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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 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????
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.
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
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.