Many people asked to test LED bulbs sold in Fixprice stores. I'll start with the Era lamp, which says "15 W, 1200 lm, Ra> 80, shines like a 110 W incandescent lamp." Looking ahead, I will say that all the given parameters do not correspond to reality.
This lamp was chosen for the test for the simple reason that there were no other LED lamps in the store on Snezhnaya 16 in Moscow when I entered there. By the way, all the price tags are from other lamps, and the price of this one is 99 rubles, I found out only by paying for it at the checkout.
On the front side of the box it says "15 W, 2700 K, shines like a 110 W incandescent lamp."
On the other side, add "Color rendering index Ra> 80, luminous flux 1200 lumens, service life 25000 hours, voltage 220-240V".
At the bottom of the box, the manufacturer ATL Business is indicated, but it may not be a factory, but a Chinese intermediary.
The warranty period is not indicated anywhere on the box, it is only in the instruction manual - 1 year. For lamps of Russian brands, this is a bad sign - only for the cheapest lamps of low quality, manufacturers give a year of warranty. Good lamps always have a warranty of 2 to 10 years.
On the lamp itself, the date of issue is 04/10/2020.
I measured the parameters of this light bulb after a half-hour warm-up using precision laboratory equipment and got the following results.
The measured power consumption is about 10.4 W, that is, almost a third less than promised.
The measured luminous flux is 882 lm, that is, only 73.5% of the declared.
The lamp shines like a 75-watt incandescent lamp and will not replace a 110-watt lamp as promised by the manufacturer.
The measured color rendering index was not> 80, as we were promised, but only 70.3, which means that such a lamp is undesirable used for lighting residential premises (it is believed that for such lighting, the CRI (Ra) color rendering index should be above 80).
The measured color temperature turned out to be close to the declared one (this is unusual, as a rule, they write 2700K on cheap bulbs, but in fact it turns out there 3000K).
With a supply voltage of 230V, the measured ripple coefficient was 0.1%, which is good.
With switches that have an indicator, the lamp works correctly - it does not flash and does not glow dimly when such a switch is turned off.
When the supply voltage drops to 204V, the brightness of the lamp drops by 5%, and the ripple increases to 14%. This means that a cheap linear driver is used in the lamp, due to which the lamp will react with a change in brightness to any changes voltage in the network (the light will "twitch" all the time when the voltage is unstable) and will not be able to fully work where the voltage is in the network lowered.
I don't know how long such a light bulb will last. I can assume that you can not count on the promised 25,000 hours, and at best it will live up to the end of the warranty period, that is, a year.
It is important to understand that this is not a specific "Era" light bulb made on the cheapest LEDs and driver and its real characteristics are much worse than those stated. Exactly the same can be observed with other cheap lamps of Russian brands.
Many people buy LED bulbs along with groceries on the way home at nearby stores. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the cheapest lamps are sold there (read, lamps, in the production of which they saved on everything) at not the lowest prices.
If you want quality lighting in your home and lamps last long, choose them consciously. Now, even for the same 99 rubles, you can buy a high-quality LED light bulb. My project Lamptest will help with this - even if I have not tested a specific lamp model yet, you can always look at the test results of other lamps of the same manufacturer and everything will become clear with them.
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
For ten years I have been writing every day about technology, discounts, places of interest and events. Read my blog on the site ammo1.ru, in LJ, Zen, Mirtesen.
My projects:
Lamptest.ru. I test LED lamps and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.
Elerus.ru. I collect information about domestic electronic devices for personal use and share it.
You can contact me in Telegram @ ammo1 and by mail [email protected].