LED Blog: LED Lighting And All Things Green

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 light bulbs 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…