LED Home Lighting | The Future’s Bright, The Future’s LED
Why the buzz about home LED lighting?
Home LED Lighting was until quite recently a little known backwater in the field of domestic lighting solutions with few practical applications and few fans. Well that was then. This is now.
The stark reality now is that oil is running out fast which means that in future we are going to see HUGE increases in the cost of energy.
That’s because
- at present almost all our energy comes from oil, and
- the law of supply and demand is still on the statute book.
Sound’s grim? Well that depends on whether you buy into the “we’re all doomed, woe is us” mentality that assumes we brought all this on ourselves (which, to be fair, we did) and now must pay a terrible price (literally and metaphorically).
An alternative school of thought suggests that actually mankind has a pretty good record of applying its collective ingenuity to solve most problems, even great big ones that we in fact created.
The question then arises as to whether we will be able to fix our energy problems with existing technology or must hope instead for some new future breakthrough to save the day?
And the answer to the question? A bit of both. We already have the technology, it’s called LED lighting; the breakthrough required is simply widespread adoption.
And that’s why home LED lighting is widely regarded as one of the hottest emerging technologies now and for the forseeable future, and one of the coolest domestic lighting solutions available.
It’s economics, stupid!
The difference between conventional incandescent lamps and solid-state lighting such LEDs is truly orders of magnitude. The former is little more than a heat source that also releases a very small percentage of incidental light; in terms of light production it’s little different to the gas lamp or candle even.
Whereas LEDs are electronic devices that convert their tiny power input into pure light and very little else.
And that’s the point.
They cost almost nothing to run (and can be easily powered by solar power and other renewable energy sources), don’t wreck the environment, look fantastic and have a lifespan that ensure they can go on quietly doing this for decades.
The very low power consumption characteristics of LED lights combined with their long life span makes them very attractive to consumers in terms of total cost of ownership.
In a world of ever rising fuel costs the payback from moving to home LED lighting can be as little as a year or two with ongoing reductions in fuel bills for the future thereafter.
But its not just your personal carbon footprint that’s improved by running low-cost, low-heat, low-replacement lighting.
The energy required to power wasteful incandescent lamps, that throw up to 98% of that energy away as heat, comes from electricity generating power stations that themselves pump waste heat AND carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And that’s all before you factor in the energy (and therefore ever more expensive fuel and environmental damage) required to keep making all the replacement incandescent bulbs you will need to continue illuminating your home.
A regular 60w incandescent light bulb has a life of little more than 1,000 hours which means you will have to purchase a whopping 50 replacements over the same life span as an LED equivalent.
Multiplied by billions of people, that’s cost, waste and pollution on a truly heroic scale.
The writing on the wall…
Philips (no small bit player in domestic lighting solutions) is betting the farm on a future where home LED lighting is completely commonplace. Check out Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions.
And Philips are not a lone voice in the wilderness. Many in the lighting industry see the present generation of “low-energy” CFL light bulbs as merely an interim solution prior to widespread adoption of LED technology in the near to medium term future.
CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) are, as the name suggests, simply small fluorescent tubes (not unlike the neon strip lights you see in offices) and are noted for their large ungainly appearance, inability to be dimmed, unpleasant light quality and 5 milligrams of mercury in each one that render them hazardous waste.
This is what Kaj den Daas, chairman and chief executive of Philips Lighting, has to say about the future of CFLs: “We are not spending one dollar on research and development for compact fluorescents”.
That’s because Philips R&D budget is being spent on next generation LED lights to meet the expected future demand for low-energy, low-environmental impact products that will be driven by the twin tsunamis of climate change and the energy crunch.
Matt Adams (also of Philips Lighting) gives an intriguing glimpse of what we might expect from LED lighting in the near future.
When an entire established industry changes it’s business model, from making money selling a low-cost item that has to be frequently replaced to selling a higher priced item that lasts decades, you just know that the world is about to experience one of those seismic shifts that are so easy to identify in history and yet so easy to miss when they actually happen. You hardly need a “stock market for beginners” guide to figure this out as an investment opportunity for the future.
Think the internet, powered flight, telephones, electricity itself. That scale of shift that changes the world forever, as all the while the know-alls, critics and other assorted Jeremiahs explain why it won’t work and can’t happen.
LED’s are just for torches and Christmas trees huh? Check out Lite Panels professional broadcast quality film and TV set LED lighting. No they’re not cheap, yet, but remember how long ago it was that folk bemoaned the price of a single megabyte of computer memory? Not very long ago at all, and now you can’t even load the operating system without at least 1 gigabyte.
Get the picture? Ultra-bright soft white LED lighting more than capable of lighting your entire home already exists; we’re just entering the commoditisation phase which will rapidly bring the cost down.
The future of lighting is LED because the future has to be low-energy, low-carbon, low-heat; otherwise there is no future.
That’s just the way it is, so get used to it and welcome to the bright new future of home LED lighting!