Thursday, 01 September 2011 04:52

If you’ve heard about residential LED lightbulbs, you probably know that they’re energy-efficient, last a long time, and are pricier than other lightbulb technologies.  Here are a few things you might not know about LEDs.

LEDs are cooler.
Online retailer Energy Circle actually measured the difference between LEDs, incandescent bulbs, and halogens and found that a halogen bulb, a type of incandescent bulb, ran at 327 degrees!  A Cree LED downlight was measured at 107 degrees and a Philips Par38 CFL, worked at 167 degrees.
That is not to say that head isn’t at all an issue.  LED bulbs do get hot but the heat is dissipated by metal heat sinks that wick away the heat from the light source itself.  Keeping them cool with heat sinks or even liquid cooling, as Switch Lighting is doing is important to ensuring they last as long as advertised.

You get instant full light.
You get the full brightness of an LED bulb when you turn it on, which is an advantage over CFLs in a couple of ways.  For starters, you don’t need to wait for full light if you’re running in and out of a room.  But frequent cycling also degrades the life of CFLs, one of the reasons that CFLs in some cases don’t last as long as expected.
This suggests you should put LEDs in places where lights are cycled on and off quickly.  CFLs, meanwhile, are in light fixtures and lamps which typically stay on for extended periods.  Consumer Reports found turning CFLs on and off in less than 15 minutes degraded their life.

LEDs don’t attract bugs.
Pixi Lighting, which makes LEDs, lists “no bugs” (that is, insects) as one of the reasons to use LEDs, but if you look at discussions online, it is not so clear-cut.
The stated reason that bugs don’t fly toward LEDs is because bugs are attracted to ultraviolet light and at least some LEDs don’t give off this type of light.  

You will need to learn some lighting lingo.
We still talk about 60-watt and 75-watt equivalent bulbs because that’s what we’re accustomed to, but some manufactures are using new labels that give people far more information than brightness, which is worth understanding as lighting gets more diverse.
Lumens, of course, measure the amount of light , with a 60-watt equivalent giving off at least 800 lumens.  But LEDs are also sold by color temperature, either warmer yellow light or cooler white light.  There is also a color rendering index, with the highest being the best for light quality.
Warmer color lights will be more familiar since they’re closer to the yellow glow of a CFL, or incandescent.

Martin LaMonica, GREEN TECH

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