LED Blog: LED Lighting And All Things Green

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…

What if Starbucks switched to LED Lighting?

In a recurring post we plan to do, analyzing the impact of large chain stores on the environment, I thought I’d start off with analyzing how much energy and money my local Starbucks could save by switching over to LED lighting. They have a ton “recessed lights” as well as track lights that could all be retro-fitted with LED spotlight bulbs.

In Summary:

56 bulbs running at 17 hours a day (6am - 11pm):

Total Cost to convert to LED:$5,620

1st Year Savings in Electricity and Bulb Costs: $3372.14

Total Time to Payback: 1.7 years

Total Savings over 8 Years (LED’s last 50,000 hours): $26,347.56

Number of Years until LED’s need to be replaced: 8.1

Total CO2 emissions reduced over 8.1 years: 200,880 lbs.

What if ALL the Starbucks Stores in the US (11,434) switched over to LED lighting:

They would save $38,557,099.98 PER YEAR in electricity and bulb costs and reduce CO2 emissions by about 285,000,000 lbs. PER YEAR.

Anyone work at Starbucks? What an impact Starbucks could have both on the world and on their bottom line…

Click here to see the full report…(first page)

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 on if you can replace the bulbs with LED floodlight bulbs or if it’s an application that requires “omni-directional” light…this article will explain why.

[Click here to see the full article.]

Make: Magazine, one of my favorite mags, and subsequently the website, has a really cool and informative movie on the history of LEDs. Did you know the first LED was actually a rock? Yeah, me neither. They also give a quick tutorial on how LED lights work and how to make a simple circuit. Go check it out and learn a thing or two thing Monday morning. At least you’ll know who Nick Holonyak, Jr. is the next time you Trivial Pursuit.

[Make via Gizmodo]

$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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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. So potentially you could just walk around with one of these LED PAR30 bulbs in your backpack to bring light everywhere you go. I can’t wait for my hawaiian-shirt-powered laptop in the next few years.

[Via Reuters]

Mmmm.....tallscreen.

Is bigger always better? In this case, I would say yes. At least in terms of sheer awesomeness. What you’re looking at here is a future 33-story LED screen on a building in Dubai. The biggest LED bulbs we have are these 18W LED floodlight bulbs. You know, the place where the mega-rich go on vacation and they have nothing better to do than create their own islands in the shape of palm trees?

This screen is so large that you can see ads on it from 1.5 km away. How’s that for getting your message across to the masses. All I can think about is a massive game of Tetris, where each block is the size of a small office building.

Then when I’m done with that, how bout some Arkanoid and then finish the day off with a quick game of Raiden Fighters. Oh the possibilites…. How much do to you think it would cost for me to rent that for a few hours? Do you take Amex?

[Via Engadget]

Burn Baby Burn!

It’s 6pm the night before the prom and you stare at yourself in the mirror. You realize that no matter how much makeup you put on, it’s apparent that your pasty white skin is the result of all those long days studying indoors so you could get into MIT, rather than hanging out on the beach like the rest of your friends. All the tanning salons are booked solid through the weekend for the last-minute party rush and those tanning sprays made you look like a carrot the last time you used it. What do you do?

Being a future MIT alum, you craftily Macgyver together a rig of CFLs and toast yourself for 10 hours underneath to make it to the ball in time to claim the crown of Prom King.

Now you already know that those long fluorescent tubes used in tanning beds share the same genealogy, but did you know that they also carry similar hazards?

A study by the Health Protection Agency in the U.K. showed that some compact fluorescent lightbulbs, which have a visible coil emitted ultraviolet (UV) radiation above the recognised safety limits. Basically it’s saying that those lights that giving you a tan. Now that would be a good thing if you needed it, but sitting in front of one for 8+ hours a day is definitely more than you should get.

About 20% of the CFL bulbs tested emitted UV-C radiation which is more harmful than the more common UV-A or UV-B, and and it’s the same kind that’s used in hospitals to kill germs, and can cause DNA damage, leading to skin cancer.

The highest levels of UV radiation, about an inch away from the bulbs, was the same as exposure in direct summer sunlight, the agency said.

Now this doesn’t apply to all bulbs, but the most common bulbs do have this problem. So stop sitting so close to the light, cuz that burning sensation you feel in your eyes may or may not be just simple eyestrain. Oh well, on the bright side, I guess it gives me a legitimate reason to take more breaks during work…

I think I’ll stick to LED lights for my office lighting needs…

[Via The Guardian Via The Health Protection Agency]
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Size comparison to a regular incandescent bulb

“It walks down stairs
Alone or in pairs
And makes a Slinkaty sound

A spring, a spring
A marvelous thing
Everyone knows it’s Slinky”

Which this is not. But it does have that feel with its funky looking heatsink. This monster is made in Korea and is one of the brightest screw-in replacement LED light bulbs I’ve ever seen. This is WAY brighter than the LR6 we mentioned in a previous post. The size is almost definitely for heat dissipation reasons. Which works wonders because for the brightness and light that this things produces, the bulb only gets slightly warm. Other lesser sized bulbs with a smaller heatsink and more compacted LEDs would definitely be too hot to hold, though not skin-scorching like an incandescent can be. The size IS quite…large…but it’s not as heavy as you would think considering it’s for heat-sinking purposes.

It’s interesting because many people think that if you buy an LED bulb - it must have a CREE chip to be the “brightest”. Absolutely untrue. The LEDs in here are “no-name”, but put into a package that can disperse heat extremely well, you can pump up the power and get more light. See the pictures below for an example of how it lights up a room. And this is a terrible placement for it too. I was lazy. :(.

22W Lighting up a room

Looking at the top of the bulb, you can see the array of LEDs used to give off this massive amount of light. The nice thing about using so many LEDs vs. say 10, is that you’re not driving each element so hard that it HAS to give off lots of heat in order to function without overheating. Touch the top translucent plastic cover, and you’ll see its cooler than the back of your LCD monitor that you’re using to view this picture. OVerall, a pretty good design. Unfortunately, this sample I got is not yet in full production yet, or I’d get a crate full of them. Have you seen brighter? Let us know in the comments!

P.S. I’m eventually going to make a video of this bulb too. And it won’t need to be connected to an AC outlet to work. I heart LEDs.

UPDATE 1/25/09: We don’t have that monster in yet, but we do have some nice high powered bulbs (with requisite hefty heatsinks here

Closeup of the monster

So this is a quick and raw video of one of our new products that can be found on the website. It’s basically an LED light bar and it’s called the Eternaleds Lumistick. It’s 4.5 watts of PURE POWER! But seriously, it’s actually pretty bright and small enough to put anywhere, like under a kitchen cabinet, or in a drawer. Which also means that I have a lot of ideas for some arts and crafts for it. Imagine taking two of these and attaching it to an AC battery back, adding a red tinted filter to it, then running around in a park. Can you say Instant Lightsaber? That is one of my ideas for a video in the next coming months. If you have any questions about it or if you’re interested in seeing any other Eternaleds bulbs in action, post in the comments. Enjoy!

Luke, I am your father.