As of tomorrow the post top fixtures in my complex are now going to be 40W LED instead 100W MH
I am going to miss watching them warm up for the night.

But on the bright side (Pun intended lol) I am probably going to score some cool looking post top fixtures (I talked to the guy responsible for the massacre of the Metal Halide post tops and he said I could have up to three of the fixtures and as many lamps as I can handle the rest are going to $old for scrap )

PS: I pray that they are 120 or at least have a multitap ballast as I want to make a post top floor lamp

Yes I have been eyeing those fixtures for a while now
I heard that they used to be 175W MV but I am unsure of that because as long as I lived here they were always Metal Halide

Be prepared for high failure rates if the LED's are cheap nasty Chinese brands... haha.

Good score for the old lights! I would've done the same...

The LED bulbs look like a giant corn cob with Surface Mount LEDS on multiple Printed Circuit Boards
So yeah I don't expect them to last along time
I was not able to get a complete post top (They kept the fixtures just put the corn cobs in them)  but I did get a ballast and a lamp
The ballast is an Advance 71A5380 and the lamp is a Castor  100W M90 for enclosed fixtures only

The place is now under lit
The 100W Metal Halide lamps did a great job lighting the place even though some were out the place was still lit well

I was reading on the web and found a review site for LED lamps and they said that the life span was much shorter than advertised.
Price did not seem to make a difference in lamp life.
Some lasted longer than others and some quit before 6000 hours.
Even using the same bulbs, some quit before the other same ones did.
 
Some can't take the heat very well like a CFL can.
Without good ventilation they can fry.
I think it will take a while before they get all the bugs out of them.
I would expect a flood of cheap junk from China first before any really good ones show up.
So I am going to use my CFLs for a few years longer.

Some of the first CFLs would burn up.
When CFLs first came out a bought a few and one day my wife came screaming out of the bathroom and said the light was smoking.

I went and looked and a CFL was smoking like crazy.
I dumped them all out and was about three years before I bought another one.


I found this interesting.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2546363/The-great-LED-lightbulb-rip-One-four-expensive-long-life-bulbs-doesnt-like-long-makers-claim.html

This LED takeover, is only a false public relations campaign for Philips and Cree and nothing else. LED can't reach more than 50lm/w outside the laboratory, and can reach more than 25,000 hours only in low power applications.
The LEDs that are used for general lighting, are totally different than LEDs for flashlights and indicator lights, and have a shorter life respectively.
A high power LED is the solid state equivalent for short arc HID lamps for stage, entertainment and projection and cinema lighting (Which have also much shorter life than the same lamps for general lighting respectively).

lots of hogwash here.
a recent datasheet i looked at showed 136 lpw.
if the fixture mfr does a lousy job with the optics and heatsink then what you said would be true in the case of that mfr only and said mfr would be out of business fast.but its like any other new tech.the saying that the pioneers catch the arrows applies here.
and anyone who buys cheap noname whoflungdung chinese stuff deserves the junk they get.
my experience just with homebrew led fixtures is that most of what comes from cree,lumileds,samsung,ect usually exceeds the specs.
and i have observed no degedation on even overdriven but overcooled units.like early k2 tffc running at 1.2a in a outdoor fixture every night for 4 years now from my 12v solar system.i built 2 and only needed 1.the extra is in a seldom used place and no difference in output was noted when i recently compared.
so get your facts in order.the ones you posted were valid in about 2000.its 2014 now.

This LED takeover, is only a false public relations campaign for Philips and Cree and nothing else. LED can't reach more than 50lm/w outside the laboratory, and can reach more than 25,000 hours only in low power applications.
The LEDs that are used for general lighting, are totally different than LEDs for flashlights and indicator lights, and have a shorter life respectively.
A high power LED is the solid state equivalent for short arc HID lamps for stage, entertainment and projection and cinema lighting (Which have also much shorter life than the same lamps for general lighting respectively).

The problem is not as much with the LED alone, but with lying marketing people with none basic lighting knowledge at all. Here I mean claims about the equivalent traditional lamp it is supposed to "replace". You may meet claims like a 500lm LED "replaces 100W incandescent", visibly terrible color state "Ra>90" when the attached report showing individual components, whose average is about 50 (correspond to the observation) and so on.

Other area are lamp designs overheating the LED's and their ballasts. Again not a fault of the LED chip maker...

As on today (07/10/2014) 5 have already failed
one of the floodlights is totally out
4 of the post top fixtures have turned into a strobe light and are flickering like mad

The 40W LED that I said turned out to be a 65W LED as the first set of replacement lamps that were put in were too dim (I am not surprised as they were those cheap corn cob style LED bulbs) The second time around they look like UFOs and the LED driver or ballast is now separate from the LED dies and heatsink

I am not surprised.
There are similar stories on the internet from people that thought their new LED lighting was going to last 27 years, but only lasted about six months or less.

I do plan on using LED lighting in my home....
In about five years when they get all the bugs out of them.

I just posted pictures in the gallery of one of the new LED retrofit lamps that I obtained
This was the failed one but it was just the driver that failed and they replaced the LED Lamp and the driver so I was able to keep the one that was replaced (Which still works as I tested it with a 24VDC Power Supply) This LED Module only needs a constant voltage of 24VDC @ 2.5Amps (If at the 100% Setting)

Gallery Link Showing the whole thing

If the 'bugs' ever are, as many of these so called bugs are inherent limits of the technology, and as such manifest whenever LEDs are stuck in places where they are not a good solution.  LEDs are great for indicators and in certain illumination applications like flashlights and nightlights, assuming that they were designed and built properly.  Anything requiring thousands of lumens is almost certainly going to be better off with some combination of incandescent, halogen, high pressure mercury, fluorescent, high pressure sodium and metal halide lamps as they are much cheaper solutions and are far more reliable.

If the 'bugs' ever are, as many of these so called bugs are inherent limits of the technology,

That is not true. LED's have their specific critical properties, whose the light designer should observe, otherwise it fails soon.
But the same is the case for all light sources, those critical properties just differ (e.g. operating higher wattage LPS vertically base down, vertical rated lamp horizontally or the opposite,... - in all these cases it will cause the assembly to be highly unreliable and fail in few weeks as well).

The main problem is, people tend to install the LED's as they are used to with incandescents or HID's and ignore the specifics. Of course, then the creation is highly unreliable and fails soon.

and as such manifest whenever LEDs are stuck in places where they are not a good solution.  LEDs are great for indicators and in certain illumination applications like flashlights and nightlights, assuming that they were designed and built properly.  Anything requiring thousands of lumens is almost certainly going to be better off with some combination of incandescent, halogen, high pressure mercury, fluorescent, high pressure sodium and metal halide lamps as they are much cheaper solutions and are far more reliable.

Well, these days the packages of few 1000's lm are already the cheapest when using LED's, mainly when the designers defended the freedom to observe the LED specifics (and so are able to turn that e.g. into cost reduction measures).
It may not look like that, but except LED and some specialty sources, the lighting industry op;erates with very small margins, the LED wave is just "cash cow" with very high profits, although the key patents are expiring and the growing competition is pushing the margins down.

the biggest problem with LEDs is that using them for lighting, especially for omnidirectional lighting, is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. you have you use an array of dozens of LEDs, specifically placed to mimic a regular light, with tons of gadgetry to get them to run properly.

i don't even expect prices to fall considerably, seeing as how the process of making just one "bulb" is not simple at all, and as upgrades to the technology occur, they have to redesign and replace the entire fixture rather than just upgrading the parts.

i can see LEDs successfully replacing fluorescent tubes in applications like TV screens, signage, lighting for things like refrigerators, and other applications where fluorescent tubes have a disadvantage.

where i see a problem occurring is in incandescent replacement and HID replacement; companies like CREE are taking a huge loss by selling their new light bulb for $10, and other companies aren't willing to make that sacrifice just to get buyers. the lighting quality even then is not all that fantastic, and in outdoor fixtures where the LEDs are uncovered, it can be really irritating and unpleasant.

this is why i'm excited about the new "Finally" a19 bulb that's coming out this fall that uses induction technology. i think it could eventually replace CFLs, and if the same ingenuity was used to design HID lighting replacement, induction could easily win there, too. induction lighting is used in a lot of applications like that already, but they haven't really redesigned the fixtures in ten years, and they just don't have the efficiency that LEDs have.

Those critical properties are what are being taken as bugs due to many people are buying in to various elements of the hype surrounding LEDs without understanding how they need to be implemented.  Hence all the reports of early failure.

the biggest problem with LEDs is that using them for lighting, especially for omnidirectional lighting, is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. you have you use an array of dozens of LEDs, specifically placed to mimic a regular light,

The array of led's instead of single, high power one is not imposed by the need to diffuse the light, but because that way it become cheaper to handle the heat and semiconductor defects (a defect in the semiconductor material is of the size of just one atom, but destroys the complete die. So smaller the dies, less of the material get wasted when selelecting just the good ones)
And what is "regular light"? Except last 20..30years, for 1000's of years it was always the cheapes and most optimum working arrangement for the given technology. It is only the last two or three decades, when people suddenly want to pack everything into an incandescent bulb format...

with tons of gadgetry to get them to run properly.

That is just not true.
The LED's are the least demanding light source except of the incandescent (well, with the incandescent I even take the precisely regulated voltage as granted)
All other electriocal light sources require more complex gear, or pose more restriction on it to run properly.

The thing is, because the LED's are so easy to drive, it is the only technology that technically allows to design a ballast running them flicker free, provide galvanic isolation, compensate mains voltage fluctuation, be efficient, small, and with reasonable cost and life, all at the same time. Yes, such ballast is not the simplest one, but unlike with any other light sources, it is feasible, so became a standard.

If you want to strip the requirements down and keep just the efficiency, reliability and cost, you end up with just a series choke and a string of LED's of about the same voltage as is the nominal mains rms behind a rectifier bridge.
If you argue the MV does not need the rectifier, well, you may arrange the LED's in an antiparallel pairs, so each polarity would be handled by one die from that pair. And compare to the MV, for the same power you suffice with less than 1/2 size of the choke: Unlike the MV, you do not have to worry about stable arc and reignition after zero cross, so one requirement less than with the MV...
And you need a heatsink? Well, even with the MV you need a lantern with rather large reflector and refractor bowl. With LED's you suffice with just flat plastic refractor (so way simpler and cheaper to make than the deep bowl), the lantern body then could well act as very good heatsink of no extra cost, of course, when designed accordingly.
Yes, if you want to use LED in an incandescent ficxture, there appear to be a lot of extra gadgetary. But the first thing I then ask: Why do you insist using incandescent gadgetary (socket, bowl,...), when you want to use LED's? Isn't that the stupid thing in the first place?

i don't even expect prices to fall considerably, seeing as how the process of making just one "bulb" is not simple at all,

Well, making single lamp not at all, but making a batchg of 100k+ units become way more expensive with all the tradditional sources: With every step you have to pick each piece one by one. With LED's, majority of the steps (and all the complex and demanding ones) is done in batches of 10k+ pieces. So even when these steps are way more copmplex and demanding, the fact you make 10k+ units at once is, what makes it cheap at the end. Basically all the semiconductor (that includes LED) technology is just designed around that concept, even when that mean way more complex circuit than the "manually" made counterpart. Still, just the ability to produce it in such batches makes it way cheaper.

and as upgrades to the technology occur, they have to redesign and replace the entire fixture rather than just upgrading the parts.

Replacing and redesigning the fixture with the change of the lighting technology happened all the time really since the stone age, the only exception was the last 20..30years, when some greenbrainer tried to convince people, the format of incandescent bulb would be a "golden standard". No surprize, when it doesn't work, it just never did before and I'm convinced it never will in the future...

i can see LEDs successfully replacing fluorescent tubes in applications like TV screens, signage, lighting for things like refrigerators, and other applications where fluorescent tubes have a disadvantage.
where i see a problem occurring is in incandescent replacement and HID replacement; companies like CREE are taking a huge loss by selling their new light bulb for $10, and other companies aren't willing to make that sacrifice just to get buyers. the lighting quality even then is not all that fantastic, and in outdoor fixtures where the LEDs are uncovered, it can be really irritating and unpleasant.

this is why i'm excited about the new "Finally" a19 bulb that's coming out this fall that uses induction technology. i think it could eventually replace CFLs, and if the same ingenuity was used to design HID lighting replacement, induction could easily win there, too. induction lighting is used in a lot of applications like that already, but they haven't really redesigned the fixtures in ten years, and they just don't have the efficiency that LEDs have.

Well, given the technbological complexity and design limitations, the induction does not even have any chance to reach the similar reliability and/or life of regular hot electrode fluorescents or even LED drivers designed with the same budget limitation. Yes, there are induction ballasts models with proven reliability record, but what was their purchase cost? For that price you could have the complete LED system with the same life and reliability, of course, with similar ballast size as well. But the thging is, the market does not want this. The market wants cheap to buy systems. And there, with that budget range, the induction would be simply way less reliable than any other system
Now I'm talking about the cost to cover the production and development, not directly the sale prices. As the LED's bear the "green" and "sexy" patinas, they allow for way higher profit margins, you an not even dream of in any other general lighting technology. This is slowly settling down, but still the gap is there huge. Believe, Cree and others are still making money on the LED products, the only difference to others, it is just not the 95+% anymore, what it used to be few years ago...