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Best MR11 LED bulbs


Giant

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We have been struggling to find 12V MR11 LED bulbs that both suit our preferences and are reliable.

We've been through two sets I picked out from Chinese suppliers, the first set were a bit dim and too blue for us, the second set were brighter and warmer but too narrow-beamed and started failing after a few months.

We thought we'd finally hit the jackpot with these ones from UltraLEDs:

mr1130wwb.jpg

They're seriously bright (30 2835 LEDs, 350 lumen), warm colour temperature, and have a nice wide 120 degree spread with a diffuser on the front rather than just an exposed PCB with the LEDs on.

Having spent a bunch on getting 20 of them, I stuck a 12V regulator in the lighting circuit to protect them as it wasn't clear if they'd be OK with straight battery voltage.

All looked good but a year or so on more and more individual ones are starting to flicker - seems to be premature degradation of the internal drive circuitry, not the LEDs themselves. We're now losing more of them by the day and going to have to replace yet again.

Any ideas? These latest ones were perfect aside from the short lifetime. I have looked at Bedazzled etc but not turning up any as bright as this, their best MR11 is 18 2835 LEDs at 230 lumens.

I design electronics so would happily even make my own ones with decent drive circuits! But would need a source of MR11 housings and diffusers.

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I have a pair of MR11 in my 12v cooker hood. They're just as bright as the halogens they replaced and I've had them in there about 5 years. We use them much more than a cooker hood application would suggest as they're a nicer ambience than leaving the galley lights on or having that end dark.  That all sounds pretty handy, however, as they've been in for 5 years I can remember nothing else about them!  I'm at the boat after the weekend so I'll see if I can find more detail - I think I may have kept the boxes they came in as storage for the halogens as spares.

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1 hour ago, Sea Dog said:

I have a pair of MR11 in my 12v cooker hood. They're just as bright as the halogens they replaced and I've had them in there about 5 years. We use them much more than a cooker hood application would suggest as they're a nicer ambience than leaving the galley lights on or having that end dark.  That all sounds pretty handy, however, as they've been in for 5 years I can remember nothing else about them!  I'm at the boat after the weekend so I'll see if I can find more detail - I think I may have kept the boxes they came in as storage for the halogens as spares.

:D I used to store my halogens like that as " spares " we had about sixty in a box for ages so I eventualy skipped em. Wonder how many of us have kept the old halogen ones?

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8 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

:D I used to store my halogens like that as " spares " we had about sixty in a box for ages so I eventualy skipped em. Wonder how many of us have kept the old halogen ones?

Hehe, yeah. To be fair I've only kept the cooker hood ones which are MR11 so different from the rest - I have a couple of spare leds to cover the other 20 or so. They are all bedazzled though, and I've not had any fail.

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43 minutes ago, Sea Dog said:

Hehe, yeah. To be fair I've only kept the cooker hood ones which are MR11 so different from the rest - I have a couple of spare leds to cover the other 20 or so. They are all bedazzled though, and I've not had any fail.

I would buy from bedazzled but I don't have a spare thirty grand for bulb replacement :P

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14 hours ago, Giant said:

I design electronics so would happily even make my own ones with decent drive circuits! But would need a source of MR11 housings and diffusers.

How about buy one or two of a few different ones from Aliexpress (usually the cheapest source), reverse engineer them, let us know what you think. :)

Personally I would look at the 'COB' ones first and foremost... eg:

https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?site=glo&g=y&SortType=total_tranpro_desc&SearchText=cob+mr11&needQuery=n

ETA: The best for a mainstream brand at typical high street prices may be the OSRAM Star MR11 3.7w (345lm) for £9.99:

https://www.clasohlson.com/uk/Osram-GU4-(MR11)-LED-Bulb/36-6918

Edited by smileypete
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if you want to get a cheaper price from aliexpress find what you want and add it to you basket from a pc (easier site navigation) and then use their mobile app to actually buy them, there used to be a discount if you used the mobile app (not sure if it's still applied, but worth a try)

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15 hours ago, Giant said:

All looked good but a year or so on more and more individual ones are starting to flicker - seems to be premature degradation of the internal drive circuitry, not the LEDs themselves.

So bearing in mind that...

15 hours ago, Giant said:

I design electronics so would happily even make my own ones with decent drive circuits!

Why don’t you simply do so with the failing ones?

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3 hours ago, smileypete said:

How about buy one or two of a few different ones from Aliexpress (usually the cheapest source), reverse engineer them, let us know what you think. :)

Personally I would look at the 'COB' ones first and foremost... eg:

https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?site=glo&g=y&SortType=total_tranpro_desc&SearchText=cob+mr11&needQuery=n

ETA: The best for a mainstream brand at typical high street prices may be the OSRAM Star MR11 3.7w (345lm) for £9.99:

https://www.clasohlson.com/uk/Osram-GU4-(MR11)-LED-Bulb/36-6918

The second set of Chinese ones we tried were "COB", this style, but weren't that exact seller.

The problem with both those and the Osram ones is the narrow 35 degree beam. We've been much happier with the wide angle 120 degree ones which end up lighting the whole area rather than just the spot beneath them.

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1 hour ago, WotEver said:

So bearing in mind that...

Why don’t you simply do so with the failing ones?

I am leaning in that direction, the problem is that it's impossible to get them open without breakage. The diffuser on the front is frosted glass, which has been epoxied in to the plastic housing.

I have destructively dismantled a dud one and extracted the board:

led-internal.jpg.952f5e46853e044120c1635e57c5b703.jpg

The design itself doesn't seem to be that bad. My guess is it has just been let down on lifetime, like so many products, by an overstressed electrolytic capacitor.

I have identified all the parts except the unmarked inductor - the driver is a PowTech PT4115 which should be more than adequate, with a Vishay MB6S rectifier and that 22uF cap in front of it to handle AC input (unnecessary in this installation). The diode in the step-down circuit is a Vishay SS14.

The bulb does run pretty warm. The ICs should be fine with that, but I would guess that the cap has failed from running at high temperature several hours a day for a year. It's labelled as rated to 105C, but as noted in this excellent app note from Maxim about caps in LED bulbs, that probably means it's only good to a couple thousand hours at that temperature, even assuming its ratings were verifiable in the first place. The capacitor is marked Jakec, who I don't know, but the first hit for "jakec capacitor" on Google is someone on badcaps.net saying they're crap...

So I would guess that I could fix these by just replacing the capacitors, if I could just get the casings apart without breaking them!

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1 hour ago, Nightwatch said:

Coz I was very rich, I bought all my led stuff from dedazzled. Never had a problem. 

The ones I have at present are from Limekiln at about a third of bedazzy prices. Non of these have failed or are even flickering yet so you can stick yer bedazzled pricing where the monkey sticks its nuts you wealthy old flunky :D

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19 hours ago, Giant said:

The second set of Chinese ones we tried were "COB", this style, but weren't that exact seller.

The problem with both those and the Osram ones is the narrow 35 degree beam. We've been much happier with the wide angle 120 degree ones which end up lighting the whole area rather than just the spot beneath them.

If you want wide angle, why use spots? (rhetorical question :)) Maybe bypass the MR11s and go for LED strip, puck lights, or even MR16s.

For large boats I wonder if it's better to have the lighting done in mains via a small dedicated inverter, as there's a very wide choice of GU10s.

I have a few dimmable Philips GU10s LEDs that are 'all glass' and I wonder if they do without electrolytics, some of the MR11s on ali look the same, but it's a moot point if wide angle is a must.

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1 hour ago, smileypete said:

If you want wide angle, why use spots? (rhetorical question :)) Maybe bypass the MR11s and go for LED strip, puck lights, or even MR16s.

For large boats I wonder if it's better to have the lighting done in mains via a small dedicated inverter, as there's a very wide choice of GU10s.

I have a few dimmable Philips GU10s LEDs that are 'all glass' and I wonder if they do without electrolytics, some of the MR11s on ali look the same, but it's a moot point if wide angle is a must.

If we were starting from scratch I might indeed do it differently. However with 20 MR11 fittings already neatly in place, I was hoping to just get some bulbs that worked rather than yet another project...

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Slightly different but I recently bought a box of five dimmable MR16s  for £7.99 from Screwfix that (much to my surprise) worked fine with my 15 year old dimmers.  Some positions they flicker a bit but just turning the dimmer up or down slightly solved it.  I would like half a dozen dimmable MR11s but the price is a bit daunting, especially as I would probably need new drivers for them.

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