LED Lighting: Pushing Ahead | Green Energy News

April 2, 2006 – Vol.11 No.2

LED LIGHTING: PUSHING AHEAD.

Progress Lighting, a 100-year old distributor and manufacturer of lighting products, has teamed up with 11-year old LED lighting developer Permlight to launch a new line of LED lighting products aimed at residential applications.

With this announcement, LEDs, despite their current high costs, are about to go mainstream. Progress sells lighting products through dealers across the U.S., including Home Depot.

It may only be cost that keeps LEDs from taking on the big kahuna: incandescent lighting. Right now the nearest competitor for more efficient lighting is compact fluorescents (CFLs) where in some areas LEDs are technologically closing in.

Just a few years ago when LEDs were first considered as replacements for conventional incandescent bulbs, LED developers regularly said the lighting technology would consume 80-90 percent less electricity than incandescent bulbs when used in white light, general lighting applications.

But as white light LEDs got brighter, produced more lumens, and bulbs were developed that could fit conventional fixtures, their power consumption increased. Now LED bulbs use about the same amount of electricity per unit of light output (lumens per watt) as CFLs. CFLs use about two-thirds less electricity for the same light output than incandescents. Even if LEDs never do better than CFLs the savings is significant.

However, the technology for white light LEDs is relatively young - 5 or 6 years at best. Vast improvements in lumens per watt are expected. It will take more time.

A study from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study concluded that LEDs need a ratio of 110 lumens per watt to tackle standard light bulbs in the marketplace. One company, Light Waves, has introduced an LED light replacement for a 60 watt conventional spot light that operates at 45 lumens per watt: less than half of what Princeton says is needed but clearly progress.

LEDs have much going for them. They don’t have the operational ills of CFLs and can act more like incandescents.

Slow start-up-to-full-output times plague many CFL models. LEDs come on faster than the blink of an eye. Much faster. Almost startling.

LEDs, when running on direct current (DC), are fully dimmable. Some LED lighting products have DC power packaged in. Dimmable CFLs are available but must be used in dimmable circuits.

The color of the light output from CFLs is not always pleasing. White light LED bulbs, since they can be made from white-light or a combination of white and multicolored LED emitters, should be able to be tuned to please the discriminating eyes of consumers.

Some low-cost CFLs aren’t lasting anywhere near as long as the 8000 -10,000 hours claimed by marketers. LEDs may not last the claimed 30,000 hours either, but LEDs as indicator lights in electronics seem to go on forever. Some say LEDs dim over time, however.

Finally, at least in California, CFLs are considered hazardous waste because of their mercury content. LEDs, however, meet California’s Title 22 Household Hazardous Waste Disposal Laws. (Although, electronic controls for the LEDs could conceivably be considered a waste disposal problem: e-waste.)

So LED product developers are forging ahead even though their products are still priced far from CFLs and light-years from incandescents. (The Light Waves 990 lumen LED spotlight (as mentioned above) is $224, which the company admits is expensive.)

Visit Light Waves Concept at http://www.lightwavesconcept.com/ and Permlight at http://www.enbryten.com/ and Progress at http://www.progresslighting.com/