Comment by someonebaggy
1 day ago
You can replace parts that don't come in nice detachable sockets.
Lightbulbs came in sockets because they were meant to fail. First by accident, later intentionally. They were also quite breakable because they were made of glass. LED lights don't have these problems unless they're designed to. Which is the meta-problem - how do you know which ones are planned obsolete?
Forcing an LED system into a lightbulb from factor has quality and cost implications though. A good LED light has a separate power brick inside the enclosure. Which is what you see in these fan lights.
I build lights with cob modules with phosphor (bridgelux), and unless I screw up the thermal interface, I get many years out of modules that cost < $5 each. one thing is that the thermal paste is too fiddly for most people, voltage/current tends to drift around and 0.5V is a big difference here. mechanically they tend to use a couple different form factors, but not 100%. the 10 watt units I had been using were bigger than the 15w I use now, and the mounting spacing went from 0.75 to 0.71
I would hope that at least some of this would get standardized over time