LED burn in testing

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that most lighting companies like to gloss over: LEDs are fragile creatures.

Behind the seamless, hypnotic glow of a finished Fluora, there are thousands of tiny micro-components. These components are extremely sensitive and can be easily damaged. Lots can go wrong during manufacturing if you aren't obsessive about quality control.

Unfortunately, LEDs also don't fail gracefully. As much as we'd love them to simply not turn on if they are damaged, sometimes the data that is being sent to an LED gets corrupted, causing an LED to flicker or lock up, a phenomena we affectionately call "disco-ing". Over the years, we've developed our own process of testing and maintaining LED systems, for both our larger art installations, and our home products.

To start, we put our hardware through a standard industry test called “burn-in testing.” Right after our LEDs are manufactured, we lay them out on massive test tables, plug them into our custom testing systems, and run them at 100% full brightness for 48+ hours straight.

Burn in testing at one of our factory partners in China.

This test is designed to catch what the industry calls “infant mortality” defects — early component failures caused by microscopic manufacturing flaws or faulty soldering joints. If a diode is going to fail, we want it to fail on the factory floor, not in your living room.

Despite implementing and enforcing these initial tests, we still see failures after receiving these LEDs in the USA.

Calli, testing an LED Twig before it goes up into one of our LED Tree installations

For our art installations: we implemented a second, on site test to catch failures while building them on site.

As part of the installation process, we setup a test station, that includes an LED controller that plays back a basic "test pattern" - rotating between Red, Green, Blue, and White. Red, green, and blue test each individual diode on an LED, and white tests all three of them on, together. Each LED fixture is put through this test one final time before they go live in an installation.

Our on-site installation teams have spent many long nights under the monotonous glare of those test patterns, fixing minor wiring issues and re-soldering connections on the fly to recover broken hardware and get installations to 100% complete.

With Fluora, we knew we wouldn't have the luxury of a final hardware test - as product would get shipped directly to customer's homes. So, we got creative.

We ended up creating a replaceable LED leaf - if one LED or leaf on a Fluora fails, you can swap it out with a single new leaf instead of replacing the whole entire product.

The final safety net? A 1-year warranty on all our products. If there are any LED or hardware issues whatsoever in the first year, we fix the problem and replace necessary hardware, free of charge.

Fluora Mini full system test on the production line

This testing is incredibly tedious — and can be soul crushing — even one LED pixel off on a Fluora or in an art installation can be an eye sore. However, it needs to be done to create a fully magical experience — whether in the home with Fluora or in public with our larger art installations.

Bring the magic home