Today i modifief my power cob led lanterns drivers. Originally they are blastic encased to plastic box that increases much of internal electronics. I take plastic covers off and install only pcb (taking electrical safety on accout) to metal cased cool guality led shoprail lantern. Driver in these lanterns are mounted to a separate metal box with some distance away the hot led heatsink.

I measured component temperatures after and before modification. Before mod elcaps temperatures is in range 80'C lafter modification i measured again elcaps and reault is in 50'C.

As electrolytic capacitors are main.cause eol, other components partly too. According to Aarrhenius calculation where 10'C Lower temperature of electronics doubles the lifetme, My luminaires now shoul last much more longer.

In commercial installatons tempererature of electronic ballast can be hihg. I suspect if power supply is good without transients, As i shoud be, i think that temperature is most reason for problem with electronic ballasts. I mean the quality models like Philips,!Osram,TCI and Tridonc for example.

Sorry about some writing errors, with mobilephone writing is quite hard for my large fingers...

Hi VPL I think your right they should last longer the other bad thing with hot electronics is increased transistor leakage current this leads to more heat which  leads to more leakage until eventually the transistor goes short circuit you get the idea!

And you have to worry about insulation temperature, or it will not be insulation anymore.

The 10C/double life rule is correct. It is actually related to speed of diffusion of materials, in this case diffusion of contaminants that destroy the capacitor

Other things that may fail are the LEDs themselfes if they are running at high loading or high temperature, and the driver as whole if it have some design problem (common with cheap drivers) or is exposed (especially over time) to bad line voltage

Led are good guality Citizen COB. I have get test resulta to my hand. Continuos operating test now continuing 83000h lumen decrease few %. lm80 tm21 test results show 70% lumen point 176000h with maximum allowed current 2.1A And tc temperarure 85'C. I operate these 1,4A with tc temp 85'C. So.according manufactrures tests i suppose that driver is determining total life. I have many spare cob leds for these, but only few spare ballast. A reason for mod.