[FRSBRZGT86FAN]

Originally Posted by extrashaky

If you're talking about LED lights in general, the answer is no. Not all LEDs crap out. Some of them last a really long time. It depends on the quality of the components used and how they're installed. With the Valentis, I don't know if it's their design or that they're using really cheap boards. They're not the only one with this problem. I've seen pics of Buddy Club tails with rows of lamps out also.

However, the Tom's tails are also LED. They don't seem to be losing boards the way others are. Depot may be using better components, or it may just be that they're not trying to cram 50 LEDs into a single housing.

Tom's do have a problem, though. The heat from the drivers melts the black plastic along the top of the light inside the outer housing, opening a gap for light to escape. Mine have this problem. Eventually I'm going to open them up and fix it, but a $480 set of lights shouldn't do this.

Here's a pic (not my car) of the problem:

Originally Posted by Packofcrows

So in other words, no matter how I buy them, the LED's will sh!t on me eventually compared to oem ones?

If they only lasted me 3yrs w/o issues id consider them.... Guess maybe TOM's are in my future?

Originally Posted by extrashaky

It's probably the driver. LEDs are powered by a little circuit board. The LEDs themselves don't throw off a lot of IR heat, but the driver boards do produce heat. If you seal them up in an enclosure with nowhere for that heat to go, the driver boards will cook themselves. If you leave a chimney for the heat to escape, water gets in them. There's no really good solution other than to use high quality drivers and fewer LEDs rather than trying to light the car up like a Christmas tree. The Valentis probably go out in groups like they do because a single driver is running multiple LEDs.

A bunch of builders in Florida jumped on the LED bandwagon and installed LED street lamps and parking lot lights, which promptly failed. Since they were off during the day, they were cool enough for seagulls to perch on. The seagulls shit all over the heat sinks on top so that they overheated at night and cooked the boards.

Originally Posted by Zhangy

The thing about LED is that they are best not used in an enclosure, because heat shortens their life.

Recent electrical engineer graduate here with a fun fact:

The term @extrashaky is referring to is called thermal runaway, the driver is supposed to lower voltage as temperature increases to the average of the LEDs preventing damage and then when temp decreases far enough go back up in voltage. But what that ends up happening as a byproduct of lower voltage, is an increase in the current running to the LED when you lower the volts. When the driver fails, is of bad quality, over stressed (i.e. one driver for way too many LEDs on a strip) or in the case of taillights constant heat cycling in an enclosed space, you end up with the set of the LEDS (can be 1 or even 5 or 10) getting too much current and burning themselves out. The OEM brake lights don't have this problem because its about 15 super bright LEDs spaced apart with a really high quality probably DENSO driver