LED – The Best Light Bulb for Your Money

Are you still using incandescent light bulbs? As we all know that home lighting accounts for about 20% of the average home’s electricity bill. So switching to compact flourescent or LED bulbs will cut down your electricity bill.

Here are the pros and cons for LED:

LEDs
LED technology allows for a large amount of light to come from a small source of energy without giving off much heat.

Costs: At up to $100 per bulb (although many cost between $20 and $30), converting an entire home to an all-LED lighting system could wind up costing thousands of dollars upfront.

But, like computers and iPhones, LED bulbs will likely get cheaper over time, likely making them a more convincing lighting option.

“The cost of bright LEDs has dropped 95% in the last 10 years and 30% in the last three,” says William Greenhoe, president of PiSAT, a company that makes solar powered LED lanterns and flashlights.

Pros: Each LED light bulb, which uses direct and powerful light emitting diode technology, can last up to 50,000 hours.  That’s five and a half hours a day every day for 25 years.

Also, LED bulbs don’t get as hot as incandescent bulbs, which could make them more safe and efficient for commercial use, especially if they’re left on 24 hours a day, seven days a week

Cons: Converting your home lighting system to all LEDs may not be a good idea if you live in a very cold climate, says Cunningham, citing reports that Canadian consumers switching to LED bulbs eventually had greater demands on their home heating systems due to low heat output from LED bulbs.

And though some companies guarantee their bulbs for life, many LED bulbs are only guaranteed for a year or a few years.

“LEDS are just coming onto the market, so there’s not a lot of regulation right now or information on whether or not they’re going to fulfill their 50,000 hour promises,” says Cunningham.

A Modular LED Light System – Branch Light

Branch Light it’s a modular interior LED light system. It features a lightweight black ceramic body, with no wirings, no threads and no holes, just a plain faceted surface inspired on the Vertex. Both interconnections, LEDs and wall plus roof supports, are made, using the power of neodymium magnets.

Création du designer portugais Bruno Fosi, le concept de lustre à LEDs modulable “Branch Light” mélange art nouveau, inspirations origamiques et technologies modernes pour un résultat plutôt réussit. Découverte en images dans la suite !

Who Can Save the Incandescent Lightbulb?

A new breakthrough may change the attitude that the incandescent lightbulb has had its day.

As we are know that compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) have unquestionably gained popularity for their energy efficiency when compared to the traditional incandescent bulb. Millions of people around the world have been encouraged by politicians, governments, energy utilities, and even lightbulb companies themselves to phase out traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of CFLs (or even LEDs) to save electricity in the home.

But now researchers at the University of Rochester in New York say they’ve found a way to make an incandescent lightbulb more efficient.

A group led by Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, has been testing the effects of ultra-fast lasers on the properties of metals and decided to try a tungsten filament (the tiny wire in the typical lightbulb).

The group blasted the tungsten filament with an ultra-fast short-pulse laser for a femtosecond. A femtosecond is to a second “what a second is to about 32 million years,” according to the researchers.

The blast changed the properties of the surface metal on the filament so that it formed nanostructures and microstructures that enabled it to shine significantly more brightly while still using the same amount of electricity.

“We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament. When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb’s energy usage,” Guo said in a statement.

The change in the filament has enabled the incandescent light bulb to shine as bright as an average 100-watt bulb, but consume less electricity than the average 60-watt bulb.

Full details of the project, which was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, will be published in the next issue of “Physical Review Letters.”

So laser can save the incandescent lightbulb? We are expecting the project…