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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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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 ?
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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.