Lumens: Why you can’t use them to compare LED Bulbs to traditional bulbs.
Are LED’s brighter than Compact Fluorescent (CFL) bulbs? Some people say that LED’s still aren’t as bright as Compact Fluorescent bulbs. Some people say you should switch to LED’s RIGHT NOW because they’re way more efficient. So what’s the real answer? It depends…this article will explain why.
Powered by rice....kinda.
Imagine a world where you could have a coat or a bag that has solar panels on it that would charge your gadgets while you were using it. What, that’s already been done? Well, sure but what I meant was have it done it a way that doesn’t scream “uber-nerd”. I mean how do we expect Lindsey Lohan to wear something that’s ugly?
Well, this technology may be it. It’s a solar cell that is created using tiny solar cells(1/4 the size of a grain of rice) that can potentially be put into a solution and sprayed on various material like a car, a house, your head, etc. and produces a seemingly unheard of amount of energy for the size/power ratio. Not only that, but they plan to double the power in just a few months. I can’t wait for my hawaiian-shirt-powered laptop in the next few years.
[Via Reuters]
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 10-watt 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….
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. 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]
Those crazy Chinese are at it again with another version of the Great Wall, at least from my perspective. I guess they’re in it to win it when it comes to grand displays to impress the rest of the world. Maybe this time they’re actually getting it right. This version is made up of LED’s and dwarves anything I’ve seen lately. Probably not the biggest I’ve EVER seen, but then again, it also isn’t an installation that uses half a million watts just for the sound system. No, this wall is so “great” because it is billed as a zero-energy fixture.
The LED wall contains solar panels that harvest the sun’s rays during the day, and uses that energy to display a video light show at night. How completely perfect. It’s like the true circle of life. In theory, you could build one of these in the middle of the desert, away from any and all civilization, and play large-than-life size movies off of it. Take that another step further and I would LOVE to play some old school Street Fighter II on a deserted island. Although GTA IV would definitely keep my attention for a little longer.
This is a one-off structure, so I don’t think they’re selling to the general public, but if you have to ask how much it would cost, you definitely can’t afford it. The new green buzzword of 2008 is “zero energy“. I’m already an adopter. I’ve had this solar-powered flashlight for years….
So I was sitting at home playing jacks and I couldn’t get out of my head how the Luxim bulbs can possibly be so efficient. It must be some sort of voodoo magic. So I did some more research, of what little there was, and found a little animation on the mechanism that causes this little Tic-Tac sized bit of glass to emit this enormous amount of light.
So apparently the way these things work is that it’s like a cross between a halogen and a fluorescent. With halogens, the filament material heats up (much like a standard incandescent bulb) and microscopic bits evaporates into the high pressure bulb. With fluorescents, a plasma is formed that emits electrons onto a phosphor to create visible light.
Now with the Luxim, the plasma is created from the gas, and then some metal halide elements in the bulb evaporate (assuming because of the heat from the plasma) and that combination of plasma and evaporated metal halide creates a light that could blind even a deity.
You can take a look at the animation and the description of it.
It looks pretty amazing with some just as amazing claims. The heatsink and heating mechanism looks ridiculously big though, from the picture, so it seems like it may be a while till it’s ready for prime time. I’d be totally interested in seeing one in real life. Though from what I read into mechanism of how the bulb gets heated up and the temperatures, I’ll make sure to wear my codpiece at the viewing.
It’s a brave new world! There’s a new sheriff in town and he’s called Luxim. If you haven’t heard yet, check out the video. Pretty amazing stuff. Apparently, this single Tic-Tac sized bulb can put out the power of a 400W Halogen bulb, and using only 250W. In comparison, I think that’s the ceiling of power as far as LED’s go. Also, it’s purported to be twice as efficient as LED’s (thus 4x as efficient as CFL’s)
The interest specs :
Luxim Bulbs - 140 lumens/watt
LED’s - 70 lumens/watt
Incandescents - 15 lumens/watt
Inside the bulb, it forms a plasma (so says the video) at 6000 degrees Kelvin (that’s one spicy-ah meatball), which is as hot as the sun. If I was a kangaroo, I’d jump on this in a second as it sounds like the next great thing. Having over $40 Million in VC funds behind it definitely helps. As great as it sounds, it seems almost too good to be true. I mean the technology seems kosher, but is it something that is commercially viable at the moment? If they can figure out the crazy heatsink issues and somehow put it into something the size of a lightbulb, I’m on the next train to LuximLand. I will be following this like a hawk and see what other info I can scrounge up in the next few days. Stay tuned!
The giant 10,000 LED ball officially dropped in Times Square to usher in 2008, and I’m sure there was no lack of sound bites (or wonderment) on how amazing the ball looked.
For probably an entire minute (and via multiple replays on various channels all over the world), everyone’s eyes were locked onto what will become the future of lighting. And was there an any more spectacular sight at that moment as we all counted down to midnight and made our new years resolution, while thinking to ourselves “This year will be the best one yet!”
I want to be the first one to proclaim that 2008 will be “The Year of the LED”. From an early present from the U.S. government to sign the energy bill that will ban incandescents, to new innovations in LED light efficiency, we are slowly making the changes we need to extract ourselves from the dependency of energy. But that change will happen much faster if we can educate people on things that they can do to help themselves as well. The question that really needs to be answered is “What’s in it for me?”I personally want to save the watts that I use on lighting to power my new Intel Core2Duo desktop and my Wii that I got for Christmas! That’s a far cry from the Atari 2600 and Speak & Spell that was all the rage over two decades ago. I wonder how much energy those consoles used up…
