LED Lighting - And All Things Green

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. 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]

I bet Thomas Edison never would’ve thought we’d end up making light bulbs with fans inside them when he invented the light bulb 100 years ago. That’s what I’ve been seeing more and more of lately both online and at the Las Vegas Lightfair I attended a couple months back (more on that in a future blog entry). Why? Because it’s a race right now for every manufacturer to make a brighter bulb and grab the largest share of the market possible. So why the fans?

To understand this a little better, let’s get into a little bit of LED bulb design theory. There’s three main components in an LED bulb:
1. Chip/Die – This is the LED itself
2. Heatsink – This is what keeps LED Chip/Die cool
3. Optics – This is the lens that directs the light out of the bulb – giving you a narrow/wide beam of light

CREE is the #1 US manufacturer(brightest) for LED dies right now. (See our LED Buying Guide for more information). We can pretty much assume the majority of manufacturers are using the same chip. What about the lens? As important as the lens is, you can only bend the light in so many ways, and the light output increase is only marginal using the same chip.

So what’s the solution? Pack more LED’s into one place or drive them harder by putting more electricity through them. What happens when you do either of these and what’s the #1 killer of LED’s? Heat.

So we need a way of keeping them cool. OK let’s just make a bigger heatsink:

But now the bulb won’t fit in a traditional socket. “Doh”

OK, what about a fan? “Aha!”. This will let us keep a small form factor, and keep the bulbs the same size.

Sounds like a great idea at first but aren’t LED’s rated at 50,000 hours? That’s 17 years at 8 hours a day. Ever opened up a computer after 2 years and seen the amount of gunk the fans have picked up? Imagine the amount of gunk that they will pick up after 5 or 10 years? What happens then? Fan stops > LED overheats > LED dies. There goes $50 to $100.

That’s my thoughts. I just don’t think LED bulbs with fans are the way to go. There’s no way they can possibly last 17 years unless we come up with a self-cleaning fan technology. I DID find a company that came up with a brighter bulb without a fan and am about to get samples of this bulb. Pictures to come…
Anyone think otherwise? Anyone tried an LED bulb with fans?