Posted on 06/30/2008 9:34:54 PM PDT by blam
Standards Set For Energy-conserving LED Lighting
These solid-state lights are powered by energy-efficient light emitting diodes and are among the first ones of a new generation expected to cut energy needed for lighting by 50 percent by 2027. (Credit: NIST)
ScienceDaily (July 1, 2008) — Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in cooperation with national standards organizations, have taken the lead in developing the first two standards for solid-state lighting in the United States. This new generation lighting technology uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of incandescent filaments or fluorescent tubes to produce illumination that cuts energy consumption significantly.
Standards are important to ensure that products will have high quality and their performance will be specified uniformly for commerce and trade. These standards--the most recent of which published last month--detail the color specifications of LED lamps and LED light fixtures, and the test methods that manufacturers should use when testing these solid-state lighting products for total light output, energy consumption and chromaticity, or color quality.
Solid-state lighting is expected to significantly reduce the amount of energy needed for general lighting, including residential, commercial and street lighting. "Lighting," explains NIST scientist Yoshi Ohno, "uses 22 percent of the electricity and 8 percent of the total energy spent in the country, so the energy savings in lighting will have a huge impact."
Solid-state lighting is expected to be twice as energy efficient as fluorescent lamps and 10 times more efficient than incandescent lamps, although the current products are still at their early stages. Ohno chaired the task groups that developed these new standards.
In addition to saving energy, the new lighting, if designed appropriately, can produce better color rendering--how colors of objects look under the illumination--than fluorescent lamps or even incandescent lamps, Ohno says.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
How can we survive without Mercury?
I would imagine that the standards will be more applicable to the power supplies, rather then the LEDs.
LEDs will eclipse CFLs. But they have to get rid of the blue color.
They already have. I have a set of white, not blue, LEDs in my car serving as dome lights.
Agree. CFLs will be a non-issue soon.
"I actually thought it looked very easy to make blue LEDs," says Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd., Tokushima, Japan. "I thought, blue means I just have to change the color—I just have to change the material."
I was never a fan of LED lights. But then I bought a small led light that uses one AA battery. VERY bright WHITE light. Uses some microchip or something to get the brightness out of that one LED, and the battery lasts a LONG time. Pretty much as bright as my tactical light that has a halogen bulb with 2 lithium photo batteries. (That never seem to last very long?)
As long as the LED bulbs can get dwon near the price of the regular ones with decent color, etc. it sounds good to me.
Yup. Stay with incandescent and just go from incandescent directly to LED and not polute your house with mercury from CFL's.
Maybe buy a few extra incandescents before 2012 when they'll stop making them.
It’s insanity to require people to have a CFL or LED in an attic, or a crawlspace, or screwed into the garage door opener.
I call it my Nerd Light.
I wonder how much $ the powers that be have invested in the CFL's = getting contracts with China, the only only one that would be producing them = and then mandating that every household must buy them = is going to go down the drain.
Warms the cockles of the heart, it does.
Free market trumps Marxism/
I think it will still be several years before LED lighting becomes cost-effective (or even possible in higher power lighting).Furthermore, as they push the technology to it’s limits, heat goes up and reliability goes down. I have 35+ year old (very small and dim) LED’s that work fine. OTOH, I’ve seen a lot of cars driving around with “lifetime” LED taillights missing a few. The colors of both CCFL and LED lighting are not exactly flattering, either. LED’s use a few semi-exotic materials, too, like indium and gallium. The Wikipedia has a very scary reference to the world supplies of these elements.
:D
They aren’t yet there on brightness per dollar. Not even close. But improving.
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