I’ve got a garage door opener whose light refuses to go off. Power to the bulb is supposed to terminate 3 minutes after the door opens and/or closes. I’ve unscrewed the bulb so as not to waste electricity.
Having replaced the incandescent bulb with an LED, I’m wondering is consumption is so minimal that leaving it on is of little consequence.
It is far less, but not of little consequence.
Depending on Brand and model of the opener, there might be setting to fix the always on problem. Just be careful up on the step ladder. Find the manual first, more often than not free online.
Some LED bulbs interfere with garage door openers; supposedly this is more common with cheaper bulbs.
This can manifest in confusing ways. The remote will work to open the door and turn on the lights, but it won’t work to shut the door.
It’s not a big deal, but I mention it because it can be a little baffiling when it happens.
Here’s a 2017 article with some more details and recommended bulbs:
You didn’t mention the wattage (actual wattage, not “equivalent wattage”), but let’s say it’s 10 watts. Leaving it on 24 hours a day would then be 240 watt-hours. For four days, it’d be nearly a kilowatt-hour. Depending on where you are, electricity costs somewhere between around 10 and 40 cents per kilowatt-hour. So worst case, you’re looking at less than a dollar a week.
A typical 40 watt equivalent LED bulb is going to draw around 4 watts, but might be a bit on the dim side for a garage. A 60 watt equivalent will typically be around 8 watts.
The cost of electricity in the U.S. tends to vary somewhere between about 12 cents per kWh to about 50 cents per kWh, with somewhere in the range of 16 to 20 cents being most common.
So, let’s do some math. A 60 watt equivalent LED will draw 8 watts, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, which works out to 70,080 watt-hours, or 70.08 kWh. If you pay 20 cents per kWh, that works out to $14.02 per year to operate the LED. A 40 watt equivalent would be half that.
If you are in an expensive area of the country, and pay 50 cents per kWh instead of 20, you’d pay $35.05 per year.
You also have to add in the cost of the LED bulb itself. A typical LED bulb costs $8 for a 4-pack at Walmart. They claim a 9 year life on the package, but in reality their lifespan is closer to 3 years on average. So figure $2.00 for one bulb out of the package, spread out over 3 years, or $0.66 per year.
(ETA - I see that @Chronos snuck a reply in while I was doing math)
You might also want to give the garage door opener a bit of a whack with your hand. If there’s a sticky relay in the opener, that should cause it to un-stick. You don’t want to hit it too hard, just hard enough to jiggle a stuck relay (if that happens to be its problem) but not hard enough to break anything.
Yes, when LED bulbs first started to appear I made the foolish assumption that they essentially lasted forever. For the most part, they do not, and in my experience the two key variables are the quality of the bulb and the ambient temperature. Some fixtures are not well ventilated (well, in some cases not ventilated at all) and even though LEDs don’t produce a lot of heat, they do produce some, and it can build up. I do have an early-version Cree LED that has been on continuously in the ventilator hood over the stove for about a decade, but it’s an unusual design where the housing is plastic with lots of ventilation holes, and the fixture itself is fairly well ventilated.
My issue here is not the cost of a new LED but the hassle of replacing it, where “hassle” in this case can mean “downright dangerous” if one is of an age where getting up on a stepladder is a safety hazard. Garages can get pretty hot in the summer and my garage door opener light enclosures aren’t well ventilated, so if the lights were always on they’d likely have failed several times by now.
I would try the find the manual and check settings before moving on to percussive maintenance but it does indeed work at times.
The bulbs last forever, unfortunately no one asked about the life of the driver circuitry. The 1st generation of LED integrated fixtures are dying now and with no way to practically repair them, the only solution is to trash and replace the whole thing.
I think that most people would define “the bulb” as “the thing that I buy from Home Depot and screw into the socket”. That includes both the lighting elements themselves and the driver circuitry, and by that definition, yes, the bulbs do wear out.
I’m being facetious, but the fixtures with the non user replaceable bulbs are a real issue.
couple the LED bulb with a motion-sensor socket:
(generic link - not necesarily a recommendation):
and don’t be THAT person who leaves the light on 24/7
This simply isn’t correct. Sometimes it’s the driver and sometimes it’s the LED’s themselves.
I’ve soldered in* replacement LEDs, and had the bulb continue to work fine.
The real problem is that manufacturers are producing bulbs in which the individual LEDs are driven hard causing them to run hot and die relatively quickly. This has the double benefit for manufacturers of keeping their costs down (fewer LEDs per bulb) while increasing turnover.
Google “Dubai lamp” if you want to learn more about this highly cynical behaviour.
*Obviously this isn’t an economically worthwhile thing to do but I enjoy fiddling around with such things
Thx to all for the replies. Good info. We had a new Genie installed last year. I could have assembled a whole new opener with all the parts they sent me to correct the problem. Nothing ever worked. One of these days I’m going to pack up everything, drive to Genie headquarters and dump it all in its lobby.
Many years ago I put a CFL in the opener’s lamp socket. The wattage was less than the rating of the socket, but CFLs have a large in-rush current spike when you first turn them on, and about half the time, that current spike would weld the relay contacts together. I could unstick the relay by cycling the light switch on the wall-mounted opener several times (this mechanically fatigued the tiny tiny weld on the contacts until they broke free), but in the end I went with…
…something like this. A few years ago I installed several 4’ LED fixtures on the garage ceiling and powered them through two room occupancy sensors wired in parallel and mounted on opposite sides of the garage. No connection to the garage door opener at all. These just come on any time a person or vehicle shows up, light up the whole garage far better than a single bulb mounted on the opener ever could, and then shut off a couple of minutes after they stop sensing movement.
I have several of these early Philips bulbs that are over ten years old and still going strong, never had one fail. Meanwhile, many younger cheap-ass store-brand bulbs I’ve tried over the years are a very mixed bag of longevity.
Ironic link to safety recall:
https://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/consumer/contact/recall/endura-and-ambient-led-dimmable-light-bulbs
Note, I’m in the lighting industry and help design/test LED lights for a living. There is no reason aside from cost, testing, and component selection that these can’t last indefinitely. The “foolish assumption that these would last forever” is entirely the fault of the manufacturers being cheap.
Well, the foolish assumption is that low-cost manufacturers would splurge on high-quality components and testing at the cost of their own profitability.
Wisdom is “you pay for what you get.”
Yeah, there are lots of things that could be built to last a very, very long time, if that were what customers prioritized. Usually, though, people just choose the cheap option.
'Zactly.
Said another way, the real, real foolish assumption is that the bulk of consumers will care about anything except the lowest possible sticker price.
The reliability / quality “cost” of squeezing the last penny out of the economic cost is always disproportionately large. But that’s what a huge fraction of the public wants. So that’s what all of us get.
See also Spirit Airlines.
I don’t agree that this is what is happening here - the cost of a few more LED’s per bulb would be barely measurable. LED’s wholesale for less than $0.0015 per LED. Doubling the number of LED’s in a bulb would cost perhaps 1c per bulb. There are no (and no more expensive) components required to make drivers that would run LED’s at lower current. The opposite if anything.
Bulb manufacturers could sell bulbs that lasted almost indefinitely at exactly the same price point.
The reason they don’t is not because of cheaping out on components. It is planned obsolescence, reliant on market failure. People simply don’t know that LED bulbs could last far longer. They are used to the idea that CFL’s and incandescents are consumables. There is too long between purchase and failure for people to notice which bulbs last longer.
I suspect that over time countries may mandate efficiency standards for bulbs, to correct the market failure. Or maybe not given it is not exactly a huge issue.