A three-wing garage light Came With The House in the basement, where it served to light up the foot of the stairs. One of the 48 LEDs in one of the three LED panels began flickering brightly and, over the course of a few days, that panel went dark. The next time I turned on the basement lights, all three panels were dark.
Removing the screw-in lamp base:
A closer look inside:
The middle of the PCB is darker than the perimeter, with the darkest area around the black inductor standing up near the green filter cap. A blackened lump on the solder side that may have once been an SMD resistor evidently served as a fuse.
All three panels are in wired parallel, so the failed panel reduced the load on the supply, thus increasing the voltage on the remaining two panels enough to kill them off, too.
Worth noting: the black wire goes to the positive side of the LED panel. You can just see the + mark near the two connectors on the left side.
I wired each panel to a lashed-up bridge rectifier with a widowmaker extension cord from a variable transformer controlling the voltage, but none of them responded to the 150 VDC peaks: they’ve suffered Real Death.
The electronics landed in the recycling box and the three heatsinks are now in the Big Box o’ Heatsinkery, where they will surely come in handy for something.
The surprisingly readable 09/21 date code on the case says it’s just over four years old. Similar garage lights now run around ten bucks each and I wouldn’t expect them to last more than a couple of years.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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