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New Crop of LED Filament Bulbs Look Almost Exactly Like Incandescents
An anonymous reader writes A recent article posted on a green building site gives a detailed analysis of a creative new kind of LED bulb that has been popping up Europe and Asia over the last year. They look almost exactly like Tungsten filament bulbs, require no heat sink, and offer extremely high efficiencies in the 100-120 lm/W range. The article describes their construction, compares them to conventional LED bulbs, and describes the result of a report by the Swedish Energey Agency that analyzed the performance of several brands of these these bulbs on the European market. Particularly interesting are links to teardown videos.
i want to go LED so bad but waiting for a good price point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
These are really cool. But it did make me chuckle when the article talked about how current LED candelabra bulb in particular are quite ugly. The candelabra bulbs were made to (poorly) mimic the shape of candle flame, and now we are attempting to mimic that imitation because we have gotten used to the way it looks :)
They look almost exactly like Tungsten filament bulbs
In my house there are three consecutive rooms: one with an incandescent bulb, the second with a compact fluorescent and the third one with a LED light. I asked my kids which one they prefer and to my surprise, they both chose the LED light. Then I bought a somewhat "warmer" LED and put it in the corridor next to the white LED room. As an old timer, I prefer the warmer LED. Not my kids. They describe it as artificially yellow and again to my surprise they choose the whiter LED.
The only reason we prefer the ugly yellow hue from indandescents is because we are used to i. It isn't "warm", its sucky. Same with thing happened when gas lighting was first replaced by incandescents: people pined for the soft orange glow of gas lights but within a few years people realized how bad that hue was.
My kids, young and unencumbered by tradition prefer the LED lights. So will everyone else rather soon, as we slowly transition to whiter more sunlight-like hues that are now possible with LEDs.
cost about the same as incandescent light bulbs?
Over time, they should end up costing less. Unless you don't pay for your electricity.
Cree for the higher lumen stuff, and Ikea (dunno who makes theirs) for the 200-lumen stuff.
Both the Cree and Ikeas I get are 2700k, and trust me on this.. I was a huge tungsten snob, it's all about the color temperature.. I bought the LED lie hook line and sinker.
All of mine are opaque (soft white) and when they're in the fixtures, they're indistinguishable from the tungsten.
My power draw for my lighting (all-up) was around 550 watts. Now it's around 56. (both figures calculated by totting up all the wattage from all the fixtures)
There's also a knock-on effect, the LEDs run so much cooler I suspect the AC runs less. Maybe not a lot less, but any less is welcome.
The only thing I haven't LED-ified is the home cinema, due to the lighting requirements there it's all MR-16 mostly 10* 20w spots on a dimmer, rarely run them brighter than 50%. For now I refuse to give these up.
Oh the bathroom is also still tungsten. Four huge 25w globes. These new filament-type LED may just the thing to LED-ify the bathroom.
And yes.. I've also noticed a lack of bug-attraction with LED, as evidenced by the two 1000-lumen LED monsters in the garage. Barely any bugs wander in. A moth maybe. A bee, once. But nothing near the bugstorm induced by my very brief fling with CFL. Very brief. Like 2 days. I hate them. Hate hate hate!
LED FTW
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Because Chrome is shit. Use a REAL browser like Firefox.
I actually agree - it's useless legislation. LEDs are so much more efficient, and so much longer lasting that they are quite capable of phasing out incandescent lamps without regulatory help. With the economy of scale and decreasing manufacturing costs, it won't be long until LED lamps are almost at price parity with incandescent lamps, which means the latter won't be manufactured except for a few decorative purposes. It's one of the rare times where the invisible hand is actually working as advertised.
This is where I'm at as well, although I may just replace the fluorescent fixtures themselves with ones designed for LEDs.
My first LED bulbs were installed in April 2011. I saved the box and receipt because I wasn't sure they'd last. Since then I've been gradually replacing the (often crap) CFL bulbs with LEDs. I've yet to have an LED bulb fail. I've even started replacing our three way incandescent bulbs in the torchieres with 3 way LEDs because the tech has won me over - sure they're pricey, but three way bulbs are more expensive anyway and don't last long at all.
Except for the kitchen (where the fluorescent tubes are) we're pretty much converted.
Oh, and at Costco I can get three packs for under $15 right now.
#DeleteChrome
I actually agree - it's useless legislation. LEDs are so much more efficient, and so much longer lasting that they are quite capable of phasing out incandescent lamps without regulatory help. With the economy of scale and decreasing manufacturing costs, it won't be long until LED lamps are almost at price parity with incandescent lamps, which means the latter won't be manufactured except for a few decorative purposes. It's one of the rare times where the invisible hand is actually working as advertised.
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.
LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.
There's still a large number of people who just don't like LED's or CFL's... and some even claim that the high efficiency halogens just aren't the same, it could take decades for those people to make the switch to LED's without legislation that makes it more difficult and more expensive to purchase incandescents. If even 1 out of 100 people want to stick with incandescents, that's over a million households in the USA alone, still plenty of room for economies of scale to keep prices reasonable.
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.
LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.
One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
Another thing to consider is that the one LED will use about 1/8 the power of those incandescents, so unless your power is free, you're now looking at 240-1000x the total operating cost for incandescents compared to LED's.
My next-door neighbor has very little money, so back in 2009 she bought a big SUV because it was $1200, compared to $3000 for a subcompact... and then couldn't afford the gas to get to work. People are really lousy at looking at anything other than the initial purchase price.
A third thing to consider is that as fewer people buy incandescents, the cost of maintaining tungsten-drawing machinery and other lightbulb-specific manufacturing equipment is going to rise. Vacuum tubes are hard to make well, and while we have a century of experience in doing so, silicon is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Don't you mean there are cheaper methods of heating than resistive heating? Because as far as I can tell, resistive heating is 100% efficient. Incandescents convert some fraction of the input energy to visible light. Almost all of the rest is emitted as heat. And if there was no light emitted, a resistive element is nearly 100% efficient.
No, he means more efficient:
In electrically powered heat pumps, the heat transferred can be three or four times larger than the electrical power consumed, giving the system a coefficient of performance (COP) of 3 or 4, as opposed to a COP of 1 for a conventional electrical resistance heater, in which all heat is produced from input electrical energy.
Translation: If your heating is all electric, with resistive heating you get a watt of heat per watt of electricity. With a heat pump you get more that one watt of heat per watt of electricity.
It's expensive wire.
Tungsten.
Very high melting point, very high strength and a bit of effort to go from ore to wire.
You don't have to look at Wolfram Alpha to get the first idea about Tungsten.
I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents
I'd be surprised if that fact mattered much. I'm happy to pay for LEDs because they last a lot longer, so I don't have to climb ladders and fuck around with fixtures as often.
CFLs are crap. They might last longer than incandescent. I don't know. I just know I have a little pile of CFLs that died after not noticeably longer intervals than their incandescent betters. I keep reading "the new ones are better." Whatever. LEDs mean I don't need to care about CFLs and the lies of their greentard fanbios.
I find it interesting that there are sound engineering reasons behind this shape, not just the retro look. The filament shape solves the 360 degree light distribution of most LED lamps but raises the issue of how to cool it effectively when not in contact with a heat sink. Helium has a much higher heat conductivity than air and moves the heat effectively to the envelope. Holding the helium for years without leaking is difficult requires something more gas tight than plastic. Forunately, there are many factories for glass bulbs that would otherwise be closed due to the decline in incandescent lamp sales. The technology for the glass envelope and sealed leads is a result of many years decades of development and probably would not have been worth the investment just for this purpose but these factories are already there with trained personnel and fully depreciated equipment.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
CFL were forced on us by legislation
No, CFL is just one of the options. The choice is between CFL, LED and halogen. And LED is clearly starting to take over the CFL market after just a few years.
Because an incandescent bulb is natural? I didn't know they grew on trees *eye roll*