The BEST 100W alternative around right now
The team over at littlegreenblog.com have done a pretty detailed review about what they thought of our new Quanta-18 100W flood replacement (Retail $99.99). They’ve even got a cool video that shows the actual light output in a real-world application! Get it here.
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.
$75 or $2? How much would you pay?
So with the economy in a downturn, it seems that EVERYONE is cutting down on spending now. Lighting included. By now most people know LED’s are AWESOME in termss of energy savings, money savings, environmental benefits but many still aren’t spending the money.
LED bulbs right now range anywhere from $10 (of the Ebay variety) to $150 across the internet. The ONLY way they’re going to get cheaper is simple supply and demand. If there aren’t enough people buying, then manufacturers won’t be able to sell enough quantities to bring prices down. So it seems the path to adoption is sell to large-scale projects like hotels, office buildings, chain restaurants, that can retrofit their fixtures with bulbs like this LED PAR38 (since they use & save the MOST energy) to bring prices low enough to the point where average homeowners can afford LED lighting.
A couple manufacturers and large distributors I’ve spoken to recently have been focusing on targeting large scale projects, government projects (street lighting, government buildings, universities etc.). This makes sense since they’re not as price sensitive and can actually SEE the savings on their final bill by switching out hundreds, if not thousands of light bulbs that are on typically 12 to 24 hours a day.
Now average Joe-Six-Pack *wink*, by switching out 1 or 2 bulbs or even 10 bulbs in his home won’t really see a huge difference. So it seems the strategy for most people/consumers is to “sit and wait till the price drops”. But to how low? How much would YOU pay?
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Alright, so it’s done. Jeff did a great job at the Green Health Live interview.
Here’s the link to the blog on The GHL site. Marc did a good job of writing an overview of how LED’s work using the images that we gave him for the show. Check it out.
http://thestream.tv/blog/?p=379
Here’s the link to the video.
http://www.thestream.tv/watch.php?v=560
I don’t quite agree with Jeff’s fashion choice (I mean who wears cyan dress shirts, really?) but that didn’t deter from his knowledge of the product. There was another 45 minutes of Q&A afterwards with some interesting questions, but unfortunately, that didn’t get aired.
The best question that someone wrote in was “So what happens when the bulbs explode?!” The look on Jeff’s face was classic. It was a cross between “Is that a real question?” and “Uhh….is anybody screening these submissions?”
The answer to that, is that LED lights DON’T explode. They are solid state electronics (kind of like a USB drive), meaning it’s just a chip. The newer bulbs casings are made mostly from aluminum (rather than polycarbonate, a stiff plastic) which are used as a heatsink to dissipate the heat produced from the high intensity LED chips. Compact fluorescents are glass tubes that have an argon gas (or sometimes krypton gas) and a little bit of mercury inside. The old style and office fluorescents had a separate block of electronics called a ballast that’s meant to “jumpstart” the lighting process. The compact fluorescents have a mini-ballast inside the base of the bulb to do this. I haven’t heard of these lights exploding either, but I have heard stories of these burning out, especially when you turn the lights on and off rapidly. Apparently doing that will greatly decrease the life of a CFL. Luckily, LEDs don’t have this problem. And of course you definitely don’t want to be in the vicinity of a broken CFL or fluorescent due to the small mercury issue. (Just kidding, it’s not a small issue…click here for the cleanup instructions.)
Incandescents and halogens are both glass “globes” that contain a metal filament that heats up to an extreme temperature, which creates light. The bulb contains no gas, but actually contains a vacuum, so the filament is less prone to oxidation from the air (and thus burning out more quickly). As you can imagine, this high heat is transferred to the thin glass bulb and dissapated through the air. Halogens are a bit more efficient that incandescents (more light for the same wattage) but they both get hot enough to burn you (and start various curtain/paper/fabric fires) if you touch them.
I remember back in my younger years, we had one of lamps with a lampshade. Nothing special, just the typical run-of-the-mill table lamps. I had one of those mist bottles, the kind you use for Windex, but it was filled with water for ironing clothes. In my infinite wisdom, I knew that such a fine mist would evaporate quickly from warm surfaces, so I thought it would be fun to see the water turn quickly into steam by spraying it on a hot light bulb. Bad idea. I was (and still am) a little scientist and thought I knew what I was doing, it seemed so simple in my head. In the same way that glass cracks when heated up and dunked in water, the light bulb did the same. Except being under pressure and being so thin, instead of cracking, it EXPLODED. Bulb shards everywhere. Luckily the lampshade was still on, which shielded me from flying slivers of broken glass to the face, or you’d be probably be calling me Patches right now. What happens is that the glass on the outside contracts due to the cooler temperature, while the glass on the inside of the bulb doesn’t. This non-uniform stretching causes stress in the glass, and ultimately rupture.
I can’t believe I actually made it to my age in one piece when I think about all the dumb things I did as a kid. Retrospectively of course. At the time, it was pure genius…
Tonight at 6PM PST, Jeff is doing an interview with Mark Ryan at Green Health Live. The URL you can see him at, AND participate with questions to ask him are :
LIVE STREAM:
http://www.thestream.tv/series.php?s=11
WEBSITE:
http://www.greenhealthlive.tv/
Green Health Live is an online talk show (which is part of a larger video and entertainment site) that does weekly segments on how to live greener and educate people on green issues that they may not be aware of. I watched a few episodes (The Fish and Recycling episodes are good) and I like the style that they use, it’s not preachy or boring (as content like that *could* be in another person’s hands) and actually makes it fun to learn about how to do your part for the environment. It caters towards the general public which is really nice, especially if you don’t know a lot of the acronyms or technologies that are just thrown around nowadays. Personally, in this age of fast-food entertainment, if you lose my attention or go over my head for even a second, my hand is already on the back button to see the newest Youtube viral video.
Of the episodes that I saw, Mark kept it interesting with his funny quips and comments, and co-host Carrie is a good bastion of knowledge on the medical aspect of each show. I think just the fact that he sports a faux-hawk while talking and interviewing guests is entertainment enough, but then again, I just have a natural predilection towards mohawks. Jeff will talking a little bit about the industry/business, but the focus of the interview will be on more informational topics such as
It should be interesting to see how well Jeff does, and if anything, this will be a great resource for people that want to find out about or want a general introduction about LED lights. I’ll be posting the video up after it’s finished tonight. Stay tuned! Or better yet, watch the show and submit a question!
