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Light Bulb Replacements
LoveOO writes Boston.com has a story about three companies which are trying to replace the Light bulb. I say it's about time and what about hydrogen powered vehicles? Two things that annoy me are filling the gas tank and changing light bulbs. It's time we did alot less of both."
Wait, so if you don't fill up your hydrogen powered vehicle, where does the energy come from? Better yet, explain where the hydrogen will come from to power your vehicle. Don't become enveloped in the promise of hydrogen power. Without an efficient way of extracting hydrogen that doesn't use fossil fuels as the underlying energy source for the extraction, the promise of hydrogen power is a sham. If the Bush administration says that hydrogen fuel will be our savior, perhaps that's a clue that you should educate yourself on where such a fuel would come from. Putting money into hydrogen is wasteful without clean sources of energy to make extract the hydrogen. You might as well just keep burning oil because hydrogen extracted by a process utilizing fossil fuel will only end up costing you more money.
Slashdot needs a basic physics primer that explains such concepts as "energy" and the laws of thermodynamics.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
I have always suspected that many electrical issues, including frequently blown light bulbs, are caused by dirty power. What I really want isn't better light bulbs, it's better power. Everything would operate better and/or longer if the power coming out of the sockets wasn't so random and dirty. Ever look at a standard 120V AC on an oscilliscope? Nasty.
Does anyone know of a whole-house solution for providing clean, voltage-regulated power to an entire house? I probably have $50K+ of computers, music equipment, home theatre, etc, and all of it would be better off with clean power.
We have whole-house solutions for water filtering, air filtering, so where's my whole-house solution for clean power (and maybe even whole-house UPS?)
Hydrogen is not that explosive. In many ways a hydrogen powered vehicle would be safer than a gasoline powered vehicle. Since hydrogen is a gas, it tends not to stick around in one place once it leaks. It also tends to be less volatile than gasoline. Check out this page.
Most people assume that hydrogen is disproportionately dangerous because of the Hindenburg disaster. The fact is that if gasoline powered engines were invented today, gasoline is volatile enough that they would be considered too unsafe to be approved.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
The fact is that you need energy to produce hydrogen, and that energy is probably going to come from either Coal, or Natural Gas. The end user thinks their helping the environment, but what really happens is that the production of a carbon exhaust is moved back in the supply chain. The amount of Hydrogen produced by a renewable source in any reasonably short time frame (20 years) is going to be almost negligible.
The Hydrogen Future seems too good to be true, because it is.
--Mike--
"It'll be interesting to see whether Color Kinetics can exact a licensing fee from anyone who blends colored LEDs. Says Simms: "We haven't invested the fortune that we have in intellectual property without planning to defend it."
:)
No, they can't. The big outdoor big-screen TV's at the race track in Saratoga NY use this. One Red, one Green, and one Blue LED for each pixel. Been done, prior art, now go crawl back into the hole from which you came, you dirty low-life patent weasel
I've tried over and over to use flourescents, but:
Clear, Dark Skies
I also wonder if any company who invents these lightbulbs will not build in some sort of artificially short lifespan so as to have an increased revenue as people have to continually buy more.
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I must say that Color Kinetics gear rocks. Their color-mixing LED arrays not only look cool, but are a neat toy to program for fancy light shows.
Also on the LED front, the city where I currently reside (champaign, IL) recently passed funding and a proposal to replace all of the old incandescent traffic signals with LED arrays. Should cost a lot of money originally, but will save big on electricity bills in the long run. Here is an interesing EPA EnergyStar paper talking about the potential energy savings that cities can get from this technology -- 1 Million kWh and nearly $70,000 per year per 100 intersections! Also, LED based traffic signals are (IMHO) easier to see both at night and during the day.
One complaint from a study is that the green traffic lights are actually too bright.
worlds oldest currently operating college webcamWho is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
I agree that flourescent bulbs are great for most people, but I can see the them cycling and they make me nauseous. It's like staring into a mild strobe light all the time (I have the same problem with CRT monitors too).
If LEDs don't have this problem, then they would be a better solution for me.
Hydrogen is not that explosive, maybe, but it is highly flammable. And when you mix it with oxygen it can really get going. The thing about oxygen is that the air is full of it.
Personally I wouldn't feel comfortable driving at high speeds on roads with SUVs and a big tank of gaseous hydrogen in the tank.
What I'm interested in is those hydrogen pellets we saw mentioned here a month or two back.
i don't like my old sig.
by running an exterior light all night in the first place?
Light polluting scum.
Clear, Dark Skies
The production of H2 in a plant is much cleaner then what you would think. In a controlled large scale system, you can make it pretty efficient and as a result run relatively cleaner.
Not saying its 100% clean, but its a net gain of 'clean', when you take into account the filth cars spew out using carbon based fuels directly..
And no, I'm not a tree hugger.. I LOVE my car.. but I also realize what it spits out the back end due to its fuel..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They built a better mousetrap back in the late 50's. The device was very good at killing mice, somewhere in the neighborhood of the high 90 percent. Anyway, the problem ended up being price. The improved mousetrap cost 3 times more than the old standard version. So when the new and improved mouse trap caught a mouse, and they often did, the housewife was faced with the dilemma of either prying the dead mouse body from the trap, or throwing the whole thing away. Long story short, they weren't about to touch the dead mouse body. And, they must have felt that at three times the price, they couldn't afford to keep buying the improved mouse trap and throwing it away. So after becoming an instant market success, the improved mouse trap flopped. Lessons from business marketing 101.
My father still tells the tale of the paint he saw in the '50-'60's that would eliminate light bulbs. I believe it was low voltage, so you just paint a surface, attach an electode (probably paint-over an electrode or 2 already anchored to the wall) and get as much light as needed with different sized surfaces. This way, entire ceilings or small spots could be used as illuminating sources. Liquid LED?
I'm sure GE had something to do with the product never seeing the "light of day" (um...yeah).
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.
"The company holds 19 patents related to the control of LED lighting systems, and has filed for more than 100 additional patents."
How is controlling an LED lighting system any different than controlling a regular lighting system? The answer is that it is not. This company is a patent scammer. I think they are using a tried an true formula:
1) hear about new technology
2) figure out what existing methods are analogous in new technology (real complicated stuff like oh they emit light too so how about we invent special "LED switches")
3) Patent said "novel" invention.
4) Threaten to sue all the real companies that actually want to make stuff and sell it.
5) profit.
With the recent blackout, especially here in Detroit/S.E. Michigan, I'm surprised I haven't heard much about converting to LED traffic signals. The power draw would be a lot less (less drain on power grid) and they could recover the higher parts cost because of less labor involved in replacing the traffic bulbs i.e. the LEDs last a lot longer than bulbs. You can even see them in the sunshine.
And lord knows, anyone who has driven through Detroit is familiar with burned-out traffic bulbs. LEDs seem like the ideal replacement.
{ - Generic Guy - }
fluorescent: Pro 1)Use minimal amounts of power 2)Compact 3)Produce large amounts of light Con 1)Light still has an annoying 60hz cycle, (could be deadly around machinery) 2)Warmth or coldness of light can be tricky to pick out. 3)Outdoor use is limited 4)Long warm-up times make them impractical for bathrooms and immediate turn-on areas. LED The LED bulb holds the promise to fix all of the inadequecies the current compact flourecents have while retaining their efficiency. I think there is a really big future in this technology.
IIRC, those piercing blue headlights use some new kind of halogen bulb, not LEDs.
Also, I like the LED stoplights. What I hate are those weird fresnel-lens type stoplights that you can't see clearly from certain angles (anyone else know what I'm talking about?).
Last I looked into white LEDs there was still a color problem. The light comes out just a bit too blue. At the time, it was impossible to get a truer white in a single 'bulb'.
I bought an LED desk lamp that has an array of about 100 LEDs. To get around the bluish color problem, about a third of the LEDs are orange to make the light warmer colored. Unfortunately it is still not quite like incandescents or flourescents. The light from the lamp still makes skin tones look sickly bluish gray. It's very bright for only using 5 Watts. I believe that flourescent lights are still more efficient, but there is a certain coolness factor of having an LED lamp.
If anyone is interested, here is a link to the PDF of the GALAXe LED desk lamp
One of the problems with nuclear is that it doesn't encourage non-proliferation. If we have it, everybody thinks they should too. Look at how the US views Iran building a nuclear power plant. The political cost is very high.
I've got a lot of pretty old LED stuff. I've never seen one burn out. From what I know of how they pump photons, I'm not sure how you would burn them out other than running them outside of spec.
Why does the article say "lasts up to 10 times longer"? Are they figuring on the probability of losing them to surges or accidents? Or is there something I don't know about LEDs?
Last I looked into white LEDs there was still a color problem. The last time I looked into a white LED, the damn thing almost blinded me! Personally, I still think combining Red, Green, and Blue LEDs to get white light is a neat idea, and you should be able to vary the duty cycle of the LEDs to get any color tone you want. Any photons produced that aren't tuned to the center of the frequencies humans see in is just wasted energy!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
It also decreases lightbulb sales. It's just like many other things (consumer electronics, computer parts, shoes, clothes, etc.) that are basically designed to break after a certain amount of time.
Before this mentality took over in the 1950's, things were made to last forever and had a really sturdy, well-crafted feel to them. A lot of stuff from this period still works perfectly today.
Here at my office, they replaced all the ballast transformers in the overhead lamps with new 400Hz switching power supplies units and the tubes with new ones that are only half the diameter or the original 120VAC 60Hz standard tubes. They put out much more light than the old ones, have a "warmer" phosphor coating, and use less than half the electricity of the originals. They still have that flourescent lamp color however, but the best benefit is that they have absolutely no "strobe effect" against computer CRT monitors.
From http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
... was ... a combination of iron oxide, cellulose acetate and aluminum powder"
"Furthermore, the substance used to coat the cotton skin
"the total mixture might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant,"
Oh, God. Can you imagine what'll happen when consumers demand a single plug with both a water connection and a high-voltage electrical connection? Joe Sixpack, a puddle of water, leaking oil and a bit of gas (from the mower can) on the garage floor, and enough juice to make it all go boom. It's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Yep, a few of the CFL companies seriously overrate their equivalent bulb ratings. Your best bet is to find the incandescent bulb you're using now, look at the lumen output (if you can find it), and buy a CFL with equal or higher lumen output.
Also remember that if you look at a CFL, it will look less bright than an incandescent at the same lumen output, because the light is less like a point source. Compare the two by looking at how well they illuminate the room or the book you're reading. To me, the ability to accidentally glance at the bulb without my eyes hurting is an advantage of the CFL. Oh, and another point - some CFLs take about a minute to get to full brightness.
As far as not fitting, that's been a problem for me too, but it's getting better. There are 9 watt CFL twist bulbs that fit in the little ceiling fan light kits now; they do an adequate job of replacing a 40W bulb, and are 2 for $10 at WalMart. I only wish they were dimmable.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
one thing i've never understood about light bulbs is why there is so much empty space in there. it is, after all, a vacuum tube, right? (ok, not exactly a vacuum, but very low pressure.) it's my understanding that if there was air (oxygen) in there, then the filament would burn up almost instantly when you turn it on, which is why it's in a vacuum. a smaller tube would have even less oxygen in it (at the same pressure), which is better, right?
but why is the tube so big compared to such a small filament? if it's a heat dissipation issue, it seems like there would be other ways to deal with it. with so much miniaturization elsewhere, why is the old light bulb not any smaller?
" At least hydrogen doesnt generate carbon monoxide when it burns."
True, but if you're burning an air-H2 mixture isn't NOx a problem, just as it is when burning anything else in air?
Anyway, I don't get the obsession with having end users mess with H2. H2 is potentially dangerous (high pressure tanks, flamability), expensive (see high pressure tanks), and inefficient (fuel tends to leak out). Yea, I know people are working on better/safer/cheaper H2 storgage solutions, and hopefully they meet with more success than the people working on better/cheaper batteries for electric cars.
Why not zinc-air fuel cells instead of hydrogen fuel cells? The zinc-air reaction is not as efficient as the hydrogen-air one, but it makes up for that in other ways. The input is zinc metal, the output is zinc-oxide -- both safe, stable solids. The electrolyte is rather poisonous, but so is gasoline, battery acid and radiator fluid. There's no need for expensive high-pressure tanks or need to wait for a breakthrough in storage technology. The ingredients don't leak out while your car is parked at the airport. Dealing with solid fuel and waste products can be handled by pumping a slurry of the electrolyte and zinc/zinc-oxide.
I'm not saying zinc-air is the ultimate solution but it seems to be a more practical solution for cars than hydrogen.
Iz
MIT Technology Review did a nice article on the development of LED replacements for light bulbs in the May 2003 issue. However, you need to be a paid subscriber to read this online.
The article focuses on the often secretive research going on at competing companies to develop a cost-effective white LED, which is needed to replace general illumination. Most white LEDs today are actually UV emitters with a white phosphor, reducing the efficiency. The other standard approach is to have red, green and blue LEDs together with a diffuser.
What the article failed to state is anything about ORGANIC LEDs, who's future is much more important than a reqular LED.
OLEDs have been around for a while now, and the idea is to line your ceiling with them to create light. The problem is they are too expensive, and currently a white OLED has only been stable for around 15 minutes. BUT, green OLEDs once had the same problems white OLEDs have now. So there is much room in the future for improvement in quality and price.
One reason the color may be off is becuase a regular incandecant light bulb emits extra red and orange light into the visible spectrum. This is why flourescent lamps are often not favorable. Lighting manufacturers will go through extensive eye comfot tests that deal with color, flickering, and lamp life/lumen mantainance testing before the bulbs go out on the market.
-n
> LEDs are excellent spot lights, but are much worse [...] at room flooding light that most light fixtures are used for
Just throwing out ideas here... Couldn't you arrange a few LEDs in a hemisphere and put a glass sphere/bulb over it that is translucent (ie, looks like finely-sanded glass) to diffuse (?scatter?) the light to make the photons go in a more varied pattern (or lack thereof)? I guess there would still be spots of brighter light where the LEDs are positioned, but if you put a few layers of it, it might work (not to mention cost 10x as much).
I don't think you're right about regular light bulbs consuming fewer resources. We have a handy measure of the resources consumed to make something. It's called cost. That is, the total value of the resources used to make something. The price you pay for something that is traded as competitively as light bulbs is very close to the cost of the resources consumed making it (human and physical)
With compact florescent bulbs, the initial cost is higher ($8.00 vs. $0.20), but the lifetime cost is lower due to lower energy use and longer life. Incandescant lights are cheaper to make and better for the environment in low duty cycle applications (say in a closet), but are worse when the light is on continouslyI like my beverages with warning labels!
One of the things I like most about incandesant lights is that I can dim them. Call me ignorant, but is there a simple way to make a drop-in replacement LED "bulb" that will dim with traditional dimmers (which we know work by turning the light on and off, being off longer for dimmer lights).
If you can't dim them they're not going to be largely accepted and adopted, even at relitavely cheap price points.
Anyone care to clue me in as to if there are products like this or not yet? If so, if not - how would this work.
Thanks.
There is still one area in which I don't use flourescents. Dimmable lights.
They also don't work well with three-way light fixtures. I've seen three-way flourescents (3 U-bulbs, with one bulb coming on for each power level), but not in the past 2-3 years. In general, they'll work - but not come on at the lowest level and have no brightness change between the second and third levels (as you'd expect). My wife likes her three way bedside lamp, so it remains a incandescent bulb.
They also don't work well in exposed fixtures. The bulbs are certainly not designed for looks... and while I tried putting them into a 5 light chandelier in our foyer, my wife quickly objected. The ceiling fan in our room has a similar issue - 4 exposed lights.
I've switched as many bulbs as is practical over to CFL, but there's a lot of fixtures in the house that are either too small (the CFL's are still larger than incandescent, and 1/4" can make all the difference in the world), on dimmers, or exposed.
The last issue I've run across is that while a CFL may claim to be 100W of brightness, they lie. A 100W incandescent in my attic is considerably brighter than a 23W CFL - despite claims otherwise. The CFL left me peering around for things, while the incandescent provided plenty of light, particularly further away from the bulb.
I would say the chances are that even after the incandescent bulb is replaced, the new LED thingy will screw into a (now) standard light bulb socket, just so that people won't have to buy all new lamps and rewire their houses in order to use them. Also, I would be willing to bet real money that the LED replacement for a lightbulb will be called a "lightbulb" by a lot of people for a long time to come. Have you ever heard anybody call a refrigerator an "icebox?"
The Fire Dept in Livermore CA claims it has the worlds oldest light bulb. It's a 4 watt night light that's left on all the time, and has been burning for 103+ years.
The article is slightly incorrect in its history. Edison's original light bulbs were designed for DC power. Because of that they also had very long lives (AC is what causes the filament to break)-- in the decades!!! In fact, very recently some museum firehouses had these lightbulbs pass the 100 year old mark still (very dimmly) glowing.
LED lighting could resurrect the old idea of having a DC line in houses. The only reason it's never been implemented is to make light-bulbs work well, you would still need >60V DC and that's a fatal shock risk. If houses got a "safe-ish" 20V DC line, we wouldn't have an average of 40 transformers per household (think about how many little things you have which require transformers).
About an hour ago I had a discussion with my father about how LED or fluorescent lamps probably do not save as much power as advertised. Before you start talking about how little power gets converted to visible light in a normal light bulb, let me explain this further:
An incandescent light bulb is an ordinary resistor, which means that the current it draws from the net is in phase with voltage and sinus in shape.
LED and those little flourescent lamps are different. They need a rectifier to work (or are rectifiers themselves). This means that the current they draw is some ugly shape that only remotely resembles sinus. This means that this current contains a large proportion of higher harmonics (e.g. current that has 100, 150, 200, etc. Hz, ask Mr. Fourier). While your house meter may show less used kWh, these higher harmonics will cause bigger losses at your local transformer. Why? Because losses in transformer core rise with the square of frequency.
Computers with their switching power supplies already cause a lot of this kind of problems. If everyone would begin using LED lamps it would get much worse and power savings would not be that significant (they would only move from your house to transformers and power stations)
NOx is only a problem for internal-combustion engines. Fuel cells, which seems to be the main target for the hydrogen-powered vehicle push, doesn't have that problem.
As far as zinc-air: zinc is both way too heavy and way too expensive to be a viable vehicle fuel!
Why spend $100 for an LED light bulb which uses only 40 % less power (according to the article), when you can install a Compact Flourescent for $5 and save 80 % of the power?
Most of the light bulbs in my house are 12 Watt CFs (as bright as 60 W bulbs). They last a very long time and cost less that $5 each.
It shouldn't be a problem. Many LED displays are already "multiplexed", which means that only one segment is on at any given time. By rapidly switching from one segment to the next, it fools your eye into believing that all of the active segments are on.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I wonder if anybody is doing failure analysis?
I betcha the City would gladly send the bulb off to someone in return for a replacement.
If interested, reply to me and I'll print it off and drop it off at City hall.
Sometimes, analyzing a part that failed in the field can yield useful insights into the failure process.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
As far as zinc-air: zinc is both way too heavy and way too expensive to be a viable vehicle fuel!
Aluminum is much lighter than zinc.
It's been said that if you throw away an aluminum can, it might as well be half full of gasoline, because that's how much energy it takes to smelt aluminum oxide (from bauxite ore).
With that in mind, there are companies that have been working on aluminum-air batteries that will release the energy from aluminum by converting it back into oxide through a fuel-cell like process. It consists of a sandwich of consumable aluminum plates for the anode, a salt solution, and non-consumable yet air permeable plates for the cathodes. As the anodes corrode away, replace them, and return the used plates to a recycle center to be "recharged" by re-smelting them into aluminum metal again. Smelting aluminum is a very energy consuming process (known as the Hall-Heroult reduction process), but it is essentially the aluminum-air battery in reverse (and in massive scale).
Some chemistry know-it-alls might want to put on their thinking caps and calculate how much energy it takes to hydrolize water into hydrogen and oxygen, and how much energy it takes to turn aluminum oxide into aluminum and oxygen, but then factor in the weight vs. power output of an aluminum-air battery and weight vs. power output of a fuel cell + hydrogen storage tank.
For those who just gotta do something now, here is a link that shows you how to roll your own aluminum air battery, and then you can hook a couple in series and get back to the topic of this thread and power some LEDs.