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Screw-in LED Floodlights
Anonymous Coward writes "This company claims to have the first LED flood lights that you simply screw in as a replacement for your old bulb. enluxled.com are also claiming it's cool enough to handle, more damage resistant, longer lasting (50,000 hours) and only uses 22w to produce twice the light of a 100w bulb." And hideously expensive, but you never have to change them.
boy, this took a while to surface, given that LEDs have been so popular in automobiles, traffic lights, and railroad signals for the past few years...will have to give one a shot.
LED's are definately the way to go, but the price still needs to come down quite a bit. People ask me if I used LED's for my Christmas Lights since when you have 22,000 of 'em (as I did in 2002), that's a lotta electricity. So while there are some GREAT looking LED Christmas Lights (with all the obvious advantages - and don't forget the color stays fairly permanent unlike painted on mini's), they are still really pricey ... especially when I can buy lights after the Holidays at 75% off.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
50,000 hours isn't forever...
No, but it is 5.7 years ($14/year) of continuous light, or 17 years $4.7/year) of eight-hours-a-day light.
You can buy about 32 regular flood lamps for $80. They will last about 2,000 hours each. That's 64,000 hours total -- an additional $14,000 hours.
So for home use, don't bother. For commercial or industrial settings, though, there can be lots of lights, and here is a labor cost associated with changing them. Some organizations change every light at once, to avoid the higher cost of replacing bulbs individually as they burn out. For those types of applications, the longer-lasting LED lights will lower the cost of changing bulbs.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
And..
They willl promptly be shut down for violating some law they just enacted specifically against that company to raise profits of the 'traditional' manufacturers.
Skeptical?
Right-to-profit is now becoming the next big thing. No more skipping commercials. No more fast forwarding through trailers. No more choices. Corporations have a right to profit, and they will lie/cheat/steal/sue to protect that.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I used to work in my highschool stage as an assistant stage manager. and we've been using low power LED Fixures for the last 2 1/2 years. you think somebody would have done this sooner.
Fluorescent lights have drawbacks of their own. If they're turned on and off frequently, they're _less_ effecient than incandescents (and their lifetime is significantly decreased). And unless you're using an expensive digital ballast, they flicker and an annoying 60Hz. (I assume an even more annoying 50Hz in Europe/Africa/Asia.) And the cold-zombie color of the light they produce is less-than-pleasing. (Not that the LEDs I've seen are much better.)
What is obnoxious about them is that they blind oncoming drivers, especially if they are aimed too high. Of course even more annoying are the pickup trucks and SUV's with Halogens - not only are they blindingly bright - they are right up in your face.
There should be a law (at least for vehicles driven on public road, do whatever you want in the forest behind your house on your property) as to how high headlights can be above the road surface, and how bright (in lumens) they can be (and I suppose a min brightness too).
Better technology could be used to decrease power consumption and size, while producing the same amount of light, as opposed to being so bright as to melt the retinas of other drivers.
I would bay $70 a bulb if they made these for indoor use as a replacement for the regular light bulb. They could probably run it at 10 watts. And they would last 10-20 years depending on use. Think of the savings on your power bill!
Actually they have a complicated set of rules that varies from area to area. Some areas they are allowed to have rubber tires, some areas not. In our area they have lots of wood shops that used gas powered air compressors. Then they use air tools for their work. One of the most interesting things I saw when I first moved to the area was an Amishman backing his horse and buggy up to a public boat ramp on a lake. He had a trailer with a boat and a Honda motor on it. Alot of them have phones outside in what appears to be an outhouse. Several households will share the one phone. But they can not be in their homes. The list goes on.
It's the MJ growers that will get the greatest benefits from this technology.
Strike that.
It's the electric company they are stealing from that will benefit due to the use of less electricity.
They aren't Luddites, they just feel it's spiritually important to keep things simple, and not get so caught up in modern consumerism that they forget what's important.
IIRC, they have a counsel of sorts to deal with things like this, where something comes along that is so much better and safer, but no more complicated, comes along. Having grown up off-grid, and having plenty of experience with kerosene lamps and candles, I can definately appreciate where these guys are coming from.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Flourescent lamps work by using a mercury vapour discharge tube to produce ultraviolet light, which excites a phosphor coated on the inside of the tube to produce white light of various colours. They work pretty well; my house pretty much only uses 22W flourescent bulbs, which are roughly equivalent to 100W incandescents. The colour's not bad, but the spectrum is a bit weird, and some things look a little strange. (My parents have a glass vase that shows up purple under sunlight or incandescent light, but green under flourescent light.)
White LEDs can use the same system, with a UV LED that excites phosphor, but these are inefficient and very expensive. (Or at least were, the last time I looked.) A more common way is to use a red, green and blue LED in the same package. These can be cool because you can change the colour by simply changing the relative brightnesses, but they produce a spectrum that makes flourescent tubes look normal. Compared to incandescents, they're very blue, and some things look really strange.
Does anyone actually know what these things are?
Why are you worrying about the price of the lights? When a person down the street buys one, just go and steal his :)
I hope they are "warmer" than fluorescent lamps. I hate the pure white light that they emit. I like a light with a yellowish hue. That is why I still prefer incandescents bulbs, despite all the advantages of fluorescent lamps.
I wonder why they do not paint fluorescent tube with a yellowish hue to make them warmer. I bet if they would do this, they would conquer a greater market.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
"This company (enlux) claims to have the first LED flood lights that you simply screw in as a replacement for your old bulb. "
This claim is false.
Commercial white LED floods and other replacements for high-voltage incandescent bulbs are available for any standard base in the world, including the funky euro and russian bases. They are available at three colour temperatures and in any other LED colour, including IR and UV.
They have been available for more than two years.
Enlux had no such products available a year ago.
Seems they define "flood" a bit broadly: According to their own data, it illumines a narrow region like a spot would.
50K hours seems a little short-lived.
And white LEDS dim quite noticeably over a very short time. They will most likely be too dim long before 50K hours. Most likely in a bit less than half that time, around 20K hours.
If they are willing to lie about being the first, and deceive about the useful life of their lights, what else will they lie or cheat on?
Wonder if enlux will do for LEDs what Lights of America did for fluoros...
As the grandparent said, this "complex system of rules" is just religion oriented rule utilitarianism in action. The point is to live a simple, happy life in service of God.
:-)
A story I once heard on the radio: some Amish people are outside doing their laundry by hand, as a group; laughing, playing, and having a grand old time.
Meanwhile a person living a modern-lifestyle goes miserably jogging by. This person was not enjoying their jog, plus stressed out by a job that is used to buy expensive labor saving machines (washer/dryer) that STILL required time to load and operate.
The Amish doing their laundry by hand were getting exercise and camaraderie, and as a bonus they got their laundry done all at the same time. They were also not involved in an time-consuming job to pay for expensive gadgets.
See how it all works? Over time, the rule utilitarianism builds up to a happy life.
Of all the things modern society has to offer, you might think that wandering a modern store the Amish would be most amused by modern electronic gadgets. This is not the case - the simple pleasures always win out. Check out any Amish people in a modern store and you will certainly find them, especially the children, trying out high sugar snacks and beverages.
Pop - one of the most pleasurable modern amenities
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
You can have the same "Fail gracefully" concept applied to flouresence too if you use an array of small tubes. This is not special to LEDs. Its just by the bulb design. A single LED just as a single tube will fail in one go, just as an array of LEDs will fail gracefully as will an array of tubes fail gracefully, your argument is flawed.
When I was shopping for energy efficient lights years ago, Target had some tucked away in the corner of the lightbulb aisle.
The manufacturer was Sunbeam. GE dominated the rest of the row with incandescent and halogen bulbs.
Today, Sunbeam is gone. GE still dominates this row but within that GE domination, compact fluorescent lights rule the area.
Companies want to make profit, sure. But to think they want that profit coming from any particular product is not understanding capitalism. Markets change and companies change with them.
Just type random stuff into eBay. Consumers are certainly not facing constricting choices.
As for skipping through commercials or forwarding through trailers, that's an entirely different issue that has no bearing on manufacturing goods.
Laws are for people with no friends.
In Europe, more and more cars are being originally specified with HID headlamps - 'Xenons'. Maybe our regulations are different here but they provide a much better field of illumination than standard headlights and are less annoying to oncoming drivers when dipped. I have them on my car and it makes night driving so much easier (and safer). They are auto-stabilised so don't 'flash' at oncoming vehicles, even when on a bumpy road or with a heavy load in the rear.
Road markings and animals stand out much more clearly on country roads and the full-beam performance is immensely better than the old incandescent/halogen bulbs. Not to mention they will probably last the lifetime of the car.
It's not just the color, it's the actual spectrum. Use a CD as a diffraction grating (look at a reflection of the bulb in the shiny side, at an angle), and you will notice how the bulb produces several rather narrow spectral lines. The combined color seems a decent approximation of white to the human eye, but the pigments in the paint and dyes have their own spectral anomalities, so some colors change in weird ways when lit up with fluorescent light. Some fluorescents have a better, more even, spectrum, though. They might be less efficient and more expensive.
I always do the CD test before buying bulbs a non-trivial quantity. And, besides, I usually get them for $1 or $2 at Walmart, so I'm not interested in a $80 LED bulb for that reason.
Now, white LED's spectrum has a narrowish blue line from the LED itselt, and a very wide line across the yellow part of the spectrum, from coumarin-6, which is dye they coat the blue LED with to make a white LED out of it. Definitely better than cheap fluorescents, but not quite there yet.
The article is really old, there have been major improvements since then, but it gives you a good idea of the basic principals of operation.
I want to try makeing one of these, just put some sulfur and argon, both easy to get, into a glass tube. Toss it into the microwave and see what happens.
It depends on the specific bulb. Color temperature is measured in Kelvin. A home incandescent tungsten bulb is usually around 3200K. The higher the color temperature, the "colder" it appears. Daylight is around 5000K, plus or minute 200 depending on the situation.
For some people, colder light is the best kind one can get. In photography, most films are designed to work with daylight and flashes (which are themselves designed to mimic daylight) and you end up with really ugly red-orange tones on everything if your only light sources are regular incandescent bulbs. For 35mm photography, the closer the light source is to 5000K, the better.
I'm eager to get my hands on a couple of the cold-white bulbs this place is selling. These 50000-life-hour 4800K cold-white bulbs will make a great replacement for the 3-life-hour, $5-per-bulb 4800K photofloods I currently use for close-ups and portraits. In my case, these LED floods will pay for themselves after only 48 hours of use!
These aren't apparently any good for indoor area lighting (I have dozens of ceiling can lights I'd love to use such a thing in): per the website they cannot be installed in can's (temperature issues?) and cannot be dimmed (which leads me to wonder how you run them at 15W to get the rated lumen output rather than 22W as speced).
No dimming is the reason I haven't switched to using excellent warm compact flouresecent lamps.
Maybe they just stuck a resistor in series with a bunch of LED's and they're burning the other (large) chunk of power in heat. Nah... if they did that at least it would be dimmable. I wonder how they could make a PWM thing generate so much heat you can't use it in an enclosed fixture.
Sigh.
Ok - they are guaranteed for 50,000 hours. That doesn't necessarily mean that they'll die right then, though.
A friend of mine has a company that makes LED products, and she says that they don't die at 50,000 hours, she just didn't want to guarantee them any longer than that becuase after that, it's not really cost effective. Granted, they might not last THAT much longer after that period, but still, it's awhile.
Not to mention the fact that when LED lights die, they don't turn entirely dark, they just get a little dimmer as parts of them stop working, but other parts continue to function.
- they absolutely are not '5 times brighter than normal bulbs'. The 100W equivalent lits about as much as the old 40W bulb that was there.
- their color sucks, depending on the model (I bought several different), they are either greenish or even more yellow than a tungsten bulb
- They take time to lit to full output.
- They cost a lot.
After a month of trying to get used to them, I threw them away. So I hope LEDs can do better, but since I already have several headlamps with while LEDs, I expect some problems. In particular the headlamps I have (Petzl and Black Diamond) are way too blue, they are blinding.So, technical issues or marketing issues ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
LOL. I really thought that it was actually an English word.
But no, French is not my first language. It's Dutch, and we call it an 'achteruitkijkspiegel':
'achteruit' = backwards
'kijk' = look
'spiegel' = mirror.
Like German, Dutch tends to concatenate words to make a new, very long one.
But I would appreciate it if you could introduce 'retrovisor' into common English. That would be cool indeed.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
These HIDs are indeed obnoxious as hell, and probably dangerous too:
...I hate the off-white color too.
- They are more focused than ordinary lights. As such, when a car that is equipped with them follows you on an uneven road, the lamps annoyingly blink and even change color in your retrovisor.
Ooooh, BLINKING. I can TASTE the danger!! Seriously though, more focused beams are less likely to throw light into eyes of the other drivers (say, in an oncoming lane).
Actually they hit closer to white than halogen (which are yellow tint). I do agree that the real high color temperature ones (the purple and blue) are dumb, not only because of the color of the light but the fact that they produce less light.
I don't buy into their ability to provide better illumination.
It's not like this is magnet therapy, there's a measurable difference: HID lamps give more lumens at the light source, and are therefore brighter. Brighter lights help you see oncoming road contitions further ahead, giving you more time to react.
The only thing dangerous is you driving around with a dirty windsheild and blaming every light that shines on it at night.
Another poster here said 'florescent bulbs'.
Now that makes me think about tulips...
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
A fun thing about how cool compact flourescents are is that you can make paper lampshades (I like to use a good drawing paper, Japanese rice paper, parchment, whatever) and they don't get hot enough to be dangerous. A bit of origami skill and you can make some stylin' lampshades which look weird either lit internally or with the light off.
K.
Where I live, electricity is 12 cents/kWh. A 100 W drain is $105 a year. Where I sit, I use the equivalent of a 100 W incandescent 12 hours a day. That's $52 a year with incandescent, $13 a year with fluorescent, $6.50 a year with LEDs. The time value of money can't catch up with savings like this.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
He said that electric heaters are virtually 100% efficient, and he'd be absolutely right.
A heater's function is to create heat. All of the energy coming into it is either spent on heating the air, or creating infrared, which will heat the objects surrounding the heater... And either way you slice it, it's heat. Heck, even the impedance in the power cable will create heat. It's 100% efficient even to the outlet.
An electric heater is the only 100% efficient device that I can think of. Who cares about the power plant, that's not the subject matter.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I bought a EverLED Flashlight Bulb and installed it in a 4 D Cell Maglite. It's far better than any of the other LED flashlight solutions I've come across. Although it's not as bright as the Xenon bulb upgrade from Maglite, it uses far less power and it's brighter than the bulb that comes with the 4 D Cell Maglite.
Is there an ideal application where a user would want the lighting to be dull, and price isn't as significant an issue?
testing out my trending skills