12 volt X-flash LED bulbs

    Manufacturers of LED lamps are in the hundreds, but I often write about the products of two brands - Ikea and X-Flash. Ikea is the only brand that offers lamps with high color rendering indices (CRI> 92) on the Russian market, and dimmable. X-Flash is the brand that is the first to bring all the Chinese news to Russia.

    I talked about X-flash lamps with auto-on functions at dusk, lamps that change color temperature (now Philips also has these), lamps that can change brightness without a dimmer. Until now, only X-flash has lamps manufactured using the new Crystal Ceramic MCOB technology and the brightest candle- shaped lamps with an E14 base .

    Recently, X-Flash has another type of LED products, which none of the brands on the Russian market have. These are LED lamps with the usual E27 and E14 bases, having a working voltage of 12 volts.


    12-volt lamps are not mass products. They do not need ordinary buyers who buy lamps for apartments. But to everyone who uses autonomous power supply systems (solar panels, windmills, batteries), such lamps will be very useful. They will also be useful to tourists, motorists for use in carrying, connected to the on-board network of the car, owners of garages where there is no electricity or it is often disconnected. Of course, in all these cases, ordinary 230-volt lamps can be used, connecting them to a 12-volt voltage source through an inverter, but using 12-volt lamps can save energy and simplify the design.

    X-Flash introduced eight twelve volt lamps with conventional caps :

    E14 5 W, 3000K warm light and 4000K neutral light.
    E27 5 W 3000К / 4000К
    E27 8 W 3000К / 4000К
    E27 12 W 3000К / 4000К

    Lamps with a power of 5 W are released in the G45 ball format, lamps 8 and 12 W are in the form of a regular A60 pear. All lamps operate on both constant and alternating voltage.


    At my disposal were seven of the eight new lamps.

    I measured the parameters of the lamps using the instruments Viso LightSpion , UPRtek MK350D , THD-2 , Lamptest-1 , Aneng AN8001 , Suntek TDGC2-0.5 , TN-44 , PS-1502DD , Stahl Instab 500 .


    All the lamps give high-quality light - the pulsation when supplied with alternating voltage is absent or very low, and the color rendering index is 82-85, which makes it possible to recommend them for lighting residential premises.

    5-watt lamps actually provide 7–18% more light than the manufacturer promised.

    The actual power of 8-watt lamps turned out to be 7.2 - 7.3 W and they give 8-10% less light than promised, but this fits the requirements of GOST R 54815-2011 , according to which the measured luminous flux of the LED lamp should be at least 90% of the nominal luminous flux.

    Although the actual power of 12-watt lamps is lower than the declared one (10.3-10.5 W), they give 9-10% more light than the manufacturer promised.

    I measured the minimum voltage at which the lamps work confidently and give at least 90% of the initial luminous flux.


    At constant and alternating voltage, the measured values ​​turned out to be different and a problem was found with the driver in 5-watt lamps with an E27 base. At a nominal constant voltage of 12 volts, these lamps are “full-fledged”, and at full brightness they burn at a voltage not lower than 13.2 V. At an alternating voltage of 12 volts, the lamps burn normally, but at 11.3 V they reduce the brightness to 90%. Apparently, the manufacturer confused something and put the drivers in these lamps not for 12, but for 15 volts.

    In this case, a 5-watt lamp with an E14 base behaves completely differently. She works confidently with a decrease in the constant voltage to 10 V, and alternating to 9.5 V. Surely, her twin sister with a neutral light of 4000K behaves in the same way.

    8-watt lamps with alternating voltage operate at a voltage drop to 9 volts, and at a constant voltage up to 6.9, and the brightness in the range of 6.9-12 V does not change, and with a further decrease in voltage, it decreases in a jump-like manner.

    The 12-watt lamps at AC and DC voltage behave almost identically and work confidently when the voltage drops to 9.1 V.

    All tested lamps are suitable for use with a 12 V DC power supply, except for E27 5W lamps, instead of which you can use E14 5W.

    These 12-volt lamps do not have “protection against a fool” in the form of a special base that does not allow them to be screwed in instead of ordinary lamps and get fireworks when plugged into the network, but in order to use them for their intended purpose, they will not have to look for special cartridges.

    As with all its other bulbs, X-Flash claims a very long lifespan - 50,000 hours and gives a warranty of 5 years. Lamps are sold in the manufacturer’s own online store, so there should be no problems with the exchange in case of lamps failure.

    All the parameters of the tested lamps, as well as all the other results of my tests of LED lamps, look at lamptest.ru .

    © 2017, Alexey Nadyozhin

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