Panasonic's New LED Bulbs Shine For 19 Years

Mike writes "As lighting manufacturers phase out the incandescent bulb, and CFLs look set to define the future of lighting, Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years (if used 5-1/2 hours a day). With a lifespan 40 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, Panasonic's new EverLed bulbs are the most efficient LEDs ever to be produced. They are set to debut in Japan on October 21st. Let's hope that as the technology is refined their significant cost barrier will drop — $40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb, even one that promises to save $23 a year in energy costs."

Comments

Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there

[paul248]

You really think Philips would try selling a half-wave rectified LED emitter for $40? That would be so unbelievably awful, you'd probably see return rates close to 100%.

Hell, even the LED Christmas lights I bought at Wal-mart last year are full-wave.

Re:Light bulb as a service

[EvanED]

till you break them and contaminate the room in mercury. Professional remediation is about $3000.

You forgot to finish your thought with "if you compeletely and unjustifiably overreact.

Re:ROI

[Firehed]

The bulb in TFA (I know, I know... but it wasn't in TFS) is rated 6.9w consumption, and is presumably the 60w-equivalent referenced in the summary. Most "60w" CFLs take around 12-15w if memory serves - so these LED bulbs are about twice as efficient. Save $23/yr for 19 years vs $12/yr for 5 years (you say 10, but they're usually rated to five and I've almost never seen one last more than two; they seem very sensitive to older wiring). It pays for itself in less than two years compared to an incandescent, and in four compared to a CFL.

Of course, that's all assuming they actually last that long. I don't doubt the power consumption ratings, but as I said I've never seen a CFL last anywhere near it's rated life. My understanding is that they have a limited number of starts due to the ignition ballast (which is external to the bulb in standard fluorescent tubes); I'd assume that if you have older wiring or other factors that may cause frequent power sags you'll burn through those starts unusually fast. That seems to be the case at my house, or would at least make some degree of sense to me. I could be dead wrong about the reasoning, but CFLs unquestionably die faster than incandescent bulbs around here. Hopefully this isn't an issue with LED bulbs.

Re:This is NOT informative, just plain wrong

[smellsofbikes]

For what it's worth, my job is designing test hardware for LED drivers. As such I spend a lot of time taking apart other people's LED bulbs and seeing what they're doing. A scary number of current LED bulbs consist of a single diode, a big capacitor, and a string of LED's in series with their series forward voltage drop being roughly equal to 150 volts, and then a single current-limiting resistor at the end of the strand. That is the *worst* way I can think of to do the job. (Not to mention the cap they're using to smooth out the ripple is a very cheap electrolytic, with a lifetime of probably about 2000 hours if you're lucky, so that will be what fails.) The nicer low-end bulbs use a full wave bridge rectifier and sometimes even a linear regulator.

Of course, any good bulb worth buying uses an actual LED driver that acts as a constant current source. But even they still often use cheap electrolytics, meaning your LEDs will still have 95,000 hours of life in them when the bulb dies because the crappy caps they're using on the input and output sides of the switcher have failed.

If you're looking at a light and want to know generally what they're doing, see if you can count roughly how many LED's are in the fixture. If there are over 30, chances are it's a series string being run on rectified AC. If there are only a dozen or less, it's got a real driver and should at least give you reasonable efficiency, although no guarantees on lifetime. In an ideal world everyone would design LED drivers and use all ceramic or Nichicon caps, which have lifetimes measured in decades rather than months, but that'd cost a few pennies more and people will always buy the cheapest thing they can buy, particularly when you're working in a price range that's already an order of magnitude more expensive than the (incandescent) competition.