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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."
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.
"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 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????
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.
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
I think one of the general enthusiasms regardless of the fact that it will still require fossil fuels, is that with a generation plant using fossil fuels, the effluent is restricted to one location. With proper scrubbers and whatnot, even with the same discharge, it beats the distributed polluting scheme of gas-burning cars.
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?
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.
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.
" 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.
> 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).
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.
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)