LED Blog: LED Lighting And All Things Green

Chinese manufacturer logo - surfing babies what?! - are you kidding me??

I just got an email in our inbox today. We get spammed about 5x a day from different manufacturers in China trying to get us to sell THEIR LED products. This one was particularly funny since it DID get my attention, but not in a good way, with their attached logo of a chinese baby “catching a wave”. (I can’t make this stuff up people)

The emails generally consist of a Dear sir/madam - followed by extremely broken English, with an attached pricelist asking us to consider them to be our manufacturer.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dear Sir,
This is Vickey  who come from Shenzhen *** ,LTD .I am kindly know you are in the market of LED lights.I would like to indroduce our comapny and products to you ,Hope to we could build business relatioship in 2009.”

I left the spelling errors in there on purpose. Do they REALLY expect us to buy their products, if the first sentence in their email is plagued with grammatical and spelling errors?

There are literally hundreds of new manufacturers in China trying to jump on the LED bandwagon, and make LED light bulbs. The question is what % of them are complete garbage?. We’ve taken the time to contact a number of manufacturers and tested their products thoroughly, before deciding on who to go with which is why we can offer a 2 year warranty and 30 day guarantee.

Once again, buyer beware - there’s a ton of new websites cropping up selling LED lights, at LOW prices. Their manufacturer can very well be the one who can’t even hire someone who speaks english, or uses surfing chinese babies in their logo…would you spend $40-$100 with them?

Anyone else seen some questionable websites? We’ll be happy to scope them out and give you the lowdown.

Announcing our new 3rd Generation LED Light Bulbs

We are extremely excited to announce our newest 3rd Generation LED Light bulbs! After weeks of testing we’ve found the brightest LED bulbs on the planet.

How do we know these are the brightest? We got a bunch of samples from manufacturers from all around the world and put them through weeks of testing. The following are the winners that are not only the brightest but have the best bang for the buck.

2nd generation LED bulbs use a big hunk of metal to cool them. This isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that it makes them expensive - and price is one of the biggest factors in getting people to adopt LED lighting. Our new bulbs are different as follows:

Quanta-18 and Quanta-9 - Uses shatterproof plastic and air-cooling technology to make them feather light and cool to the touch as well as cost MUCH less than comparable 2nd generation LED light bulbs from other manufacturers.

Chromia-6 - No more all metal heatsink - just metal fins that provide much more surface area for cooling similar to those used in the newest computer processors (CPU’s)

Hydralux-4 - This is the first LED bulb in the world to use LIQUID COOLING technology, so half the bulb isn’t covered with the metal heatsink anymore unlike other LED globes, and you get light ALL AROUND, instead of just off the top half.

Check out Eternaleds.com for more detailed descriptions, and as always real-life side by side application photos so you can see how these bulbs compare to their incandescent equivalents!

Super cool 21W bulb with an insane heatsink

Sorry guys, for the lack of updates. We’ve been VERY busy looking for some new manufacturers and new products. LED light bulbs and the technology that powers them is changing so fast, I’d almost say that the ones you’ve seen online 1 year ago are already obsolete.

The biggest advance we’ve seen is with heatsinking technology. Since LED dies/chips only get marginally better, the only other thing that manufacturers can do is cluster more LED’s together, and drive them harder.

More power means more heat, so they’re forced to come up with some insane heatsink designs (they’re starting to look like computer CPU heatsinks). I wonder if any CPU heatsink manufacturers are making LEDs……

The guy you see on your left is a whopping 21W LED floodlight that is DIMMABLE and is meant to replace about a 100W incandescent flood. 80% savings and it lasts 10x longer…NICE. Price? Well, let’s see if we can get them over here and we promise you we’ll get the lowest price possible.

So stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated on our status in the hunt for better, brighter LED bulbs. What’s the most common bulb you’d like to replace in your home or store? Floodlights? Halogen or Globes? Leave a comment and let us know…

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

We have our own website, that sells products but I can’t help but tip my hat to this company. LLF Inc. who was bought out by CREE one of the main LED Chip Manufacturers in the US has the best led fixture out there right now:

They sell a 6-inch and 4-inch LED fixture that you can install in new construction or retro-fit into existing cans (plug and play):
What’s so great about it?

• It’s CHEAP - I’ve seen it sell for well under $100
• It’s bright (enough) - equivalent to a 65W bulb using 12W
• It’s widely available - type in “CREE LR6″ and you can find it both on the internet and in the majority of electrical wholesale stores (No Home Depot or Big-Box retailers yet). Also from what I’ve heard from the wholesalers - it’s selling like hot cakes.
• It’s dimmable on any pre-existing system or using any standard dimmer.

This is a BIG deal especially in homes because having seen and personally talked to a large number of manufacturers from China, USA, Korea, Taiwan the one thing they can’t seem to nail down is dimmability. 100% of all the manufacturers are in one of these categories for dimmability:

1. It dims partially - only down to about 30% then it start flickering
2. It dims on their own proprietary dimmer - which means you have to switch out your nice looking dimmer for a plain jane knob dimmer typically
3. It dims using a remote control - HUH?! - Why would you want to have a remote to dim your lights?!? - oh and to make it work you have to throw in a transformer (proprietary of course) between your power supply and the lights.
4. They say it dims - and it doesn’t at all. When you put the bulb on a dimmer, and try dimming it produces a seizure inducing flicker.

So hat’s off to Cree, though these aren’t as easy to install as these screw-in LED spotlight bulbs. For your marketing and foresight. By the way, we’re actively looking for a BRIGHTER, DIMMABLE solution that will compete directly with the LR6. And when we find it, you can guarantee you’ll see it in our store.

What I’ve noticed lately is there’s a lack of information that can be found on the web about LEDs. Now there’s a ton of information online about LEDs in general, don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to LED lights specifically and what to look for when wanting to purchase them, the information is very sparse, and if it even IS available, it’s usually in a very technical format where you practically need an engineering degree to decrypt what the figures mean.

Because of that, we’ve decided to create a guide of our own. It’s a guide that explains :

• What LEDs are
• How they work
• Why they are better than compact fluorescents

and most importantly,

• What features you should be looking for when purchasing LED light bulbs

If you like it, Digg it, facebook it, or please let us know in the comments below!!!

The Definitive Buying Guide for LED Light Bulbs

I’ve finally gotten around to offloading and organizing all the pictures from the Eco Gift Expo at the Santa Monica Convention Center in December. It was an exciting and productive trip, and we met a lot of great people there. This was the first expo that we’ve done (and definitely not the last) so it was good to get out there and talk to like-minded eco-conscious individuals that were as passionate about being green as we were.

Now being that it was the first time we have had a booth at an expo, there’s some things you should know if you ever decide to do one…

1. Know your stuff - There will be a ton of different people going to the expo, be it consumers, business owners, as well as media (both print and web). They will all have different levels of knowledge about your product, and your competitors, ranging from completely uneducated to Mr. (or Ms.) Know-it-All. Know what you’re talking about inside and out so that you can be the trusted expert to answer any and every question that may come your way.

2. Break out your wallet - The initial cost of booth may seem like a large expense, but for all the other costs like displays, building material, tools, rentals, it will quickly add up. The final cost after all was said and done was almost the cost of two booths. My recommendation is to call up your credit card company and ask them to raise your credit limit, and at the same time lower your interest rate.

3. Drink lots of coffee - Plan on moving around quickly and talking to everyone that walks by the booth. The hardest thing about this is when it’s the second day, and you haven’t gotten enough sleep, and your energy is waning. Your mood reflects on what you are selling, so if you look tired, or unmotivated, people will think you’re not interested in your product so why should they? If you can’t stand there for 10-13 hours straight, then you probably need to hire someone to do that.

4. Expect the expected and unexpected - There were so many things that went wrong from start to finish that we basically made up as we went along. Setup ideas, broken displays, talking points were all changed on the fly. It did help a huge amount that we planned everything else down to the tee so that everything else ended up being quite manageable.

So this is the story of our experience at the Eco Gift Expo…

The booth that we had purchased had a great location right near the main entrance and we were really excited about how lucky we got. Unfortunately, luck goes both ways. We mocked up exactly how all the displays would be set up and got the visual aspect down of what people would see as they walked by. About 3 weeks before the expo, we were told that our booth location had changed. The spot that we had before had been a sponsor spot, so we were moved to a different location. It didn’t look as good on paper, but the actual location ended up being just as good, a corner booth near another entrance.

About a week before the convention, and the deadline to ship the displays from New York was coming up fast. The friend that I hired to make the clear boxes, fixtures, tracks, and wooden light boxes was finishing up the final pieces. By a random stroke of luck, I saw how the “12+1″ LED light display was coming together and made a last-minute major design change to it by putting all the fixtures on the outside of the box rather than the inside. This ended up saving the display and actually making it usable, as you’ll see later.

As things always seem to go, we packed up everything in boxes and shipped them to L.A. at the very last minute. And by last minute, I mean the paint was still drying and UPS was about to close in 20 minutes. If we didn’t ship it when we did, it would not have made it to the expo in time. But what is success without the looming chance of complete and utter failure? I like to live on the edge. Unfortunately, there was a casualty upon arrival of the boxes in L.A…..

Let’s see the pictures…..Go to the Picture Diary