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$60 Light Bulb Debuts On Earth Day
theodp writes "How much would you pay for an amazing light bulb? On Sunday — Earth Day — Philips' $60 LED light bulb goes on sale at Home Depot and other outlets. The bulb, which lasts 20 years, won a $10 million DOE contest that stipulated the winning bulb should cost consumers $22 in its first year on the market. Ed Crawford, the head of Philips' U.S. lighting division, said it was always part of the plan to have utility rebates bring the price down to the $22 range."
How many people does it take to change it?
Reading lights on the bus I ride have been replaced with multi-LED cluster bulbs - in less than 18 months most have several dead LEDs in the cluster.
Hopefully it comes closer to these claims than the CFLs, which claimed 5 year lives, but often failed within a few weeks.
Philips AmberLEDs i bought for $20 each from home depot. In some areas they are now $15. Awesome light color and brightness. When they first went on sale they were $50-$60 each. now they are $20. Wait for a year and the pricing of these will also drop to $15-$20 making them affordable.
I wont be buying any though....well maybe a few as a stop-gap but, not many.
I have been getting RGB LED strips, and looking to totally replace the house lighting. Part of the problem here is the "bulb". Yes, if you stick to a bulb form factor, and be backwards compartible, it can be hard to get enough light from LEDs, and expensive to build out etc.
However, bulbs were just the first invention....what makes that form factor so superior except for backwards compatibility?
I am looking at long strips, more like flourecent tube fixtures than bulbs. Can use many cheaper LEDs instead of a few expensive big ones... can use RBG LEDs and thus be able to change colors, or even white temp.
Of course, the stips are cheap pre-made, cheaper than I can find the LEDs on them in fact (cheapest price for 1000 in bulk was more expensive per LED than buying strips of 150 at a time) and the strips have limiting resistors, which are a major source of power loss (would be better to drop the resistor and use a constant current circuit.... but having to desolder or jumper smd resistors on each and every segment of the strip defeats the purpose of buying strips to make it easy)
Still though.... at $60/bulb.... ouch. and...its still just a bulb... with a single light color?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Don't worry, the LEDs will still have tens of thousands of hours left in them when a $.02 capacitor blows its guts out and terminates the driver board because a $.05 capacitor would have bloated the BOM too much...
I mean really, you can't drive adoption with a $60 bulb. Most people at the store going I've got 3 bulbs out are going to go "hrm $15 dollars or $180" Which do you think they are going to pick?
I'd love to know the Margins on this.
An incandescent light bulb will have a lifespan proportional to the thickness of the filament and a power efficiency inversely proportional to the thickness of the filament. You can have a long-life incandescent bulb, but it will drain even more power from an already inefficient design. The 1000-hour bulb was a reasonably optimal point on the power vs. replacement cost curve.
My objection (and I am not parent poster, obviously) is that I'm still paying the full price of the bulb. Rebates aren't magically printed money, and that $60 cost has to come from *somewhere*. Ultimately it comes right out of our power bills or tax dollars. Subsidies hide the true costs of something and ultimately just serve to benefit one company or another while reducing the variety in the market ecosystem - look at oil, corn, or any number of other subsidized industries as an example. It also only propagates our short-sighted obsession with up front costs. CFLs are subsidized here - but I'd still buy them if they weren't because I understand the differences in power consumption.
+1 Disagree
Cthulhu doesn't exist, however we can all agree that an Eldritch Abdomination is bad.
I've taken apart a number of Philips' premium lighting products (both top-end CFLs and also electronic ballasts for fluorescent and high-intensity discharge lamps).
I was pretty surprised to see absolutely nothing but the best components. All the capacitors were either high quality metalized film, ceramic or premium ultra-long-life high-temperature Japanese Al electrolytic from a tier 1 manufacturer.
Similarly, the active components were heavily over-specified 100% avalanche rated rugged MOSFETs, with high quality protection (diode clamps and current limiting resistors) on the gate drives.
While cheap Chinese CFLs often use garbage grade components - I was pretty surprised at the quality of the commercial lighting products - but then I suppose that's why these units command such high prices.
Ultimately it comes right out of our power bills
Perhaps the power companies see it as an investment. Subsidizing the development (and eventual economies of scale) of technologies that use less power will allow a power company to put off expensive upgrades to generators and the grid for a few years.
While I'd never wish to submit to the invisible hand of a free eldritch abomination, the idea of a regulated abomination, it's hands carefully controlled, might be something I'd be interested in entertaining.
They're there affecting their effect.
I've had it for a month.
I love it. Very bright, great light.
To be honest, the only place it falls down is in the electronics.
Compared to $30 EcoSmart 60W bulb I got from Home Depot, the L Prize starts up slower (about 0.25sec versus instant), can turn red when it dims (sometimes the blue LED driver circuit cuts out and the red stays on) and sometimes when you turn the L Prize off it flashes once about 0.25sec after you turn it off.
Finally, putting both bulbs on an oscilloscope, the L Prize also has a messier current waveform, far more harmonic distortion than the other bulb.
What gives? This is a great bulb, but the electrics seem like they could use some improvement.
Any comments?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I don't intend to pick on Philips specifically, not enough data to judge them against their peers; but more to express my frustration with the failure modes so common among the (not always predictable in any useful way) questionably well made offerings.
For some reason, the 'lightbulb' form factor seems to bring out the worst in designers of driver boards: Your basic, boring, overhead fluorescent tubes can be found running until their electrodes eventually degrade on some 80's inverter that has probably seen at least a dozen tubes come and go. LEDs, similarly, seem to last forever in their miscellaneous applications; but the moment they get shoved into lightbulbs half off them are either not receiving power, or in a series chain with a blown one, long before you get to start worrying about serious dimming or phosphor breakdown.
Neither tubes nor LEDs are, themselves, immortal of course; but it's just frustrating to see how often it's the driver board that keels over and dies long before the (generally not user-swappable) light emitters themselves are ready to go...
This:
"I'm still paying the full price of the bulb"
means almost the exact opposite of this:
"that $60 cost has to come from *somewhere*"
Yes. The money comes from somewhere: it comes from somewhere other than from you. No, you don't pay the full price of the bulb, you pay $22/60, plus maybe another ten cents, and the rest of society pays for the rest. Congratulations, you just benefited from a transfer program which society set up because society thinks the world is better with it, than without it. Society wants people like you to have a bit of their money, which is why we voted for leaders to give us such programs. If you don't want the money, that's okay too, you don't have to bother with the rebates.
I object when I hear people say that all market distortions are bad. No, they aren't Many market distortions are good. Some are bad. Obviously these are judgement calls, but to equate oil subsidies with LED subsidies is absurd and does a dis-service to everyone. It is culpably simplistic reasoning. (Let me be perfectly explicitly clear: it's still okay if you think this particular market distortion is bad, but it is not okay to thus conclude that all market distortions are bad.)
I'm glad you would buy the bulbs un-subsidized. Me too, probably. But that's not the question, the question is would other people buy them, large numbers of people. If the answer is yes, then perhaps no market distortion is necessary; but apparently the people who set it up thought the answer was no, and I tend to agree with them.
The cheap ones are complete garbage. The Philips are different. I've had several of the previous generation Philips 819933 12.5w 800 lumen "bulbs" running for almost a year, one 24x7 and others piling up a lot of hours. Not the slightest problem from any of them. The quality of the light is just as good as incandescent.
You may not have looked at the price dispassionately and analytically. One of these uses $37.50 in electricity over its 25,000 hr rated life, at 12.5 cents/kWh. You would have to buy twenty-five 60 watt incandescents (total cost $12.50-$25.00?) and run them one at a time to burnout to make the same amount of light for the same period, and these would use $180.00 in electricity.
So total cost is $40 (retail) + $37.50 = $87.50 for the LED, versus $12.50 + $180.00 = $192.50 for the incandescents. That's a saving of $105.00. Actually my electricity rates are closer to 18 cents per kWh, so I save a lot more than that. Not to mention saving yourself 24 bulb changes. Oh, and this previous generation Philips is available for under $20 locally where I live.
This thread seems to have rapidly degenerated into allusions to Japanese tentacle porn. Congratulations!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No point in buying a bulb which lasts 20 years. By 2020, there would be more efficient bulbs and this would be banned. And by 2020, both Google and Facebook would have capability to report to the Govt what bulb you turn on, the ban will also work on products which have already been purchased before the ban.
What free market? America has never been a country with zero market regulations -- never. In fact, for the first couple hundred years our entire tax base was levied on imports.
It seems to me that tmosley doesn't know what a free market is. That isn't surprising, today's proponents of free markets rely on people having no understanding of what a free market is, and simply having a knee-jerk attraction to anything with "free" in it.
Look it up. You might blow your own mind. "ZERO market regulations!? Who would want that?!" An incredibly tiny minority of industrialists would want that, tmosley. It's the job of the rest of us to stop them.