http://ottsun.canoe.ca/Money/2006/09...11083-sun.html

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...ht-060927.html

Big energy player EnCana Corp. has joined a group promoting an Ottawa company's revolutionary design for light bulbs that could use 90% less energy than regular bulbs and last two decades.

The design by Ottawa's Group IV Semiconductor Inc. is being supported by EnCana and Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It was showcased yesterday at the National Research Council.

Group IV's light bulb of the future would employ an electrical current passed through silicon, with almost all of the energy involved producing light instead of heat.

The proposed solid-state lighting design would consume one-tenth of the energy of a regular bulb using semiconductors to produce light instead of gases or filaments.

"Solid-state lighting is gathering momentum as a means to reduce the world's energy consumption," Group IV CEO Stephen Naor said in a statement.

__________________
"Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." -Martin Luther
"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."-Albert Einstein

 

So???
If they gave me 9.1 million dollars, I could also make an LED from sand.
I would make an LED from anything for 9.1 million dollars.

__________________
Uncle $crooge

 

a ten watt incandescent uses 1/10 the power of a hundred watt incadescent ... can I have 9.1 million dollars too?

rather than pie in the sky solutions like LED replacements for light bulbs, why not focus on a goal like turning off the damned lights! a bulb thats turned off requires no energy at all - the ultimate power saving device.

my neighbors are locked in competition to see who can make the outside of their house brighter at night ... they're wasting 100's if not more watts of energy for no purpose what so ever... not to mention that almost all the big commerical buildings around here have huge floodlights on them, lighting the corporate banner and the entire facade of the building.

__________________
If you don't have a planet, what good are gold bars?

want to contact me directly? gmail gordonthree
check out my project website: http://projects.dimension-x.net
Favorite numbers:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

 

justDIY I think you are missing the point

if you turn on a 100W bulb you ONLY get 10W worth of light
90W goes into heating, ie waste


using LED's the amount of wasted power due to heating is drastically reduced!!!

Look at the energy-saving bulbs they sell them boxed to say equiv to a 60W build (actual 18W)


wattage for lighting as become a unit in itself, anyone would know a 100W bulb is brighter then a 60W bulb and they roughly know how much it lights their room

IF an energy saving bulb only had written on it 18W they would go OMG!!! how un-bright will that be,



LED's are suppose to be even more efficent (ie turning more electrical power into lumin power) then energy saving so that can only be a good thing.
Sure turning a light off means it will use no power, but some places need the light on - you ever tried taking a piss in the middle of the night and the bulb has blown...

__________________
Nothing is impossible.
Once a problem is realised, the rest is just details

 

@styx:

I think you're over estimating the quantum efficiency of LEDs ... energy saving bulbs that replace a 60w with an 18w are compact fluorescent, which do have a much higher efficiency than incandescent or led. LEDs on the other hand, are better than incandescent, but not enough to be considered 1/10th the energy ... compare electrical efficiency by lumens per watt and see what results you get, they're quite disappointing.

50 watt halogen bulb (mini bi-pin gy6.35 came up first in google) 600 lumens ... this yields 12 lm/watt

6 watt luxeon K2 white, highest bin, (5.775 watts actually) yields 140 lumens ... this yields 24 lm/watt

double the number of lumens per watt is pretty good, so a 100 watt bulb could be replaced by 50 watts of leds ... good luck keeping 50 watts of luxeon's cool enough to last, not to mention the cost invovled, let alone fit it into any sort of conventional fixture.

Nichia and Osram claim to have white leds in the 50-60 lm/w range, but I haven't seen either bring an actual product to market, and that's all that matters in my book.

__________________
If you don't have a planet, what good are gold bars?

want to contact me directly? gmail gordonthree
check out my project website: http://projects.dimension-x.net
Favorite numbers:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

 

And given the depretiation in light output over time for LEDs (even these newer high output types) the cost of replacement factor suddenly becomes a bigger issue....

 

My city has replaced all traffic lights with very bright LED ones and they will pay for themselves and their installation in a few years. After that the savings of electricity and labour to replace bulbs is enormous.

__________________
Uncle $crooge

 

I'm watching some of the older LED signs in this country and they are already starting to fade - thats when they actually work at all 'cus the solar panels used for them are not big enough to cope with the dark winter days! Thank god they haven't used those panels for traffic lights!

Anyhow thats another subject. I put some Lumen 3W LEDs up as outside lights at the farm the other week, measured the light output from them in complete darkness and will go back in March and check them again, against Lumen's spec....

I could be picky about them, but the flourescents are so cheap to replace nowadays, and I have them on for 16/20 hours a day... Yeh! I have to replace them every 18 months (five years my ar**)!!!

 

How do you know whether it's the LEDs wearing out or just that the batteries dying or just aren't being charged enough?

Flourescents are still more efficient than LEDs and are a much more cost effective solution. LEDs are only usefull in situations where servicing is expensive or to replace direct light sources like hallogen lamps.

__________________
I also post at the following sites:
http://www.stop-microsoft.org http://www.heated-debates.com
Screen name: Aloone_Jonez

 

Actually efficiency scale goes like this:
1. HID lights. This is used from yellowish streetlights to the bright white parking lot lights.
2. CCFL lights.
3. LEDs
3 1/2: Halogens. Large scale halogens, like used in headlights, is actually a very similar lumens/watt to LEDs.
4. Then you've got standard light bulbs
5. Small scale incandescent bulbs: Like in flashlights. Halogen or not, light bulbs don't scale well. Small bulbs are VERY inefficient, which is why LEDs look so impressive in this area.

__________________
I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.

 

Oznog: Some of those lights take some time to come on (ok just one) and you can not use them in all applications here in the States. But a good list. I saved it.

Hero999: Good point. When LEDs fade at my house, I normally replace my batts. But they are in toys, not outlets. I have flourescents in all my outlets.

Madhouse: And what Country is this? Can you fill in your location.

Here in the States we must meet photometric numbers with the codes on commercial apps. So it really depends on what you are lighting.

 

HID always requires a starting cycle, at least 1-2 min. If you shut down some HIDs the ballast won't let them turn on again for like 15 min. They are very expensive ballasts and bulbs. However, the efficiency is absolutely tremendous. All stadium lights are a type of HID. Yellow sodium vapor street lights are sort of under the HID class, although it's older and so different there's little reason to group them together. Sodium vapor's still quite efficient though.

LED is very effective for colored lights because the other solutions are so bad. All other light sources create a broad spectrum and the only way to get colored light is to filter out the undersirable wavelengths. To start with a balanced white off a HID or fluorescent- with a range of RGB components- it won't be red unless you block 2/3rds of the light because you only want the red. Since there are efficient red LEDs that only make red light, without filtering, they're certainly the way to go.

LEDs are often mistakenly believed to be an efficient light source. For little flashlights, yes. Larger stuff, not really. Had somebody who wanted to make LED headlights, the calculations with the best technology showed it would more or less break even with halogens, maybe slightly better under best case, if you could keep it very cool under high power levels. If the temp went up, they were less efficient. This was a hypothetical array of devices that would have cost thousands to build, mind-boggling to mount, aim, and encapsulate against the environment, and an elaborate cooling system.

__________________
I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.

 

I agree Oznog but don't forget you can get coloured fluroescents if you want a particular wave lenght of light. Also LEDs are still a developing technology where HIDs, halogen and fluroescents have been fully mature for years. One day they might be the most efficient light source but only if nothing superceeds them, the only other lokely candidate is the Sulpher Lamp but it hasn't made anyone much money.

__________________
I also post at the following sites:
http://www.stop-microsoft.org http://www.heated-debates.com
Screen name: Aloone_Jonez

 

NIST, the US standards Institute, tested the CREE XR-E as 75 lm/W @ 350mA continous, on a pcb mounted on a tiny heatsink. Details are here:
http://www.cree.com/products/pdf/NIS...20Document.pdf

It also turns out that most incandecent, Metal Halide, Sodium Vapor, CCFL (compact fluorescents) are in fixtures that decrease their lm/W by 50%, due to fixture losses.

Grabbing a CCFL of GE's website, I'm seeing 54 lm/W. Toss it in a typical fixture, and it drops to 27 lm/W.

LEDs though, can be oriented to cast their light in the proper directions, so you don't have to redirect light going the wrong way, like you do in many fixtures, and take such a huge efficiency hit.

A great example, where they are using LEDs to save 40% of the power used by Sodium Vapor, and getting a much higher CRI light source (much improved color rendering), is quite apparent here:
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/4/2/2

 

As someone who inspects for a living I can tell you color rendering index is VERY important, and can stifle the ability to simply differentiate the specular and chromatic properties of an object. Who cares if you're saving a little on your energy bill if your employee work performance goes down because the lighting sucks the life out of you.

If you've ever seen the movie the Matrix you'll know the kind of drab and depressing feeling that a limited CRI can lend to the environment, which the directors skilfully manipulated. Everything in the 'Matrix' was carefully color bled towards a green/gray hue and rich colors didn't exist. The 'real world', as depressing as it was to live in it, was rich and vibrant with stark color differentiation and depth.

A generic incandescent light bulb has a CRI of 100.
Sodium vapor runs in at a whopping 25 (I suffer with this at work because they think simply brighter is better for inspection)

Most other bulbs run in between 60 and 80, anything over a 80-90 CRI has a very low efficiency because the overall brightness is spread out in the broad spectrum required to get sharp color and specular differentiation. If you just wanted optimal light output for a human being with least power, you'd have every light on earth colored a horrible yellow hue at about 560nm's.
There is a blue(440nm) spike in the human perception of color but the combined green(540) and red(575) cones create a higher perceived brightness in the longer wavelengths because the spectrum perception is wider around there.

__________________