Posted on 05/23/2007 10:58:33 AM PDT by Ben Mugged
Enough for you?
Factor in what it costs to change light bulbs in some stairwells and emergency lighting units....and you don’t mind paying a lot for bulbs if they last for years and draw little juice.
“Are LEDs still $30 a bulb?”
No, this one is $100 (Special price !)
Ridiculous. And chinese made.
“made in the USA” by illegal aliens doing the jobs Americans won’t.
That is a nonesense statement. It uses 1/10th the electricity of any type of light bulb whatsoever that uses 100W, including a 100W LED array. It uses 2/3rds the electricity of a 15W incandescent light bulb, not 1/10th.
The real question is what is its comparative light output, and will it make you blind or give you migraines?
How many ______ does it take to screw in an LED lightbulb?
The prime market today is commercial. A $99 consumer bulb doesn’t make much sense. BUT, if you have to send a janitor/maintenance guy to replace a bulb every few months, the payback on the $99 is great pretty much covered in the first year or two.
If a few micrograms of mercury can contaminate 7000 gallons of water, then you should worry. Otherwise, it may be reasonable to believe that’s hype from the LED-making company.
I’ll be convinced that it’s a good product when they are able to blow them off the shelves absent any government mandates.
Just don’t call anyone in government to ask how to clean up the mercury if you break one. A guy in Maine did and his house was labeled a hazardous waste zone, It cost him just over $2000 to have a team clean and dispose of the mess.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=aa7796aa-e4a5-4c06-be84-b62dee548fda
I agree — it’s pure gesture politics. Even our (Canadian)Conservative government has set standards, which will effectively ban classic incandescent bulbs by 2012. They had to do it to shut the ecowackos up. A lot of people actually believed that the only thing necessary to meet Kyoto targets was changing light bulbs, and getting a bus pass. Now, they're starting to wake up to the realities.
This particular LED has 50K hours of burn time (5.7 years of constant use)..
A bigger problem (at least they are honest about it
“Remember: LED lights are directional (like a spotlight). This EcoLED light has a beam angle of 100 degrees, which is equivalent to a wide spotlight. It is not appropriate for use in lamps with lamp shades or other lighting applications where light needs to be emitted in all directions at once. (However, it can be aimed at a wall or ceiling to produce radiant ambient light that radiates through the entire room.) Also note that this EcoLED product produces clean, bright “white” light, not the typical yellowish light produced by incandescent bulbs. Most people agree that our white lights offer far better visibility and clarity than common yellowish light bulbs.”
bump
Kyoto is a joke, thank God we somehow managed to dodge that bullet in the 90s.
Also the 50,000 hours seems way low for an LED. Maybe I’m just used to industrial units that last upwards of 450,000 hrs. Still, 50,000 hours is 5.7 years... Not great, but a start.
In “light” of our previous discussions about the mercury in CFL bulbs ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1835838/posts ), I thought that you’d be interested in this thread. Here’s a quote from the article:
“The mainstream push is towards compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), but consumers are not being told that CFLs contain toxic mercury. There’s enough mercury in a single CFL to contaminate 7,000 gallons of fresh water, and if Americans continue to purchase CFLs — then throw them away in local landfills — the United States will soon be facing an unprecedented burden of toxic mercury in rivers, streams, croplands and oceans.”
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