Philips voluntarily recalls 99,000 LED bulbs due to shock hazard

• By Poonam DAS

Last week Philips issued a voluntary recall of 99,000 LED bulbs because of the rather unsettling risk of “shock hazard.” The recall hasn’t gotten much attention yet but, as with all consumer electronics safety recalls, it’s worth knowing about and worth understanding. The recalled products are the Endura 12-watt and AmbientLED 12.5-watt lamps, essentially the same bulb in two different product families. At of the end of 2012 — well before the recall or any problems — the company dropped the Endura and AmbientLED brand names, and replaced these two bulbs with the the 11W A19 LED.

According to the CPSC announcement there have been no injuries so far, but Philips does advise all owners to stop using the bulbs immediately.

The bulbs in question are Philip’s “bug lamp” yellow LED models, which were sold throughAmazon, Home Depot, grocery and home goods stores between October 2012 and May 2013. Information on how to identify a bulb is available on Philip’s recall site. If your bulb is affected, Philips will replace it free of charge.

Philips has noted that about 99,000 bulbs were affected, but has not stated what percentage of total sales. It appears to be an isolated incident with a set run of AmbientLED/Endura products. All the CPSC page noted about them was that the lamps were made in China between the dates listed above. While a recall of this size is significant, Lighting Science Group recently called back of 550,000 LED bulbs, so we know it is far from unprecedented.

But what happened? Aren’t these bulbs safety tested, UL-certified, and fully isolated? Yes, they are, but that unfortunately doesn’t prevent manufacturing defects. It seems that something went wrong during the manufacturing process during this particular run. This would have caused a contact wire to be misplaced, to malfunction, or to in some way go bad, and make the aluminum heat sink on the outside of the bulb to conduct a charge.

Philips found out about the malfunctioning — and possibly hazardous — bulbs after two separate reports from buyers outside of the US (hence the CPSC reporting there were no injuries though, to be fair, we don’t know if the people who reported the problems were injured or not). After learning of the two cases, Philips began an investigation and last week issued a recall of the entire manufacturing run from that factory.

I spoke with a Philips representative and confirmed that the Endura/AmbientLED lines were quite popular and millions of the bulbs have been sold. This means that only a small percentage of those sold were faulty. I was also able to confirm that of the 99,000 or so bulbs recalled, only a small share of them are potentially hazardous. This means the full run was recalled for what could be a few thousand or even a few hundred bad units, but — as with all electronic products — it’s important that your device not deliver a significant electrical shock to your customers. That’s just good business.