I have quite a bit of experience with some of the cheap LED "shop lights" and am not impressed. We did a temporary install of 6 Costco Feit LED to fill in an area until the lighting circuits could be all redone and lighting optimized in one small parts warehouse. Four are on 70 hours/week during business hours. Two are used rarely when someone is working in that area, probably no more than 10 hours a month. After three years you can readily see the difference. That's 11,000 hours for the 4.
One section has 21 single bulb 8' T-12 lamps. The rate of light reduction for the Costco LEDs is a little better than the 8' T-12 (Phillips F96T12/CW Supreme). So the "short life" T-12 are rated at 12,000 hours, which is 3.25 years for our use. If we use the same type of rating, the Costco LED are probably good for almost 4 years.
In the offices we use good quality T-8 fluorescents for 10 years under the same use. As an experiment I changed out 4 of the offices to T-8 LED conversions. Each brand/model got 4 bulbs so eight different LED brands/models. All but one has had a failure of 1 in the 3 years so basically a 25% failure rate in 3 years. Most of the 22-24w LED had 2 failures out of 4 for a 50% failure rate in 3 years. So far I'm not really impressed with T-8 LED conversions either. I hope they are getting better.
For another point of reference I ran 998 Sylvania Octron 21681 T8 24x7 for 5 years before changing them each time. They are rated right at that 44,000 hours at 10% light loss. Since we could only shut them down once a year, we never were brave enough to try for 6 years. We had to meet certain standards for light levels for production and quality assurance and the light monitoring system pretty much matched the 10% light loss spec from the manufacturer at 40,000 hours.
The complete failure rate for cheap LED is running much higher than fluorescents for my uses. However, I am using good T12 and T-8 bulbs and we don't have to deal with very cold temperatures here.
