LED Blog: LED Lighting And All Things Green

As long as there's money involved...

Its always hard to push innovation for the sake of innovation, if there’s no immediate need or immediate benefit from it. Its kind of like procrastinating from doing that term paper since it’s not due until the end of the year. The later you start on it, the less time you have though, to make it good. So along the same line of the X-Prize, the Department of Energy has sponsored the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L-Prize for short) to try to kick the asses of the industry to create something amazing while there’s still time before the “end of the semester”.

The contest is to see who can make a 10-watt replacement for the 60-watt incandescent bulb. The contest was introduced last May, and requires that the lights last 25,000 hours (at 4 hours a day, that’s 17 years!) That’s actually not too difficult, as our LED floodlight bulbs are almost at that 60W mark. The “deal-breaker” as far one of the guidelines go, is that the price should go down to $8 a bulb by the third year of production. Now that’s probably the biggest hurdle. Like any emerging technology, the earlier designs, before they become mainstream, are going to cost a considerable amount more. But then it becomes a Catch-22. We can produce the bulbs for a lot less once people start buying more, but we people won’t start buying more until we can produce them for less. Something here has to give for the wheels to start turning, and hopefully the straw that will break the camel’s back will the want for innovation, rather than the need because we have no choice.

The DOE says that if every household in the U.S. switched all their bulbs to LEDs, you could save enough energy in a year to power everything in Las Vegas for two full years. That’s a lot of incentive in terms of energy saved.  If you look at any large-sized company, there is a ton of space that is used as their working environment, and to light up something like that, you must be able to see the cost benefits of switching to eneergy efficient lighting. Well, hopefully this prize can be handed out sooner than later, because time is slowly ticking away….

[Via NY Times and L Prize]

Chevy Volt...Yay!

Ok so we’re finally ALMOST there. I was lurking through my favorite blog the other day, and they seem to have put up some new ads on their site. This time, it’s about the Chevy Volt. For those that have been living under a rock, the Volt is supposed to be the “new hotness” when it comes to green vehicles. Now it does not have the fame of being the first well-known “green” car (that honor would go to the very homely Honda Insight) but it is the first highly publicized made-for-the-general-public primarily electric model.

When I say primarily, I mean that it still swings both ways, but definitely has a penchant towards liberal rather than republican. It’s getting all the attention because even though it has the same overall parts as the past hybrids, this one has a trick up its sleeve. (No doubt they’re probably use an LED light bar or two for interior lighting). Through normal everyday driving, providing it’s under 40 miles, the car will use only use electrical power. So if you’re going back and forth from work everyday, then you never have to fill up the tank. Once it goes beyond that, the battery won’t be able to keep up and the engine kicks on. Pretty novel idea and seems like something that a lot of people are  excited about.

This is not by any means the holy grail (since it still sips dead dinosaur juice), but from a usability standpoint, goes a long way towards almost never having to fill up a tank. One of my good friends swore that he would get one when it comes out, so if that happens, I will definitely be doing an in-depth review of the experience. Or maybe I should just go to the lot for a test drive….

Either way, I’m definitely excited about the possibilities of it all, and maybe in a few years, we can completely wean ourselves away from foreign and domestic oil, for the better of the economy, and ultimately, the planet.

[Via Chevy Volt]

So Apple, who had only a year and a half ago, won the top….err…bottom spot by a good margin of the LOWEST score of “un-green-est” electronics company by Greenpeace, have now turned a new leaf, at least when it comes to the new iPod nano. No mercury and recyclable? That’s a good thing. Now the nano is such a small piece of sexy kit, that what should it matter if there’s a bit of unhealthy stuff, you may ask?

Just like they say, the secret is strength in numbers. With iPod selling over 160 million iPods worldwide since its inception, even 1mg of mercury and other harmful elements will add up in the environment. This argument can also be duplicated for fluorescents bulbs (FYI LED lights contain NO mercury). The smaller compact variety average about 4mg of mercury per bulb (more for large versions) and the longer office fluorescents range from 6-25mg per linear tube. In the U.S. alone, consumers have bought over 300 million bulbs just in 2007 (Wal-mart themselves pledged to sell 100 million the year before). Now extrapolate that to how much mercury that is (easily over 5000 lbs) and it looks like we’re starting to have a problem. Where does all that mercury go? Ideally, we would take all our bulbs and electronics and had them over to a recycling facility, where IDEALLY they would recycle and reuse it. But we don’t live in an ideal world. The reality is that it goes to wherever it makes sense fiscally and conveniently. The dollar(or is it the Euro now) is king. And we’re lazier than we’d like to be. But at least by “greening” things it doesn’t give us the option to handle harmful goods. And that’s all we can ask for right now…

Greenpeace rating for companies 2006

Here’s how the other companies are doing this year, as according to Greenpeace.

[Via Gizmodo Live Blog and Greenpeace]

This website is crazy with it's new LED products for eyes and a mouth.

We were reviewed by The LED Museum. Yay! This is the second Eternaleds bulb review (since that first one a few months ago) that we’ve gotten so it’s good to see our name out there. LED Museum is run by a really nice guy by the name of Craig Johnson since 1999 and he’s done reviews on a ton of different LED-types of products from LED light bulbs to flashlights to nightlights and kids toys. I checked his site and he’s got thousands of reviews of various things that twinkle. The nice thing is he’s got pictures of the beam of the lights on a wall so you can see how the spread looks and how bright it is.

He’s got a bunch of tech specs of some of our more popular bulbs, and when I asked him how to read the graphs and results on his chart, he said

“The spectrographic analysis is simply a representation of the lamp’s output at hundreds of different wavelengths in the visible spectrum ranging from violet to deep red; the spectrum of this bulb shows a lower than normal “blue” peak (this is light emission from the actual LED die under the phosphor) and a higher than usual phosphor emission - this is what helps define it as “WARM white” rather than the cooler (bluer) white found in most other LED products including light bulbs…so yes, that’s a GOOD thing when you advertise the bulb as “warm white”. :-)….The beam cross-sectional analysis isn’t nearly as necessary, but shows (along with the photographs) that this bulb has a very wide viewing angle - also a good thing to have in a light bulb. “

His site is a little bit old school design-wise, but you could spend hours looking at all the different things he’s reviewed. Check out what he said for our HP-10 Globe, HP-3 Mini-Flood, and our new LumiStick.

Those crazy Germans.

Rather than using fossil fuels to create electricity and use the electricity to create light, the town of Dusseldorf has for many years, skipped that unneeded step and burned the gas directly in lamps to create light. I don’t know exactly how much light gas lamps can produce, but that’s probably a lot of extra carbon being pumped into the air.

The municipal power utility is trying out a new plan to replace all their gas lamps with LED lights. Of the 17,000 gas lamps in the city, about 10,000 will be replaced with LED spotlight bulbs.

So far only two dozen have been replaced as a test and people are already unhappy saying the light is rather cold (did you see the pun?). Ulrich Kuiper, who developed the lamps says that he will use warmer LED colors (there’s the pun again) for future lamps. My question would be “How all those Germans will be able to light their cigars at night when they forget their lighter?” But I guess eventually LEDs will be hot enough to do that too. Just kidding. LED’s don’t get that hot.

[Via The Economist]

Awww...they make plants now.

My boy Sammy is really making some new ground this past year or so moving into new markets with its fuel cells, iPhone-clones, and more recently, netbooks. I wouldn’t be surprised if pretty soon they started making LED lights as well! Now beginning Oct 1st, they’re foraying into the new current hotness trend that’s taking over western civilization - GREEN CONSUMERISM! With all the new products they’re creating, they must be running out of raw materials right? Where do we get more? From OLD materials! I do applaud them for making the effort and it does make sense I suppose with this new scheme they’re calling Recycling Direct. Unfortunately, this helps but a small subset of consumers, namely the ones that bought Samsung’s products to begin with as that is the only type they will accept for free (there is a fee for other brands). I can see the conversation going like this :

“Hi, I’d like to recycle my old cell phone.”

“Is it a Samsung?”

“No, it’s a Nokia.”

“So?”

“You will have to pay a fee for us to take Non-Samsung products.”

“Oh ok. I’ll just recycle it into this garbage can here. I don’t think it will charge me anything.”

Oh well. I guess you can’t win them all. There will be fixed dropoff points in all 50 states that coincide with other recycling programs in the area. Now get out there and buy Samsung!

BONUS : Did you know you can mine bars of gold out of old cell phones?

[Recycling Direct Via Crave]

Cao Group LED Bulb

Always on the lookout for companies with new innovative form factors, I found these guys at a recent LED lighting expo and managed to take some spy shots. These bulbs are amazing! They actually took about 18 LEDs and fit them onto a pinpoint giving TRULY omnidirectional light, just like a lightbulb! They were blindingly bright too.

That’s not all…. the LED light bulb can be unscrewed! You take off the glass cap, unscrew the LED, and pop in a new one. Talk about reducing waste. Hats off to you Cao Group!

The only issue? Since they’re packing so many LED’s into a tiny spot, and trying to make it fit in the shape of smaller bulbs, the heatsink must stay small, and therefore so as not to overheat, the most powerful bulb can only go up to 3W. About equivalent to a 35W incandescent bulb.

Cao Group Candelabra Bulb and Mini Spotlight

Energy Ball - Powered by the Wind, Sadly not Chi

I’ve decided to expand the realm of the blog to encompass the second half of the title rather only focusing on LED-specific information. As much as I love LED lights (and could talk about them all day) I feel that broadening your horizons ultimately makes you a better, more well rounded person.

I found this energy ball (unfortunately not the Kamehameha variety) while trolling through the interwebs, and it’s pretty, and pretty innovative. It’s basically a small wind turbine in a round configuration that provides increased efficiency and quieter operation than conventional windmill-style versions. It can operate in relatively low winds and can provide up to 15% of the energy of a typical Swedish family. For fat American’s I’d say cut that by 1/3rd, so maybe it can power 1/2 a PS3. The added benefit (or detriment depending on how you see it) is that it’s less likely to make spontaneous chicken (or bat) nuggets for you throughout the day.

A turbine is a turbine is a turbine, you say? Well then I guess you you haven’t seen enough turbines. A large factor for the purchase of any consumer is form (vs. function), so having such a cute-looking windmill ball on the top of your house could make you the envy of your neighbors as well as providing a service to the environment. The other big factor is cost, so if they can make these at a good price point, I’d love to get a couple and put them outside. I would even name each of them after obscure DragonBall attacks.

[Via Inhabitat]

David Hasselhoff

Hasselhoff at 130 inches. Screen size. Not the other thing. This must be what the epitomy of technological brilliance has brought us for all these years from Edison’s humble beginnings of the filament bulb. What you see here is an image from the world’s first 1080p (the highest consumer resolution out there) LCD projector powered with a liquid-cooled LED light bulb. As you know, LEDs have a lifetime of 50,000 hours, providing you 5.7 years of nonstop viewing.   That’s enough time to watch every episode of every season that the Hoff was in Baywatch back-to-back 315 times (yes I calculated) and still give you over four full days of bathroom and snack breaks.

The projector spits out 600 lumens at 100,000:1 contrast ratio (meaning the blacks are are black-hole black and the whites are super-marshmallow white, the actual shade of the Hoff’s choppers), and is currently only a prototype being shown at the CEDIA 2008 Convention. Being the fact that it’s LED based also means that the power usage will be well below the 200-500W equivalent bulbs that are used right now, meaning that I could probably leave it on 24/7 for the next five years without killing my electic bill. Also with a lifespan dwarfing conventional bulbs by 10-20x, I would not need to replace the bulb for a while. FYI, projector bulbs normally cost at least a few hundred dollars which definitely makes me use mine sparingly.  No word on pricing, but but I would give my left…arm…for one when it comes out.

[Via Gizmodo]

A bulb-shaped LED bulb. Intriguing

Now why didn’t I think of that? Wait, I did. It’s our website logo. All they have to do now is put it into a leaf shape. Luckily this is just a concept because as beautiful as this LED light bulb looks, the light it outputs would only be coming out of the top hemisphere, if even. Normal incandescents can do it, because their element is large and the supports are made of glass. But we can always dream can’t we?