you get most of your diffusion from the plastic dome out here,
this part was in here and it was glued.
And you can see this basically ring of plastic and glue that was connecting this into the
dome.
And so there was a lot of cutting kind of a little bit of sawing to get that out.
And once I pulled that off, also noticed that this portion right here, that is actually
just glued on top of the metal right there.
So after I did a little bit of a cut right there, I was able to pry it off, and it just
peeled off from around the outside.
This shows that they have definitely been trying to minimize the amount of space this
uses.
And they've been trying to minimize, basically the components used.
And they're thinking less about, hey, how do I fix this in the field.
These are basically disposable at this point, because it was a real pain to take this one
apart.
Though granted, dealing with the glass on that one, it was also a real pain, but it
felt like that one was designed to come apart and be more friendly as they're trying to
figure out what's wrong with it and improve things.
Whereas this one, I mean, look at how they jam the components on there, tons of little
resistors, you get those two tiny capacitors, you've got an ABS70 if I'm reading that again,
or ABS10, I looked it up earlier that is definitely rectifier.
And then you have that diode and then on the backside, another big, though smaller, but still
a big electrolytic capacitor to smooth the power that's coming in.
And then you've got a BJT transistor and you have a transformer.
It's very interesting to see that both the electronics on this with them being so much
smaller than the Cree, you don't have any free space on this a little bit.
And even that free space is well documented with them showing how everything should be
together.
It has basic bulb 60 watts has a lot of information on the PCB.
It's pretty interesting.
But then everything else is just kind of this cheap quasi metal.
Yes, it's technically metal, but it's almost closer to aluminum foil than real metal, just
a lot of plastic and its construction.
And this one was only rated for 10,000 hour life and obviously got a lot less out of that
probably because of overheating somehow again, I mean the discoloration of this makes me
think that the base must have gotten quite hot.
That's another interesting thing is right here you have these big heavy metal heat sinks.
Whereas here, you just have this metal and a piece of plastic over it.
And that's all the heat management that this bulb had. It's fun to see what manufacturers
are doing with the bulbs nowadays and how they're taking the actual LEDs themselves
and getting electronics in there that can survive and do well with house and mains voltage.
And also deal with that heat and with these, obviously, show how they fail at dealing with
that heat.
So hopefully this was interesting and you found this fascinating.
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