video – shows a blue LED in its death throes…after flickering for a few days, it will eventually die
Blue LED Burnout:
LED Christmas light strings are our favorite for decorating both our Christmas tree AND our home bar. Unfortunately what I have found over the years is that it appears the blue-colored LED’s burn out or fail faster than all other colors. The reason is not exactly certain, but we do know that red, yellow, and green seem to last forever, while blues last less than the first year.
One thing is sure, there’s nothing worse than plugging in last years lights and finding almost all the blue lights dead…well actually there is something worse; finding out that the blue led lights you installed inside your bar or bar back are dead and require disassembly of bar part and replacement of the lights.
What Are LEDs?
LED stands for Light Emitting Diode. In order to get the LED to emit specific colors, a process of semiconductor “doping” is used, adding certain chemicals to produce the desired color effect. For example: Combining varying proportions of gallium arsenide (GaAs) with gallium phosphide (GaP) to the P(positive) and N(negative) gap allows LED lamps to emit red light at 690 nm (1.8 eV) through to yellow at 580 nm (2.14 eV). To get green through violet requires some basic primary color RGB trickery, but blue is essential to get that job done. In most cases, there are no violet LEDs, only an RGB combination of red and blue.
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Simple Explanation of LED Color
To make this as simple as possible, if the P and N gap of the two LED conductors are at a specific distance, they produce a specific wavelength or color of light. The process of ‘spiking’ or ‘doping’ ads specific chemicals to the gap making it wider and thus producing different colors. Like the natural color spectrum, red is produced with a narrow gap and blue the widest gap. It’s was easy to initially produce the narrow gap of red-yellow, but to produce green to blue required enough expertise to earn a Noble Prize.
The Birth of the Blues
Blue LED’s were developed in the early 1990s, almost 30 years after the first red LED, by three Japanese scientists: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura. The three scientists received a Noble Prize in Physics for the Blue LED in 2014 because it involved some rather exotic physics to achieve.
Why Do Blue LED’s Tend to Burn Out Faster?
It is difficult to provide an exact answer as to why Blue LEDs appear to burn out faster. Perhaps it’s best to first understand how Blue LEDs work and why it deserved that Noble Prize. The manufacturing of Blue LEDs uses indium gallium nitride (InGaN) to achieve the proper energy gap for blue light. Since the lower colors require less of a gap and have a long proven manufacturing process and less exotic materials, this is likely why blue LEDs are not yet as robust, especially earlier models like the kind I’m trying to fix right now.
Enough Technical Details, How Can I fix My Blue LEDs?
Unfortunately, you can’t fix a blue LED. BUT, you can replace it, but it’s not always easy. In searching the web extensively, I found it difficult to find direct replacement Blue LED’s, especially for Christmas light strings.
Since it’s nearly impossible and cost-prohibitive to buy replacements for dead blue LED bulbs, my simple solution is to buy an entire string of Blue LED Christmas lights and use the bulbs to replace the dead blue LEDs in my multi-color Christmas light strings. It may be time-consuming, but since the other colors last so long, it’s worth the time to pop the dead LEDs out with a small side cutters or scissors. Simply pry them out and replace the failed units. I’m quite sure as the years go by, the manufacturing process for blue LEDs will improve as well as their quality and lifespan.
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(as of April 26, 2024 15:31 GMT -05:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
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Multicolor LED Lighting Made For Your Home Bar
We discuss LED Home Bar Lighting on this site often, so here are a few of our favorite multi-color LED lighting products made in strip form for lighting recessed areas of your home bar and bar back. Check out our home bar photos area for examples of how others have used multi-color LED lighting in the home bar projects. Happy Holidays!
A bag of bag of 200 bare (unsocketed) blue LEDs costs ($3 in Dec 2022). After you pull the socketed LED from the string, just unbend the leads (pay attention to which of the 2 leads is longer) and replace (making sure to put the longer lead on the same position). Easy, peasy. (I usually replace the blue with a different color to save work in the future).
Thanks for the comments regarding the premature failure of blue leds . I like your solution of buying a string of just blue and using them to replace the burnt out blues on multicolored strings.