LED Home Lighting

Why You Should Care About Low Energy Lighting

Let’s start with the obvious question; why should you even care about low energy light bulbs - what’s actually wrong with the regular incandescent lighting we’ve all grown accustomed to? This has two principal answers.

First, you should care because if you switch to low energy lighting it will save you money, a lot of money in fact. To understand what being able to see when it goes dark actually means in terms of cost, first consider that lighting consumes 22% of the electrical power generated in the United States - that represents a huge opportunity to save electricity and a whole lot of money.

Whether you look at a conventional incandescent GLS (General Lighting Service) bulb, a tungsten halogen lamp, the current generation of energy saving bulbs called CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) or a new generation LED (Light Emitting Diode) unit, almost all the cost of a light bulb is in the running costs. In other words the price of electricity. The cost of the bulb itself is quite marginal when calculating the cost of lighting.

Incandescent light bulbs waste well over 90% of their input energy as heat - only a small amount of all that electricity is turned into light; the rest is literally burned away. This is not cost effective by anyone’s definition - every evening we could save 90% of what we spend on electricity simply be fitting energy saving light bulbs. Ever look at YOUR electricity bill and wonder why it seems so high these days?

In case you hadn’t noticed, the price of electricity is directly related to the cost of energy in general, which itself is determined by the world oil price, which is already painfully high. Although there may be peaks and troughs along the way, the inescapable fact is that the supply of oil is now past its peak which means the overall trend will be for increasing oil prices from here on in. If you don’t like your fuel bills now you are in for much, much worse in the years down the line. Unless of course you choose to do something about it, like buy into low energy lighting.

Second, you really ought to care because of the fact that energy saving and global warming are intimately connected. Now it really doesn’t matter whether you are actually concerned about, or even believe the existence of, global warming. If you are concerned and want to do your bit to help stop global warming then that’s great and switching to low energy light bulbs will make a bigger difference than you might imagine one person can make.

But even if you don’t give a rat’s arse about climate change (in the teeth of some very solid evidence it has to be said) you still can’t ignore this issue because your government and the governments of pretty much the entire developed world have agreed that global warming is a clear and present danger and have enacted legislation to compel everyone, you included, to switch to low energy (or energy saving, the terms are interchangeable) light bulbs within the next two years.

The reason is very simple. Multiply all that waste heat and electricity by the billions of light bulbs switched on every day and you get to a very big number. And it’s not just the cost to you as an individual or the waste heat you’re personally pumping into the atmosphere that’s the problem, there’s also the unnecessary heat and CO2 that your electricity generating power station churns out, not to mention to additional waste and pollution incurred by the light bulb factories needed to keep supplying stocks of incandescent bulbs (which compared to any of their energy saving lighting cousins, have very short life spans).

Energy Saving Lighting Options

So, now that we have your attention and you understand what the problem with incandescent light bulbs is and why low energy light bulbs are a much better alternative, the next question is: which type of energy saving light bulb should you consider?

There is a sort of scale of energy efficiency where lighting solutions are concerned. At the bottom is the humble incandescent GLS bulb which is better than gas lighting, but not much. Next up comes tungsten halogen, which is significantly more efficient and can be a viable interim substitute lighting solution for certain types of non-directional room lighting.

A big drawback with halogen lamps is that although they are more efficient and give a brighter cleaner light, they run at very high temperatures. When used (as they commonly are) as spotlights or recessed down lights they reflect an awful lot of heat backwards and can even present a fire risk in certain situations.

Next we get to the low power consumption category where we first find Fluorescent and Compact Fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs. The many problems with CFL light bulbs and indeed fluorescent lighting in general are well known. Frankly this is a technology that really has no future. It is at best an interim stop-gap on the inevitable journey to the real future - LED home lighting.

LED home lighting is set to totally alter energy consumption patterns across the world in the next few years. Both governments and the global lighting industry have committed massive support for LED research and development. The benefits that domestic LED lighting bring are clear:

• Ultra low power consumption
• Cheap to run (save electricity)
• Climate friendly - convert energy to light, not heat
• Incredibly long life span (50,000-100,000 hours)
• Huge variety of white tones and colors
• Very bright, clean light quality
• Dimmable
• Lightweight, compact and attractive to look at
• Environmentally friendly - no mercury or lead

The (Very Near) Future of Low Energy Light Bulbs

Yet still we hear Luddite voices that energy saving lighting in the form of domestic LED lights is too expensive and can’t compete with conventional incandescent lighting for brightness and range of applications. It will never work they bleat.

Well, if you haven’t heard of Haitz’s Law then this might surprise you.

Haitz’s Law, named after former Agilent scientist Roland Haitz, is the LED equivalent to Moore’s Law in the computer chip industry (Moore’s Law asserts that chip performance doubles every 18 months)

Haitz’s Law holds that each decade the prices of LED lights fall by a factor of 10 while performance grows by a factor of 20. This isn’t idle speculation either: it is matter of historical fact that over each of the past decades the cost of an LED light has fallen to a tenth of its previous cost while luminosity (brightness) was twenty times greater. In fact, at present the luminous efficiency (light output per watt of power consumed) of home LED lighting is doubling every 18 months.

Within two years at the outside then LED home lighting will quite simply become the dominant force in all domestic lighting. Ignoring even government legislation to wean the world off incandescent light bulbs, the savings in electricity guarantee that the inescapable logic of economics will force LED energy saving lighting on the market.