The Truth about LED in outdoor lighting

During the last few year, it seems that southeast Michigan is being flooded with cheap Chinese LED retrofits and LED integrated fixtures. 

How do I know? Because in the past 3 years, I have been getting a lot of service requests from homeowners who have had these systems installed, and are already in need of repair and their installers are not coming back to take care of the issue.

First, like everything, if it sounds to good to be true, it more then likely is. Cheap LED bulbs as shown in the picture above,  bought from Amazon are lasting anywhere from 6 months to a year. These have already been removed from over a dozen systems, just this spring.  When I ask why the original installer isn't taking care of this, I'm told they came out a couple of times and now just stop coming or replying to messages. In some instances, these last forever LEDs are lasting  less then the cheaper Halogens. 

Worse news are the integrated LED fixtures where if a diode or driver goes bad, you are replacing the entire fixture. 

Our retrofit LEDs come with a 5 year warranty,

Integrated a ten year warranty. If you see a fixture that is guaranteed for the life of the fixture you may want to get that in writing and a guarantee that replacement fixtures will be available in the future.

We are running into situations where fixtures that were installed only a year ago, are no longer available.  Not great if you have a dozen of that style. 

Lastly we are finding the companies who are installing these Last Forever systems are not standing behind their work. If they were, I wouldn't be so busy running appointments to fix them. 

• If your looking for a LED system. Give me a call. I will go over everything you will need to know.