5-Watt LED Ceiling Lights

It all started with a plan to renovate the kitchen, which meant we needed new lights. After looking around the market and in stores, we decided to buy them on AliExpress. Read on to see how it turned out.

We’re renovating someone else’s kitchen, but that’s beside the point. My wife and I put up a plastic ceiling, and now we needed to install something in it. We looked around to see what was available (we wanted something classic and neat, not gold-plated and covered in rhinestones). We did the math and decided to order from AliExpress. So we found some suitable lights and figured four 5-Watt units would be enough (though I was expecting them to be more like 4 Watts each—I was wrong, as it turned out).

We liked how the lights looked, and the fact that they use COB LEDs, which promised better performance. They also have a fairly large heatsink, so overheating should be less of a problem.

We placed the order and paid. I messaged the seller to say we needed them urgently and hoped they’d ship them as soon as possible. I wrote at night, and by morning I had a tracking number. I was celebrating too soon: the package didn’t show up in the postal tracking system for a week. I messaged the seller again to ask where it was, and they replied that everything was OK and it would arrive. Sure enough, a couple of days later it appeared in the tracking system. It took three days to make it to the airport, then spent a week flying through Beijing’s airmail system, and somehow cleared customs and reached our post office in just three more days. That’s where we picked it up (we actually collected more than one package; I’ll review the second one later).

The first thing that surprised me was the size. I didn’t measure it, but it was substantial.

Below is the package without its postal bag—


It was wrapped so thoroughly that I think even if the plane’s pilots had played soccer with the package for a week (its status said “sent by airmail” for a whole week), it still wouldn’t have been damaged.

After getting through the first layer of packaging, we reached the second. Inside were four little boxes.


After opening the boxes, we found the next line of defense protecting the lights. They were carefully packed in foam inside. Once we’d defeated all the foam, we could finally get to the lights.


Now we faced the final level of this entertaining quest: Get the Light Out.

By the way, if you look closely, you can see marks from the box on the film, but they didn’t cause any damage.

Here’s what the lights themselves look like, so to speak, “naked”:


The finish is silver, but not over the top. The housing is aluminum, with protective glass at the front (not plastic). The reflector looks like a set of tiny mirrors (similar to the dichroic reflector in halogen bulbs). Later, this reflector played a nasty trick on us.

Turn the lights over and you get this—


There are heatsinks on the back, also aluminum, but blackened (or painted—I didn’t take a close look). A pair of wires also comes out of the back, ending in a connector for the driver. The unit isn’t designed to come apart; at least, I couldn’t disassemble it no matter how hard I tried. The lights were a tight fit, and I didn’t want to break one, though I put quite a bit of force into it. The springs are pretty good, and the decorative trim has a large diameter, which makes it very convenient.

The lights look much better and neater on the ceiling than they do in your hands.

The light is powered by this driver:


As we can see, the claimed power is 4–5 W.

A quick primer.

An LED has a fixed forward voltage, but an LED array is made up of cells connected in series and parallel (you can see this in my previous reviews). So a 3 W LED has 3 sections of the array connected in series, while a 5 W LED has 5.

A 3 W LED has a forward voltage of about 10 V, while a 5 W one is around 16–17 V. With the current held constant by the driver, that gives us different power levels.

Anyway, this probably isn't interesting to anyone, so let's get on with the review.

Naturally, I wanted to take the driver apart and see what was inside. It's very easy to open, but the cover fits tightly enough that it won't come apart on its own.


Inside is a basic driver, but a proper one—not a capacitor-based hack that causes flicker at 100 Hz.

During testing, I found that it gets quite hot, so I had to modify it by drilling ventilation holes. To make installation safer, I also put the lights in the metal profiles that support the ceiling.

Measuring the power consumption before the driver showed about 4 W.

And now, those of you who stayed awake through the first part of the review can find out how it all turned out.

First, I wanted to find out what power they actually put out.


A simple calculation shows that the power is only 2.82 W, despite the claimed 5 W (the measurement of power before the driver had already made it clear that 5 W was impossible).

I immediately told the seller about this and warned him that I planned to write a review of these lamps. The seller almost immediately offered a 50% refund. At first, he tried to explain that the lamps would overheat, so they had reduced the power out of concern for their customers.

I still had a faint hope that at least the LEDs themselves were rated for 5 W (the Chinese often do this: use 9 W LEDs and run them at 3–4 W so they don't overheat).

By the way, the lights barely get warm. After sitting on the table for a couple of hours with the heatsink facing up, it had warmed to about 45 degrees.

That hope vanished after I placed my glass—the one I use to inspect LED arrays—over them. (Actually, it had already vanished when my measurements showed that the LED consisted of three crystals in series, but I was still thinking, “What if?”) This is what I saw—


This photo makes it clear (and you can confirm it just by browsing AliExpress) that this LED cannot possibly be 5 W. I wrote to the seller saying it looked like a scam, so the refund would be not 50%, but a little more: $14. Naturally, he started complaining that it would mean a loss for him. I do feel a little sorry for him, in a way, but it’s a loss for me too: I expected one thing and got something completely different. The refund came through today (by the way, for some reason it took a long time—about 4 days; usually refunds arrive in around 5 hours).

But we’ve strayed from the topic again.

Next came the real-world testing. As I wrote above, they look better once installed.

A few drawbacks became apparent during testing. If you look closely at the last photo, you can see the reflector’s texture. That texture is projected onto the walls if they have a solid-color finish, appearing as yellowish spots arranged just like the pattern on the reflector. I wouldn’t say it’s completely awful, but it looks pretty unpleasant, so these aren’t suitable for walls with light-colored, plain wallpaper.

Another drawback is that I ordered warm white, but the light feels like that of cheap energy-saving bulbs—in other words, it’s unpleasantly white, although maybe it just seems that way after halogen lamps.

They don’t have a green or blue tint, but the light is too white. They light our 6 m² kitchen adequately, but I’d like it a little brighter—and that’s with light-colored walls and a slightly glossy ceiling. I’d add a couple more of these lamps, but my wife says it’s fine. You have to get used to the light (or rather, its color).

I’d planned to include a couple of photos showing how they light the room. I even brought my camera along, but it didn’t work out.

No, the camera batteries didn’t run out, and the memory card with the photos didn’t die. The camera simply decided that LEDs aren’t a light source at all, and the picture came out only slightly brighter than if there had been just a candle burning. The camera is very old; I actually brought it back to life after it had been sitting on a shelf for about 6–8 years so I could take photos for reviews, and it’s already 12 years old. If there’s an incandescent bulb in the room, photos are no problem, but the camera flat-out refuses to recognize LEDs. So, sorry, there won’t be any photos of what they look like.

I gave it 5 stars in the review because the package was very well packed, all the lamps work, they do their job, the seller was quick to respond, and he refunded $14 out of $24.6 (at the time of purchase, they cost $6.15). Whether to buy them or not is up to you.

Thanks to everyone who read this review to the end without falling asleep along the way. I tried.