3 Mistakes You Should Avoid to Select LED Light Supplier

LED lighting is a very matured market and the cost is very transparent. Therefore, as a consumer, it is wise not to chase the cheapest LED when considering to switch to LED lighting.

Some online shop might use low price strategy to win customer, profit margin is low, so they cannot afford to provide premium after-sale service like offering 5 years warranty, or burden the two-ways freight if the light fails or customer need to pay the freight to return the goods to seller. Or even they can, if they would take quite a long time(over two weeks or one month or two) to handle the client complaint.

Some vendor might never respond you even after you have paid the order for over 2-3 working days. For me, this is really bad service, they even tell you it is unavailable after one week or so and cannot ship it out.
Therefore, this is not the attitude a seller should have, they don’t care customer at all. If this happens, I will never shop again in their shop, that’s it.

There are several reasons:
Three parts accounts for the main part of the LED fixtures, that is LED chips, driver and heatsink. Generally speaking, LED pricing is not changeable, as long as it is top brands like Philips Lumileds, Samsung, Epistar, CREE, Citizen, Osram, Bridgelux.

The second team is San’an and other Chinese named brand chips, they are in good quality by market and it is reliable to use them.

While regarding heat sink, there are die casting aluminum housing and cold forging aluminum. Cold forging heatsink has better thermal management, its efficiency to release the heat out of the fixture is higher than the die casting alumium, but now, most fixtures in market is die casting aluminum, therefore, the cost depends only on the design of the housing. The larger the surface area, the better the heat dissipation rate is. If you buy a fixture use in normal temperature room, it doesn’t matter to care much about that.

However, if the ambient temperature is very high, especially in hot summer, therefore, you should keep in mind of that, otherwise, if the heat sink is too hot, the LEDs lifespan will be affected, and the lumen decay process would become faster.

Speaking to the LED driver, MeanWell and Sosen, inventronics brand are good to go. And MeanWell is the most expensive brand among them, so it is not cost effective and less and less manufacturer use it for 100-277V model, because the other two brands are also great in this section. Inventronic driver can compete against with MeanWell driver for the 480V model for over 300W LED fixtures.

In reality, there are many LED driver brand pop out recently, like the WP driver, Zhihe driver etc. They are made by some LED manufacturer, might only for their own product line, so it is not recommended to choose them because they might only expertise in a narrow range, e.g. their driver works quite well for LED fixtures under 100W or so, but always have problem in working with LED over that wattage. Or they are good to work with LED flat panel, but not work well with UFO high bay or LED shoebox like Lifud driver.

Therefore, if your budget is not that tight, you can choose between the MeanWell, Sosen and inventronics, Now some Chinese supplier will use UL listed driver instead of specific brand, the reason might be it is non-branded and made by their own or less branded than the well- known brand. It is better to ask which brand the LED fixture use, because LED driver is the most likely failed components for LED fixtures. It is not reliable, you might spend more money on pay labor fee and lift rent to replace it.

BTW, if there is motion sensor or photocell sensor(dusk to dawn sensor), it is another big cost. The top microwave motion sensor brand is Merrytek, so we suggest to choose it.

It is understandable for buyer to make final buying decision after 2-3 quotes from different supplier. Unless you are quite certain that the products are the same from different vendors, and after comparing with the service and responsive time, you can trust and buy from them, sometimes, even though there is 10USD gap, I think it is worth it.