BlueLED

The LED Approaches Theoretical Maximum: Questions for GE’s Gary Allen

  • By Matthew Van Dusen
  • 61 Comments

Home lighting used to be so simple: bulb burns out, you unscrew it, shake it to see if the filament rattles and then replace it with another incandescent. Now, lightbulb shopping is like buying a pair of shoes. Do you go flashy or sensible? Expensive and long-lasting or cost effective with a shorter life? You can choose from incandescents, halogens, compact fluorescents and light emitting diodes. It’s this latter category that has people so excited. Not only are LEDs hyper efficient they are also rapidly reducing in price. They don’t have the association with mercury (which, as we’ve seen, is overblown) that compact fluorescents do.

But LEDs are also the least understood lighting technology. So we went to General Electric lighting physicist Gary Allen for a quick history lesson and a view into the future of LEDs. (GE sponsors this magazine.) It gets a little wonky so we threw in an illustrated glossary of terms to define some terms.

Txchnologist: Where did LEDs come from?

Gary Allen: The LED was a technology first developed in the 1950s that worked only in the infrared, in the invisible spectrum. The visible LED was invented at GE’s corporate labs in 1962. The inventor’s name was Nick Holonyak. That is not to say that GE is responsible for all of what’s going on in white LEDs for general illumination, there were a lot of other developments in the last 50 years that also enabled that.

Nick Holonyak: Invented the visible LED while working for General Electric in 1962. Later predicted in Reader’s Digest that LEDs would replace Edison’s incandescent light bulb

 

Txch: Is it fair to say that Nick Holonyak was the Edison of this technology?

GA: Nick Holonyak and any of us who have worked on light bulbs since Edison are really only working on a fraction of what Edison’s contribution was. He created an infrastructure. Nevertheless, Holonyak is sort of the Edison of visible LEDs [his was red]. The white LED is credited to Dr. Shuji Nakamura, who invented the first blue LED. Think about Holonyak inventing red and then at the very far end of the spectrum in 1993, Nakamura invented the blue. The blue LED made possible the white LED.

Txch: Is this a leapfrog technology?

Leapfrogging: Skipping directly to a more efficient technology without taking intermediate steps.

 

GA: Absolutely. I would call it disruptive. They are now already passing compact fluorescents in efficacy or lumens per watt. LEDs are increasing in efficacy at 10 to 20 percent per year.

Txch: Since LEDs are semiconductors, is there an analogue for Moore’s Law?

GA: It’s called Haitz’s Law: the amount of light you get out of an LED is doubling every two years and every decade the cost per lumen decreases by a factor of ten. The performance of LEDs is rapidly approaching a theoretical maximum.

Txch: Is your goal as a researcher to reach that theoretical maximum?

Theoretical Maximum: The highest efficiency an LED can achieve. A number somewhere around 400 lumens/watt.

GA: The ideal lightbulb has 5-10 equally important goals:
1) Efficiency
2) Cost. LEDs are more expensive per lumen than any other technology. But LED costs will continue falling the same way that transistor and semiconductor costs are falling even after they become the cheapest light source.
3) Color quality. The LED is approaching the ideal color spectrum.
4) Can you change the color?
5) Can you dim the colors?
6) What is the lifetime of the source ?
7) The ideal light source should be vanishingly small. If I want to put it out of the way I should be able to.

Txch: How do you drive the efficiency gains right now?

Lumens per watt (lm/W): A measure of a lamp’s efficiency. Incandescent bulbs rate about 15 lm/W while LEDs range from 50 to upwards of 200 lm/W.

 

GA: One way is the bandgap, which is two different doped semiconductors that create an energy difference between the p-doped layer and the n-doped layer. Just like any diode. There are losses in electrons moving between those materials due to impurities and imperfections in the lattice structure.

Once you’ve created the photon efficiently, you’ve converted the energy of an electron into the energy of a photon, then you have to get the photons out of the structure. There are photonic tricks and material-based tricks that once the photon is created you get it out of the semiconductor and into your lighting system without further losses. You might call that an extraction efficiency.

Finally there is conversion efficiency. Most white light sources now are blue LED generators that then become white by a down conversion of the blue photon by a phosphor. That phosphor efficiency needs to be optimized. As those factors approach 100 percent efficiency, the LED light source will have usable lumens per watt something on the order of 300 or more. That’s compared with our best efficiency sources like fluorescent and HID and so on, that matured at around 100 lumens per watt. LED can go up to two and three times more.

Txch: Tell me about future of LEDs.

LEDs: Already five times more efficient than the incandescent lightbulb, the cost per lumen is decreasing by a factor of ten every decade.

 

GA: I’ve been in lighting for 26 years. My personal interest in lighting technology is to be working on what becomes a near ideal light source, so we can get all of those six or seven key attributes to fully satisfy what the customer wants. An ideal lumens per watt is 300-400. How close to that can an affordable lightbulb get? Probably somewhere around 200 lumens per watt or more. Once you’ve gotten two-thirds of the way to theoretical max, there are diminishing returns in terms of energy savings.

The LED lightbulb that right now is five times more efficient than the incandescent, when it then becomes another five times more efficient and it’s using 1/25th the amount of electricity as the incandescent, do you still save much more money by getting even more efficient? The answer probably is no. So will we get all the way to ideal efficiency? Probably not. It won’t be economically rational to do that. But LED can get us very close to ideal theoretical efficiency.

Txch: What’s your favorite lightbulb?

GA: You really should ask an objective observer.

The lightbulb that I have in the kitchen over the counter is our GE Energy Smart par 38, which is one of my personal inventions along with other folks on the innovation team. This is very smooth, very soft looking and the beam is perfectly uniform. The color quality is very high and the efficiency is high. It looks beautiful in the ceiling.

The other favorite that I have, I burn in desk lamps is another of our inventions. That’s the omnidirectional LED bulb, the direct replacement for Edison’s incandescent bulb. We have right now a 40-watt replacement version. Our 60-watt version is coming out next month. Our 75- and 100-watt replacements are scheduled to come out next year. What we like about that is it is the incandescent replacement type of LED that looks and performs and feels most like Edison’s light bulb. When you think about what GE lighting would create as an LED replacement to Edison’s light bulb to fill the iconic soft white product, it’s this.

Top image: Courtesy Flickr user @chris

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Comments

  1. Gabriel Walter

    Historical review of the invention of the LED was flawed. Nick Holonyak did more than just demonstrated a visible LED, he demonstrated for the first time that optical quality alloy material was possible, making possible a practicle visible light LED. Alloy material enabled the semiconductor to emit light in the visible region. To create this new material, he invented a new method for material growth which he patented. If you see the paper that was published in 1962, it was a paper on the first viable semiconductor laser. The material operating as a laser provided proof of the quality of the alloy.

    Nakamura did not invent the concept of a white light LED or even a blue LED. What he did was a find a way to incorporate Magnesium doping in GaN, by again modifying growth techniques and chamber. This enabled a lot resistance p-type material which led to the first blue laser. Why laser again? Because a laser demonstrate the quality of the material. Nakura demonstrated the first practical blue LED. But even before his demonstration the world has already started to replace incandescent lights for brake lights and signs. The world already knew about the LED and it’s potential. The world was merely waiting for someone to find a way to make p-type GaN material. I hope you get your historical review right.

    Reply

    • Matthew Van Dusen

      So what you’re saying is this three-line review of the LED’s history was not detailed enough?
      Your elaboration is fine but I think it’s a stretch to say the review was “flawed.”
      Holonyak invented the visual LED, Nakamura made possible the white LED.
      Ed.

      Reply

      • J Stephan Johnson

        I agree that “flawed” is not the operative word. Perhaps lacking in detail due to editorial constraints would be more appropriate. Still, its an excellent article and quite informative for the neophytes such as me.

        Reply

    • Phil Cooper

      I think the first blue LEDs were produced by Cree Inc. in North Carolina, based on silicon carbide semiconductor technology. They aren’t very efficient and have a rather high forward drop, but they predate the gallium nitride blue LED developed by Nakamura while at Nichia Corporation in Japan.

      Reply

  2. Doug K

    I looked up the light (GE Energy Smart par 38) that was mentioned in the article, the light is $75…..yikes! I think the ROI on that light is a little too long for me.

    Thank you for the article, informative and helpful.

    Thanks,

    Doug

    Reply

    • Matthew Van Dusen

      I agree, it tests the limits of my desire to be green. I mean, what if I drop it?
      But, I replaced five overhead lights last weekend with CFLs. Baby steps…
      Ed.

      Reply

      • Greg

        As noted in the interview, the reason for prefering that light is not purely energy efficiency, but the quality and distribution of light. If you are working on a project where color correctness/distribution/consistency is critical, then such expensive light may be justified.

        Reply

    • Phil Cooper

      A $75 lamp only makes sense in a commercial environment where one must pay a worker to go around replacing burned out incandescent and fluorescent lamps. If the LED equivalent lasts at least ten times as long as the older technology it replaces, it saves the cost of ten trips to replace it at $8-$10 a pop in labor.

      Reply

      • Paul

        Then my “sense” is a somewhat different. I have can lights in cathedral ceilings in my home, so the reduced labor and reduced falling risk for bulb longevity provides a great increase in value. Additionally I have never been impressed by the light quality, color consistency, or reliable longevity of the CFLs par bulbs I have used. One other thing – some of the one piece LED retrofits for can lights allow you to effectively air seal your can light fixture from your attic. The payback can be a whole lot quicker than you may imagine.

        Reply

    • Donald

      Remember when screw-base CFLs were $30 each? Now they’re barely higher than the incandescent bulbs they replace, despite the fact that I’m throwing away a ballast (including several hundred feet of fine copper wire) every time I toss a CFL. An LED that replaces incandescent bulbs has several times the lifetime of a CFL and in another two years, will cost about what CFL did last year.

      Best of all, for those of us who still enjoy old-fashioned darkroom photography, an LED turns off when I flip the switch, instead of glowing enough to fog film for another twenty minutes. Next time I need to replace the ceiling bulb in the bathroom that serves as my darkroom, I won’t have to go to a lot of trouble to try to find an incandescent bulb; I’ll just pop for a 60W equivalent LED unit, and likely never have to worry about that fixture again.

      Reply

    • Blair Carmichael

      I have two of the $75 dollar pars in my hallway. I was impressed how the light was brighter than the incandescent pars that preceded them. Also to note, the drop in heat emitted by the bulbs. A design flaw in our home put the HVAC thermostats in direct wash of the flood lights, It was noticeably warmer there after a few minutes of the lights being on. Now with the LED, The house is warmer as the ambient temperature in the hallway is more balanced. So I see the prices coming down as a blessing as I have many pars in high ceilings that are a bear to change.

      Another performance note is the full 1 second delay after you throw the switch.

      Reply

  3. Jay

    I think that the Chinese are going to look at ways to “borrow’ this technology and then create their “own” less expensive version. This will allow American consumers to buy this stuff and at the same time create unemployment for our own researchers that can only build an $75 LED.
    May our research and development should be looking for new engineering and technology designs that are cost effective.

    Reply

    • Rod C. Venger

      Possibly. The Chinese can bypass labor costs easily enough but it’s the technological and manufacturing costs that are driving the price. In their favor is their willingness to take short term losses in narrow areas in order to achieve longer term gains overall. In otherwords, they are willing to sacrifice now, take losses, on individual products while taking over more share of the US market overall. Beginning in the 70′s Japan waged economic warfare on the US, presumably still smarting over their WWII loss. Japan has been largely, mostly, shoved aside by the Chinese, but it’s not unreasonable to believe that their aim is the same. Why fight and conquer when you can simply supplant a country’s economy? Not only is there a huge trade deficit with China, but they also hold much of our debt. The moment of truth will arrive when, if, they demand payment. China may find out that we’d rather fight than switch, though current leadership may decide otherwise.

      Reply

      • Z

        At least 80% of your post made perfect sense – right up until the last two sentences:
        1. When you say the Chinese ‘demand’ payment (actually REpayment), how and why are they going to do that? Sovereign debt isn’t like your home loan where the debtor can just seize your possessions that were used as security, then say ‘Pay us back or we’ll keep the proceeds of your property’. Also, WHY would they want to do that?!?! The US, last time I checked, pays in excess of USD1.1 trillion in interest for the sovereign debt owed (of which apparently some 40% goes to the Chinese) – debt repayments that are secured with a nation’s (esp. the size of the economy of the US) bonds are one of the safest ways in the known financial world to invest your money, and you’ll ALWAYS get at least SOME interest back regularly – so if they demand their money back, where ELSE are they going to invest it?

        2. This ‘fight rather than switch’ makes no sense at all – if it’s war that you are implying (Republican voter, no? ;-) ), then you have to understand that if Nation A declares war on Nation B, then the debt that’s owed by Nation B to A is automatically nullified – but the converse is NOT true, i.e. US owes China money, US declares war on China. If US wins, the debt still stands, though it may be offset by ‘war reparations compensation’ (Victor writes history); If the US loses, then they’ll have to pay for the compensation AND the debt!

        And you are questioning the position of the ‘current administration’???? Patriotism is not about gloating what you may achieve with military sinew, but to maintain the strength of your country in the times of adversity – and since the 80s, only Democrats can do that! (Getting your nation 9 trillion dollars in debt PLUS a GFC, for example, is NOT a ‘good’ position by any stretch of imagination).

        Reply

        • DBray

          I’ll tell you what Democrats are REALLY good at: artificially driving up the price of incandescent light bulbs, which probably cost pennies to produce. I welcome LED bulbs, but you can keep those damned things that look to me like curly-fries. They are still very expensive, and as mentioned above, do not last nearly the time they are claimed to be good for. The only reason the prices are getting closer together has more to do with the soaring price of traditional incandescents & not so much to do with the reduction of price of the curly-fries. Why do standard incandescents cost so much more? The manufacturing process has been around forever, and I’m not aware of any tremendous spike in the cost of materials. So what else is there? Hmmm. Well, if you want to take a product like standard incandescents off the market (as Democrats clearly want to do), and you can’t do it strictly with supply and demand, you either ban it by some law or executive order (as they are trying to do) or you drive up the cost to produce it with unnecessary restrictions like over-regulation and hefty taxation.
          - D

    • Mark Wynnick

      Spot on observation.

      Reply

  4. Bill Crow

    With all the foolish, yet hyper popular, fashionable, points of view about what being “green” is I’ve chosen a different route. For me, “eco” is “‘eco’n,” as in economic. I’m interested in keeping more of my money in my pocket and watch with excitement these advances in technology.

    Reply

  5. Dennis M

    Gabriels post was as informative as was necessary , I thought it summarized
    the realities of SSL’S heritage. Good Post Mr Walters !

    Reply

  6. Mel G

    The trouble is indeed on ROI and on acceleration of technology. I just replaced a dozen of my lights with LEDs that are “only” $20/pop from Home Depot. My energy savings will pay for them in…five years? Meanwhile, if I’d waited another year, they would have been less money and more efficient, meaning I could make that cost savings in three years. Or wait five years, when they’re all at maximum efficiency and lowest cost, and save even more over the ensuing decades.

    Am I really going to want to keep the bulbs I just bought for their entire lifespan, which is estimated at 30 years? Should I have waited a few more years until the bulbs came out that I’ll truly want to own for 30 years? Suddenly buying a light bulb takes a team of actuaries and scientists. It’s as big a decision as a 30 year mortgage.

    Reply

    • Matt

      This is a great point.. For me, as soon as the LED is more efficient, produces light that’s as nice or nicer than incandescent, and has a 3-5 year payback, I jump. If the quality of light isn’t there, I’m not interested. That’s the thing that gives me the push. My impression is that they are getting very close on the quality/price curve such that I’ll buy LED replacements going forward.

      Reply

    • Pennywhistler

      You are vastly overthinking the issue.

      You bought great bulbs at a reasonable price. Enjoy them.

      Reply

      • J Stephan Johnson

        LOL Pennywhistler, touche! Sometimes we need to sit back and not out think ourselves. Enjoy the light as well as the added convenience of not having to replace bulbs all the time, and often at an inopportune moment! To quote that erstwhile philosopher, KT Frogg, “It’s not easy being green”! :)

        Reply

  7. Milton F

    1962 is an important year for the invention of visible LED by Holonyak and Semiconductor Laser by Rober Hall (Infrared)-GaAs) and Nick Holonyak (Red – GaAsP) alloyed semiconductor. The semiconductor laser demonstrated the clear understanding of high efficiency electricity (electron) to light (photon) conversion. They are the pioneer inventors of LEDs.

    Subsequently many noteble controbutors to LED technology for improve efficiency in alloyed semiconductor LEDs, For example, George Craford developed yellow LED at Monsanto and Russ Dupuis developed MOCVD technology ifor electronics and photonics devices n 1975. In 1977, Quantum Well Diode Laser was first demonstrated by Holonyak. Late, high bright LEDs were developed by Fred Kish, Kuo, Mike Krames and Craford at Lumiled. In 1993, Shuji Nakamura made an important contribution of GaN Laser (blue) use of alloyed semiconductor, quantum well and MOCVD technology. Today every LED and Diode Laser use Quatum wells and alloyed semiconductor.

    We thank all of them to made our life better and replace Edison Lamp. Overall, thank to Holonyak’s visible LED, Laser, alloyed semiconductor, quantum-well diode laser to pave the road of LEDs into lighting, display and many uses. Thanks for Bardeen and Brattain’s Transistor and Holonyak’s LED and Laser to make our life more green and less heat.

    Reply

  8. Brother Wayne

    Great article! It illuminates the shadowy beginnings of the LED and shines light on the LED’s bright future! I remember when all you could get were red LEDs then green, yellow and orange came out. It was a long time until blue became cheap enough to design into products, then wham…blue LEDs were everywhere. Now WHITE LEDs are everywhere^10. Blue and White are great for many lighting applications, but too bright and distracting on a laptop or external HDD. The good ol’ RED and GREEN LEDs are best for simple indicators and panel displays. Many thanks to those who worked long hours in those labs of old until…eureka!

    history and

    Reply

  9. James C. McLane III

    The article didn’t address the spectral characteristics that are desirable in lighting and how LED’s fit into this concern. It’s seems natural to believe that a million years of human evolution has made us prefer visible light that is similar to that of the Sun. LED’s operate in very narrow spectral bands that can only trick the eye into thinking the light is like sunlight. Flourescent fixtures give off excessive UV light that can fade colors in pictures hanging on the wall and they have significant gaps in their spectrum. Since many northern habitations in the US require heat for a substantial part of the year, the inefficiency of incandescent bulbs used indoors in those areas should not be a reason to seek a more effiicient replacement, like the LED.

    Reply

    • Matthew Van Dusen

      What you’re looking for is this story –
      http://www.txchnologist.com/2011/light-a-love-story-why-do-we-like-the-light-we-like
      Ed.

      Reply

    • Doug G

      James, your last sentence infers that keeping inefficient incandescents is a good thing just so you can harvest their heat. You would do far better switching to LEDs (or CFLs) and installing a controllable – and far more efficient – electric heat source like a mini-split heat pump. Keeping incandescents for their heat is like keeping a horse around to harvest its manure. Personally I ditched incandescents 5 years ago and get most of my heat from a wood stove (carbon-neutral, cheap, and lots of heat). I will soon be replacing my primary whole-house heating systems with mini-splits in every room.

      Reply

      • Robert S

        You have to be kidding about the wood stoves. They are the least efficient, dirtiest, smelliest most pollution heavy (think of all the creosote that doesn’t get in to the trap), slowest, least controllable heat sources i can think of. Perhaps if your supply of wood is free, they are less expensive, but buying wood is very expensive.
        * Where do you keep a couple of cords of wood if you live in an apartment? I wood stoves became a major heat source for the country, our forests would soon disappear, and global warming would be greatly accelerated.

        Reply

  10. thomas smith

    there is a bigger picture cfl and led use much less electricity, which means less needs to be generated, on a national level this means less pollution from burning oil, coal or gas, less dependence on oil and gas from anywhere. this should lower the cost of energy—-except if the capitalist just keep the same price and pocket the difference !!!

    Reply

  11. John

    There are other requirements the interviewee didn’t mention that I think are relevant:

    - Are LED bulbs a suitable drop in replacement for incandescents? Do the way the bulbs work in fixtures formerly used with standard light bulbs relatively similar to the way standard bulbs work? Are there any side issues arising from the use of these new bulbs? Example: Do they generate a lot of line noise? Do they generate a lot more heat than an ordinary bulb? Are they physically noisy? Is there any “vibration” in the light source?

    - Are these bulbs home automation friendly? Some lighting control uses the power line as a communication bus. Standard bulbs work fine with this technology. How about LEDs? CFLs do not work well with power line controlled lighting.

    - Are these bulbs easily disposed of? CFLs are not. How about LEDs?

    Reply

    • Chris

      I bought a couple of LED lights to put into small fixtures in my apartment, mostly to test out what they looked like and their reliability. Mind you these are 25 watt equivalents (using 2.5 watts of power). I’m using them in a couple of bathrooms.

      1. They directly replace the existing bulbs, same size, etc. You won’t notice any difference there.
      2. LED bulbs are barely even warm to the touch after operating for days. No negative there.
      3. They’re silent, so far as I can tell.
      4. There are no disposal issues. You can drop them in the trash. (And unlike incandescents and CFLs, they’re not prone to shattering).

      I think the reason some of these things weren’t mentioned is the person being interviewed didn’t think to mention some of the advantages.

      I tried out CFLs, and was left with a very negative impression. LEDs are still expensive per lumen, and getting larger bulbs with incandescent-style soft white light (as stated in the article) is still in the future, but apparently sometime in the next couple of years.

      Five years from now, the choice will be obvious, unless a brand new technology shows up to challenge LEDs. For now it’s probably best to wait for the larger lumen bulbs and price improvements, but using these bulbs gives one a very positive impression of where we’re headed.

      That’s a good thing, considering how much of a kludge CFLs are (in terms of reliability in non-ideal power situations, as well as disposal issues – trusting the average Joe to dispose of an admittedly small amount of mercury correctly isn’t my thing).

      Reply

  12. david braunstein

    Remember the MASER came before the LASER. The infrared LED came before the visible LED.
    From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode ( Yes my father is the Rubin Braunstein mentioned in the Wiki article) Every invention has many fathers, some forgotten, some uncredited, but all part of moving things forward.

    Electroluminescence as a phenomenon was discovered in 1907 by the British experimenter H. J. Round of Marconi Labs, using a crystal of silicon carbide and a cat’s-whisker detector.[5][6] Russian Oleg Vladimirovich Losev reported creation of the first LED in 1927.[7][8] His research was distributed in Russian, German and British scientific journals, but no practical use was made of the discovery for several decades.[9][10] Rubin Braunstein of the Radio Corporation of America reported on infrared emission from gallium arsenide (GaAs) and other semiconductor alloys in 1955.[11] Braunstein observed infrared emission generated by simple diode structures using gallium antimonide (GaSb), GaAs, indium phosphide (InP), and silicon-germanium (SiGe) alloys at room temperature and at 77 kelvin.

    In 1961, American experimenters Robert Biard and Gary Pittman working at Texas Instruments,[12] found that GaAs emitted infrared radiation when electric current was applied and received the patent for the infrared LED.

    The first practical visible-spectrum (red) LED was developed in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr., while working at General Electric Company.[3] Holonyak is seen as the “father of the light-emitting diode”.[13] M. George Craford,[14] a former graduate student of Holonyak, invented the first yellow LED and improved the brightness of red and red-orange LEDs by a factor of ten in 1972.[15] In 1976, T.P. Pearsall created the first high-brightness, high-efficiency LEDs for optical fiber telecommunications by inventing new semiconductor materials specifically adapted to optical fiber transmission wavelengths.[16]

    Reply

  13. Dave

    We are getting there with alternative energy, and I think we should continue to push in that direction. However, whenever anyone talks about this country or that country having x% of their energy from alternative sources, they never take into account the government subsidies that make it possible. When these governments decide they can no longer afford to subsidize these alternative energy sources, (and they will, due to the current budgetary environment around the world), the % will shrink back down.

    Reply

    • Jim Kress

      The Chinese government is directly subsidizing the LED industry in China by providing the most expensive equipment required for LED fabrication to Chinese companies for free.

      Reply

  14. Anthony

    $75.00 or even $50.00 a pop? So in a couple years when we can no longer buy a bulb for a buck, do any of you seriously think people are going to screw 75 bucks into every socket in our home (front-porch, back, side or garage entrances)? Guaranteed your investment will be gone by morning (stolen). Most will just buy their old-fashioned “incandescents” on the black market. A bigger money making scam than illegal drugs being smuggled across the border. Then what; the light-bulb police going door to door arresting us for possessing ilegal incandescents? Or how about the ‘ATF? Go ahead and laugh, but here in the U.S. I pay $72.00 a carton for Marlboros, and in Mexico,
    A 10-Pack of Marlboro is around $21.00 pesos. (At the exchange rate of $11.15, approximately $1.88/pk.). I have no plans to journey across the border, but if they start smuggling them into the U.S. I’d gladly pay a smuggler twice what they paid for them to save a small fortune. Of course the ‘ATF would come knocking on my door and throw me in a federal prison for a host of reasons, but where do we draw the line/where does it begin? Mandating/Forcing us to buy/pay more for something than less. Eventually; we are driven to other venders/sources to get what we want and at a fair price.

    Make it harder for people to get what they want (can you say prohibition), people will just find by other means. Why spend $500.00 from the dealer to replace the catalytic converter stolen from my truck, when I can just buy one for $175.00 on Craiglist. Yes it’ll probably be the one I lost to begin with, but oh well.

    How about *Christmas Lights? The impending outlawing of incandescent light-bulbs makes no distinction or exclusion of sub-types? ‘LED holiday strands can already be found on store-shelves and they are very expensive (relative to standard ‘mini/C7/C9s). Again; how long do you think they’ll last in your shrubs/trees/whatever before they disappear?

    How about all the lights in our homes/apartments/etc? Our lamps & chandeliers are going to look gorgeous don’t you think? Don’t forget to empty out all your sockets when you move, because your bulbs will be one of your biggest investments (potentially more than your appliances combined).

    Prohibition was destined to fail, as to prohibit (pro·hib·it / to forbid ‘an action, activity, etc. by authority or law/to forbid the action of a person/ to prevent; hinder)

    *incandescent light is light by means of heating a metal filament wire to a high temperature until it glows.

    Reply

    • Paul

      I’d be careful about general comparisons with Prohibition. They didn’t prohibit anything except inefficiency. Cheap CFLs qualified under the law before the new US rules even take effect. Some manufacturers looked at making more efficient incandescent bulbs then changed their minds – probably because they realized they would be playing a losing battle in terms of quality, economy and marketability in the very near future. Costs are coming done rapidly enough to soon make this a non-issue just as it did with CFLs. Greater manufacturing efficiency and economies of scale will win.

      If you prefer a little economy upfront over a lot of savings over life time operation, be my guest – we’ll see who saves the most in the long run. What I understand from your comment is that you are probably not an early adopter – that’s cool. I want LEDs to be good enough and cheap enough to win you over too.

      Incandescent bulbs are heaters that happen to produce a little bit of light.

      Reply

    • RankineCycle

      There is no “banning” of any particular technology; only high-output general lighting which fails to produce at least 30 lumens per watt or so (30% more efficient that standard incandescent). Halogen incandescents will still be available. Rough-service bulbs, 3-way bulbs, oven bulbs, Holiday lights, night lights, and other low-wattage, specialty, and novelty lights are exempt, though it is pretty dumb to buy incandescent night lights and Christmas lights nowadays.

      It’s interesting how the same politics which have blown this efficiency standard way out of proportion happen to be an adamant supporter of drug prohibition, though not exorbitant cigarette taxes. See the culture war raging here? Or just the fact that in America social conservatives and libertarians vote for the same person.

      Reply

      • Matthew Van Dusen

        You’re assuming there’s a scary warning because they’re dangerous. Could it not be a hangover form the days when there used to be more mercury in the bulbs?

        Reply

    • curmudgeon55

      I’ve had several strings not stolen but rendered useless because the dang squirrels chew out the bulbs for some reason. They just chew off the wires at both sides of the bulb and take it away.

      Now, you’re going to tell me that someone must have come along a clipped out the bulb with a pair of wire cutters as a bit of vandalism but that doesn’t explain why the bulb was missing from the string at the peak of the house or on the garage inside my own backyard.

      Anyway, that’s my major concern about the LED strings these days. Used to have the occasional bulb stolen when someone else needed a spare but I could always put in a new one but it’s another matter when the bulb and socket are a single unit and it’s just plain chewed out leaving broken wire ends.

      Reply

  15. Rob

    Feel free to direct any unanswered questions to Robert@LumiGrow.com

    Reply

  16. dan

    I just started replacing the most used bulbs in my house with 40Watt equivalent LEDs. They put out about 450 lumens and use about 7.5 watts per hour – and best of all, only cost $8 each at costco. Last year when I considered doing the bulbs were between $30-$70 so I waited until I could get a better ROI and I’m glad I did. Honestly I didn’t think the prices would have come down as fast as they have.

    Reply

  17. Ralphwaldoemerson

    You are all sick…buying into green is tantamount to drinking the kool aid. There is no global warming, no reason to be green except a feeling of guilt for trashing the planet and you have bought into the concept that government knows best. you are all fools. I think you all failed physics and do not understand math. I use LED’s because it is low energy tech that works for my situation using batteries to supply my power, which are recharged by wind or solar out of necessity, not economic reasoning. If you believe CO2 is causing global warming, you have to go back to chemistry 101 and physics 101 and find someone to teach you who is not a fool or who has bought into that lie. CO2 is nothing in the scheme of things, it was a ploy to redistribute wealth to poor nations, which will be sucked up by the ruling class, not reaching the lower classes and not effecting any change in the planet in any way. If you want to subsidize this kind of illegal money seizure, you go ahead, but leave the rest of us out of it. The UN recently stated this is the goal of this scam and if you did not read that news article, you are not only stupid, you are blind and uneducated.

    Reply

    • mike

      The LED article you are replying to provides plenty of non CO2 reasons to convert to LED lighting that have nothing to do with cap and trade, tax on carbon or the other world government or ruling elite schemes. If the price drops continue as predicted, LED replacements become viable based on simple Return on Investment economics. The LED efficiency can even be competitive without creating inflated energy production costs. Save your rhetoric for an article promoting the policies you despise, or for technologies that are not on track to exceed the economic efficiencies of the technology they intend to replace.

      Reply

    • Chris

      Some of us are just looking for a light bulb that is more efficient because we pay electric bills. Imagine that. And by the way, LEDs are that bulb.

      Reply

    • Jim Kress

      If people WANT to be “green” then that should be a personal choice, not one that is imposed upon them by Government force.

      Reply

    • paperburn

      what about it just saves money. I am all about saving money

      Reply

  18. Shwara

    I’m looking for livable 12VDC LED home lighting solutions. I like 12VDC. DC is closer to Mother Nature. It is what I get from my solar panels and other non impacting alternative sources. AC inverters and AC power transmission waste lots of energy. AC leaks all sorts of harmful radiation. And please do not get me going on about unsightly wall warts. Yeesch. When the “Big One” hits my little home 10 miles from the San Andreas and *if* I’m not under a new Lake Coachella I’m gonna have the lights on.

    Reply

  19. Sam

    I am looking for a paper that can help me understand the connection between efficiency and lumens / watt. The theoretical limit mentioned is 300 lumens/W. What is the efficiency at this limit? (I mean how much of the W is convereted to light energy and how much dissipated as heat.) I think this can be worked out if the spectrum of the light emission was fully defined but I expect there is experimental data on the light sources in use / under development.

    Reply

  20. Dan

    I have replaced all my par30 incandescent lamps with FEIT Electric dimmable LED PAR30 lamps,
    Most recently priced at Costco at $29.00. 650 Lumens, 3000K light appearance.
    Very happy with the results and have seen a reduction in my electric bill.
    When is the government going to get out of telling our citizens what light bulbs to buy?

    Reply

  21. Steve D

    To me, the measure of whether an LED is “white” is outdoor mini lights (AKA Christmas lights). The eye can adjust to wide color swings in ambient light – a film photo of an incandescent lit scene is ornage, the same scene under fluorescent is green – but in outdoor mini-lights, “white” LED’s are a garish blue.

    Reply

  22. Don McCallum

    It is true that white LEDS have a blue undertone due to the fact that the white phosphers do not intercept all of the blue light from the actual LED inside. But it is no more garish than a bare incandescant or flourescent or even the sun itself. So buy your own Red green and Blue LEDS and adjust the color balance to suit your own tastes by adjusting their operating current levels independantly. One big advantage to LED lighting is the reduction in fires caused by incandescants overheating flammable substances such as when a portable lamp is accidentally knocked over into a bed and not set back up, or when an oversized bulb is installed in a fixture i.e. 150Watts in a fixture rated for 40 watts.

    Reply

  23. RobC

    I have a question of curiosity to the LED experts. Since artificial lights are used often for plants grown indoors I was wondering if a small amount of solar power cells could provide the energy requirement of the newer LED’s and I wonder if they have the spectrum requirement for plant life to thrive?

    Reply

  24. EarlGrayHot

    THe fact that LEDs don’t produce a lot of heat is a problem in some instances as when stoplights get covered by snow and ice and can’t funtion. Fatal accidents have already occured as a result.

    CFLs are still dangerous and the instructions for disposing of one that has been broken are downright scary! Open a window and remove children and pets then shut the door.

    GIve me a CHEAP incandescent bulb because they have a pleasing light, they’re cheap, and perfectly safe as long as you are careful.

    Reply

  25. WesTXStoner

    What are we going to do to keep our Lava Lamps working? No heat LED = a really bright clump at the bottom …

    Reply

  26. jr

    Off topic for much of the thread, but one problem as i see it, is that there are no omni-directional LED’s. Couldn’t they be designed in an ovoid-spherical micro-array around a reflective bead. When will we have the omnidirectional equivalence of a glowing filament?

    Reply

  27. Gordon L

    I agree that relamping when you move can be an issue until we transition completely to the new technology. When I downsized from home to apartment, I replaced a handful of LED and over 60 CFL lamps with dollar store incandescents before I left. With any luck, LED units will be both inexpensive and attractive before I have to buy any more lamp replacements for my retirement digs. In the meantime, I am slowly filling up a 5-gallon bucket with the dead CFL’s that never seem to last as long as they had been advertised to. I also hope LED’s have improved by then so the lumens I buy do not drop by 50% each year like some of the units from as recently as 2010.

    Reply

  28. anger

    Txch: “Is it fair to say that Nick Holonyak was the Edison of this technology?”

    No it is not fair, clearly Nick Holonyak actually invented something instead of stealing it.

    Reply

  29. Ray

    CFLs were a BOONDOGGLE from the start. Expensive, hazardous, delicate. I have NEVER had one that lived up to its “Up to XXX hours”, expecially when in a fixture that was enclosed, as many of our older style fixtures were. As EarlGreyHot alluded to, what happens to the family vehicle, that the kids are hauled around in, when a couple of CFLs break on the way to the Hazardous Waste Facility? The only positive thing I can say for the CFL is they were ‘made in China’.

    I look forward to incandescent looking LEDs. I hope that GE and others can make them in the US. I rue the day that we stopped making incandescent bulbs in the US. For at least 1/2 of the year the heat output of the old fashioned bulb was a positive. My final rant concerns the dumbing down of America with these so-called ‘Energy Saver” incandescents. Less watts = less lumens = more bulbs necessary to get the same “quantity” of light. Sort of like putting a 150V filament in a 120V light, it lasted longer, but so what?

    Reply

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Articles in Volume 7