LED Home Lighting

Why You Really Do Need To Consider Energy Saving Lighting

If you haven’t thought much about energy saving lighting up till now then you are in for a very rude awakening sooner than you might have realised.

The governments of many developed countries have already enacted legislation to phase out and ultimately ban the normal incandescent light bulb we all know so well.

Australia has passed lighting legislation to have incandescent bulbs removed from the shelves by 2010, Canada is aiming for 2012, as are all member countries of the European Union, with the United Kingdom targeting 2011 so as to be ahead of the EU wide requirement to eliminate inefficient incandescent light bulbs.

The UK schedule for phasing out GLS (General Lighting Service) incandescent lamps gives some idea of how aggressively governments are taking measures designed to help stop Global Warming.

• January 2008: stop replacing stock of bulbs rated above 100w
• January 2009: ban sales of bulbs rated above 60w
• January 2010: ban sales of bulbs rated above 40w
• December 2011: ban sales of ALL remaining GLS incandescent bulbs

As you can see, lighting legislation to phase out of incandescent bulbs has already been passed and acted upon and a total ban will be in effect quite soon.

So if you thought that global warming was just a scare story you might need to think again. Phasing out of inefficient incandescent light bulbs and replacing them with energy saving light bulbs is but one of several global warming solutions that governments around the world are implementing as fast as they possibly can.

Whether or not you agree with it, efforts to stop global warming are flooding into legislation and regulations across the developed world, which means simply that it’s the law and you have to comply.

This then is shortly going to leave you with a question to answer next time you need to buy a replacement light bulb. Namely, what type of energy saving light bulb are you going to replace your regular incandescent bulb with?

As things stand you will face two choices:

• Existing “low energy” light bulbs – CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps)
• The new generation of ultra low energy LED light bulbs

So lets see how CFLs and LEDs compare against each other.

You have probably already seen CFLs on sale in shops and in use in offices and some domestic settings. They’ve been around a while yet despite their claims to deliver low-energy and energy savings (for which read: saving money) they have hardly taken off at all.

There are a number of good reasons for this.

The Many Problems With CFL Light Bulbs

First, when you take into account the purchase price and replacement frequency of CFLs, as energy saving light bulbs go they are not that great in terms of the true total cost of ownership.

Put simply, they don’t save enough money to make a difference to most people. Which is likely the number one reason they haven’t caught on – people typically act in their own self interest and CFLs don’t provide sufficient savings to appeal.

Second, CFLs are without doubt ungainly bordering on outright ugly and exhibit an unpleasant garish light quality. The whole point of artificial light for most people is to illuminate their surroundings in an attractive way. Who wants to come home to a house that looks like a badly lit municipal office?

Third, CFL bulbs are not as green as many assume. Being more complicated than incandescent bulbs, they need more materials, more processing, and therefore more energy to manufacture.

Fourth, CFL bulbs have poor start-up characteristics (noticeable delay before maximum luminosity is achieved) and much reduced life span if switched on and off frequently.

Fifth, are almost all CFL bulbs are not dimmable at all, and furthermore cannot be used to replace halogen lamps (for example GU10 mains voltage and low voltage MR16 12v fittings).

Sixth, CFL light bulbs contain small, yet significant, quantities of mercury vapour. Mercury, a heavy metal like lead, is a “neurotoxin” and extremely poisonous and damaging to humans whether ingested, inhaled, or simply in contact with the skin. It’s all very worthy making an effort to stop global warming, but at the expense of the environment and public health?

Used CFL light bulbs are a form of hazardous waste and should be disposed of appropriately at a recycling facility. You can of course ignore this chore and simply dump them in the regular waste, but in that case you might as well dump your green credentials along with your discarded CFL light bulb.

Finally, if you think CFL bulbs look like a poor replacement for incandescent bulbs, that’s nothing compared to how poorly the lighting industry itself thinks of these products. There is almost zero allocation for improving CFLs in the research and development budgets of the major lighting corporations, despite the well known flaws for CFL bulbs. Vast sums of money however are being spent on bringing the next generation of energy saving lighting - domestic LED lighting - to the market.

Domestic LED Lighting – The Genuine Energy Saving Lighting Solution

Though the lighting industry is less than enthusiastic about CFLs, they do have a vision for the future of domestic energy saving lighting that (excuse the pun) lights the way forward. As far as the big names in the lighting industry are concerned the future is LED home lighting.

LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) are a form of solid state lighting that has been around for quite a while in low power applications such as torches and night lights and so on. But with the new generation of low power consumption high brightness LED light bulbs combined with the urgent need to stop global warming, the time of the genuine energy saving light bulb has truly arrived.

The new ranges of LED home lighting starting to emerge (not very coincidentally with the phasing out of incandescent bulbs) finally deliver the light levels and color qualities to genuinely replace incandescent lighting.

You want low power consumption? Try a 5w LED unit to replace a conventional 60w light bulb. Couple that with a lifespan of 50,000 hours (or more, some LED manufacturers claim up to 100,000 hours) compared to 1,000 hours for an incandescent, and what have you got?

Answer: a light bulb that both costs next to nothing to run a lifespan of literally decades. New generation domestic LEDs truly are the ultimate energy saving light bulbs.

On a point by point comparison, LED home lighting delivers on every measure where CFL bulbs fall short.

The total cost of ownership makes economic sense with quite substantial savings in energy costs.

LED lighting is crisp, bright and richly varied, with many different white color tones to choose from as well as vibrant saturated colors. It’s everything that CFL technology isn’t – attractive to look at and able to provide pleasing illumination.

LED light bulbs start-up immediately (faster than incandescent bulbs in fact) and don’t suffer from being switched on and off. The start up on CFL bulbs is noticeably poor and their lifespan adversely affected by frequent on/off cycling.

They are on the whole dimmable and easily slot in as replacements for halogen lamps in the 12v low power MR16 format, GU10 mains or even the new GU20 low energy standard base.

And finally, one of the most crucial comparison points with CFL bulbs: LED lights do not contain hazardous, toxic waste, namely mercury vapour.

Domestic LED Lighting – The Technology For A Low Power World

But radical new lighting legislation and comparisons with existing incandescent and CFL lighting solutions only hint at what is really going on in the normally rather staid and uninteresting world of domestic lighting.

With global warming gaining ever more political attention (and resulting legislation) and the clear evidence that we are now past the point of “peak oil” (and that henceforth oil is set to become ever more difficult to extract and accordingly ever more expensive to burn) it is becoming obvious that the only viable world for the immediate future is a low energy consumption world, and a key component of that is energy saving lighting.

Now you might wonder how a massive, established industry such as lighting could possibly switch from a business model based around a cheap, disposable, essentially uniform commodity - namely the incandescent light bulb that relied on built in obsolescence and therefore a pattern of continual replacement - to rapidly embrace a business model predicated on a sophisticated, endlessly customizable, high lifespan product - namely LED lighting units.

What happens when everyone has bought their replacement LED home lighting kits with expected life spans of 50,000 hours or more? Won’t the lighting manufacturers go out of business? The short and straightforward answer is no, they won’t. The promise of widespread domestic LED lighting opens up exciting and lucrative new opportunities rather than tolls the death knell for lighting manufacturers.

For a start, just because the useful lifespan of an LED lighting unit may exceed 50,000 hours doesn’t mean that people will necessarily keep them that long before replacing them. Think back to the early days of the Personal Computer.

There’s no particular reason that a mid-1980’s PC shouldn’t still be running now - the components were manufactured with lifespans easily capable of lasting that long if not a few decades longer still. The reason you won’t find an Eighties personal computer still in use today is because it has been superseded many times over by better and cheaper versions.

The same pattern will almost certainly emerge as LED technology takes hold over the next year or two. Early adopters of energy saving lighting will switch to what is presently the latest generation of domestic LED lighting because the cost savings to this group are already compelling; but as performance increases and prices drop then take-up of LED home lighting will spread more widely and at some point even the early adopters of LED technology will then ditch their existing products and re-invest in the new, cheaper, more powerful domestic LED lighting, regardless of the remaining unused lifespan.

Remember a key differentiator when comparing LED lighting with incandescent and CFL equivalents: LED light bulbs are intrinsically electronic devices. They don’t have electronic capability attached to them, they actually are electronic. The things that can be done with them and the ways they might be integrated with existing electronic/computing devices are practically limitless.

Consider the convergence in recent years between computers, cameras, and mobile phones with a rich variety of media available including pictures, video and music. Now consider also that Moore’s Law (which explains the phenomenal growth of all things based on the computer chip) has an LED equivalent. Haitz’s Law holds that the performance of LED chips grows by a factor of 20 while their price drops by a factor of 10 over the span of each decade.

At present the performance of domestic LED lighting is doubling roughly every 18 months. Put another way, if at present it is possible (which it is) to emit as much light as a regular 40w light bulb (about 400 lumens) using a 4w LED capable of producing 100 lumens per watt, in a year and a half you will be able to do the same with a 2w LED light chip (and it will be cheaper as well).

Now do you get the picture of what’s about to happen on the back domestic LED lighting? Its little wonder the lighting industry is so keen to see the back of “light bulbs” and dive headlong into the opportunities presented by the serendipitous combination of global warming and LED lighting technology.

It’s a sort of virtuous triangle: governments and many citizens want to stop global warming; the lighting industry wants to introduce domestic LED lighting to replace both incandescent and CFL bulbs; the average consumer just wants to illuminate their home attractively, responsibly and above all cheaply.

Who would have thought it? The humble energy saving light bulb may yet save us all as we battle to stop global warming (before it stops us).