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Lifecycle Energy Costs of LED, CFL Bulbs Calculated
necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting on a new study from Osram, a German lighting manufacturer, which has calculated the total lifecycle energy costs of three lightbulb technologies and found that both LEDs and CFLs use approximately 20% of the energy of incandescents over their lifetimes. While it is well known that the newer lighting technologies use a fraction of the energy of incandescents to produce the same amount of light, it has not been proven whether higher manufacturing energy costs kept the new lighting from offering a net gain. The study found that the manufacturing and distribution energy costs of all lightbulb technologies are only about 2% of their total lifetime energy cost — a tiny fraction of the energy used to produce light." The study uses the assumption that LEDs last 2.5 times longer than CFLs, and 25 times longer than incandescents.
Surely they meant that LEDs last 2.5 times as long as traditional incandescents. Which is absurd actually... LEDs last a lot longer.
How come no mention of Halogens, I wonder?
My money would be on electrolytic capacitors. They don't like heat much at all, and have a tendency to fail catastrophically when they get too warm and dry out. They're the #1 cause of electronics failures, and you're unlikely to see CFLs or LEDs without electrolytic caps in them. Wrap that in a tight thermal envelope like a closed glass sphere around a light fixture, and the heat dissipation of the voltage converter circuits (up for CFLs, down for LEDs) alone would be enough to fry electrolytic caps in short order.
That said, you could also be running into solder joints breaking from thermal stress for the same reason. Either way, the fatal flaw for all of these new kinds of lighting is that they are so much more complicated in their design than incandescent bulbs.
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Please plea ignorance next time. Just because you have heard this argument a hundred times does NOT by ANY means mean that you can dismiss it on a whim. There are a lot of places in the world where people are born with birth defects because people dismissed the obvious. Ever heard of the group of kids from the same town, born without right forearms? Think before you post.