Can we have our regular old light bulbs back now?

Oh don’t you take my light bulb away.

The “scientists” forgot to tell us how many red LEDs we would have to chew thoroughly and swallow in order to get sick from lead poisoning. Sounds like more horse processed hay for the mushrooms to me.

And people wonder why I still drive vehicles with glass headlights. “New” tech is really starting to stink.

Wait. What?
Except for the anode and cathode, the guts of an LED are encased in a thick layer of plastic.

Ogunseitan said that breaking a single light and breathing fumes would not automatically cause cancer, but could be a tipping point on top of chronic exposure to another carcinogen. And – noting that lead tastes sweet – he warned that small children could be harmed if they mistake the bright lights for candy.

What fumes?! Are they confusing LEDs with CFLs?

Should try living in the UK, the good old EU banned them ages ago and now we have the dim bulbs the dim-witted EU say we should use, but hey watch this space when one breaks and a haz mat team has to come in to remove the mercury.

Even though by now everyone who is well informed knows that global warming is a hoax, it still makes good sense to try and preserve energyy. Namely, it costs money to make energy. The fluorscent type lights that I use do not really break down very often ad save at least 75% in energy. They just burn and burn, foreever it seems. I am in LA at the moment. Visiting from South Africa. I am puzzled that I don’t see more solar water heating (with a solar geyser). This is stupid. You can save 40% of your electricity bill just letting the sun heat your water for the geyser. Due to to a shortage of power , our (state funded) electricity company in South Africa is giving a subsidy for every installation built. This is an idea that must be implemented worldwide, as it is a good way to spend government subsidies instead of wasting it on “climate research”.

Part of the problem is that the information is presented out of context. That is we really aren’t told the relative toxic level compared to the other products. One also has to factor in the lifespan of the product too.
A standard light bulb has a life of around 750 to 1250 hours depending on the bulb.
Assume 1,000 as the average. A CFL is rated at 10,000; however this assumes you never turn of the light. Repeated On/Off cycling will shorten the life of the CFL, but I’ve never seen any numbers on exactly how much life it would be under normal use. LED Lights don’t have a catastrophic failure, like the first two lights, so the L70 Standard applies. When the light falls to 70% of the initial light output, the life of the LED is considered ended. LED Lights have a life of around 35,000 to 50,000 hours. Also, LED lights can be turned on and off rapidly with out any problems of a shorter life.
Thus, an LED light would have the life of 35 to 50 regular light bulbs and 3.5 to 5 CFL bulbs. One would need to factor how much toxic material in one LED compared to 3.5 to 5 CFL compared to 35 to 50 regular light bulbs. I thought that regular light bulbs used lead at the base of the bulb. … or has this been changed to lead free solder?

I think I like the opening line best:

Those light-emitting diodes marketed as safe, environmentally preferable alternatives to traditional lightbulbs actually contain lead, arsenic and a dozen other potentially hazardous substances, according to newly published research.

Didn’t they frakkin’ well know what was in these things when they built them? Is there a “black box” factory out there that makes light bulbs, but nobody knew what went into them until somebody did research? They’ve discovered, through “research,” that there’s lead in these things. Now how the hell did it get there? Do you think they’ll discover that lightbulbs also contain glass? Who knew?

Those oak tables common in so many households actually contain wood according to new research.
“We had no idea,” says carpenter John Smith who makes oak tables for a living. “We just use this here tree flesh stuff to make them. Nobody told us there was any wood in it.”

Seriously. This is so stupid I don’t even know who to be mad at.

I hate CFLs and have stocked up on incandescants. My hunch is that true Americans are going to rebel over this nonsense about “banning” anything. Free choice and education as to hazards and efficiency is what is appropriate — and American. But what’s up with this UC Irvine research after the fact? Following your example, Anthony, I just changed out a number of lights for CREE LEDs. The light is absolutely beautiful. I’m planning to live with it.

Henry@Calvi36
So if you are worried about making the energy companies rich, why not put up your own solar geysers? England perhaps not so much, is that where you live? (because they do not have that much sunshine) but the question I asked: why have I not seen any here (in LA). Sunny California. I am puzzled about that.

Wow,
They thought light bulbs would be easy.
Now, they need to explain cosmic rays.

LEDs certainly do not scare me.
Mark

Henry@Calvi36
All I said was that I have noted a 40% decline in energy consumption after installing a solar geyser. But, yes, you must have regular sunshine> that is the whole point. But where I live we have much of that. \ Hydro power is a good idea. I think Willis had a simple one built on his plot somewhere. I vaguely remember he had a drawn plan for that project on WUWT. So if you have a river at the back of your yard, look up that plan of his again , here on WUWT.

Curmudgeon Geographer says:
February 10, 2011 at 8:35 pm
“In Minnesota, those incandescent light bulbs are better thought of as “heat balls”. Rather efficient heating mechanisms in winter, they are. Goodness knows environmentalists aren’t considering the heating efficiency offered by the ol’ bulbs.”
Hi Curmudge !!!
Maybe you could turn off all your heating and park your family around a 60 watt Osram tonight.
Let us know how you go.

the energy consumption to produce 1 regular bulb is 6x that of a LED. Landfills are lined. How many LED do actually break per year per household? I do not see the problem.

Here in the UK you can still buy tungsten filament bulbs but they are now halogen bulbs which are 25% more efficient. They work fine. The only trouble is the life seems to be much less than the old bulbs.
I use halogens but mostly GE spiral CFLs. The latest CFLs start up quickly enough and the quality of the light is fine. I really can’t see anything wrong with them. I’m happy to have a lower electricity bill. The CFLs from 3 or more years ago were terrible so it’s no wonder they got a bad name. They took several minutes to get to full brightness and the light color was horrible. I have no use for LEDs but coming eventually will be OLED panels which are 100% efficient (not heat at all).

Calvi36 says:
February 10, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Henry, we do not have a shortage of any energy! Why are electricity prices so high? Simply to create profits for shareholders. There is no shortage of energy and we have absolutely no need to conserve energy apart from to save our our personal bank accounts from the rape by greedy energy companies.
———–
Get a clue and look at the balance sheet of an energy company. Somehow you are forgetting that energy does not grow on trees; it needs to pay for fuel, labour, plant capital costs etc. Energy companies are not hugely profitable.
And you are also fogetting the profits pay for your superannuation.

Bring back those old big wooden cased radios or carriage and horses because the disposal was so much more environmentally friendly.
The argument here is clouded by those eco zeolots who love nothing better than to force others to tale action on their behalf (how many homes do you have Al).
Sure we would still be buying and using incandescents but if you just give me the option on cutting my lighting bill by half less extra investment up front I like most people will take it.
And just like the plastic radio cases of today the product is more complex and has more complex disposal issues but that is unfortuneately the price we pay for being clever clogs. Bring on LED bulbs and less power stations, just wish that we could skip the eco facist induced mercury lamp interlude on the way.

@ Robert Austin – 9:36 pm
Yes, I understand that halogens are less energy efficient than CFLs – the packets say ≈40W instead of 12 or so for CFL and >60 for incandescents (and yes I realise that halogens are also incandescents but saying ‘incandescent halogen’ all the time seemed like extra work for my very slow typing ability). However, that wasn’t really what I was asking about. What I was interested in is whether halogen bulbs have less obvious downsides in the way that CFLs have the mercury problem, questions over ballasts etc. For example, which particular halogen are we talking about and is there a toxicity issue if the bulb is broken? Does production use a resource that has other unwanted side effects on the environment where it’s extracted or could have been better used elsewhere if we’d stuck with boggo incandescents? That’s more the kind of thing what I was getting at. We all know that if you never look beyond the packaging CFLs would seem to be ideal, but that that isn’t the whole story. So what downsides, if any, do halogens have they you can’t tell from looking at the packet in the shop?

Boy, I sure do long for the good old days before technology ruined our lives, back when the odd sabretooth or Vibrio cholerae nailed ya long before anyone could worry about dying from a DDT, gallium arsenide, or viagra OD. 🙂

Try whis way !!!!
http://heatball.org/en/

This is a very familiar and sad story. Remember biofuel production in Indonesia? It led to massive deforestation and an increase in ozone producing palm oil trees. There we had unintended consequences as a result of not taking time and not thinking things through, something we have been telling Warmists about – take your time and don’t rush, the world will not boil tomorrow.

Henry as per my previous post which you must have missed:
Centrica, a French Company that owns British Gas has reported this:
Key Fundamentals Financials – Interim (28/7/2010)
Turnover £m 11,707
Pre-tax Profit £m 2,004
EPS p 25.78
DPS p 9.14
Not a bad profit margin in my book!

I live in Scandinavia or more precise Sweden. Here we need to heat our houses more that half the year. During this period it also get rather dark compared to the summer that is rather exeptionally bright with “white nights” etc.
Now the are about to ban the traditional light bulb here and replace it with LED and mercury filled CFL’s. So, for each bulb I replace my heater start to work harder …
Besides that the energy effiency is mad the new lamps never last the promised x-thousand hours…
But as you all noticed the winter season is cancelled by IPCC so it must be an artificial
problem …

I would like to know who has made millions out of this fraud ? needs looking into

Overpaying for an inferior product is the norm for the environmental movement. The agencies no longer test equipment for reliability – only fuel efficiency. And what does the manufacturer do in that situation? Focus on cutting manufacturing costs to the detriment of reliability. In theory LEDs may well be a good lighting product because of the maintencance savings, but in practice I would bet the leds last for a lot longer, but the power supply becomes the weak link in the chain. Perhaps the standard charger initiative should be extended to standardize a dc power supply in the home.
If the entire environmental impacts were taken into account the answer most of the time would surely be to do nothing. This never had anything to do with saving the planet but making everybody spend time on their pet project to raise it in everybody’s conscious to justify their own extravagances. They will then try and take the credit for efficiency improvements which always would have been made, and use that as justification for their incredibly wasteful expenditure.

These bulbs do not do what they say on the tin. They are certainly not as powerful as they cl;aim to be. I do not know whether this is down to the colour of the light but you have to go up a couple of sizes. In other words, if you were running a 60 watt tungsten bulb, you need to replace this with the equivalent of at least a 100 watt energy saver bulb.
The other day I had to replace one of these bulbs that had been in service for just 2 years (may be slightly less) yet on the box, they claim that it will last for 10 years. This is not the first time that I have had to replace one of these bulbs after a short life span. They certainly do not last as long as the claim and this is important to their claims that whilst they are expensive, over their lifetime they will save you money. This is a false claim, if they last considerably less than they claim.
I am not even convinced that they are that much more energy efficient since they tend to change usage pattern. I have several bulbs that I now leave on 24 hours a day whereas with the tungsten bulbs I would have run them for only between 6 and 14 hours a day (depending upon summer/winter usage). One is tempted to think that it is only 9w or 11w so one becomes lazy and leaves the light on.
All in all, I suspect that these bulbs will be seen to be an enviromental disaster.

Fumes when they’re talking about LEDs, not CFLs? Talk about Ye Olde Bait and Switch! And if a child munches down on a twinkling LED Christmas light, I’d think he’d be in greater danger of choking. He’d have to munch down on at least a whole string (and break through the plastic encapsulation) to be at risk of poisoning—in which case, he’s in dire need of parental supervision.

[trimmed, spam]

Oh, for heaven’s sake – I’m so tired of all the hoops we’re becoming required to jump through just because of the minute possibility that trace quantities of some heavy metal or another in some manufactured product might find its way into the ‘environment’.
Besides the fact that the only significant ‘threat’ to the environment can be during and before the manufacturing process, where do they think these heavy metals come from in the first place? Are we now in mortal danger because we happen to live on a planet where lead, arsenic etc can be found?

Interesting article, but red flags go up when I read words like ‘could be a tipping point’. I also suspect the Department of Toxic Substances Control are going to be very keen on finding substances to control. Maybe I’m jaded and my trust in authority has been eroded by GW propaganda, but I don’t trust official pronouncements like this without seeing supporting data and taking context and proportionality into account. I wonder how many trace heavy metals we are exposed to daily without even realising? Also there are a lot of things that could harm a child if eaten. Luckily, children generally prefer food.

@WUWT
> CFL’s … and now LED bulbs are so much more eco unfriendly and when they
> inevitably end up in landfills, they become a source of heavy metal.
What is this? Yes, CFL’s are nasty little polluters. I don’t buy them anymore. But you’re castigating LED’s? By association with CFL’s? They’re made of tiny bits of silicon (‘sand’), with only nanoscopic levels of other ‘dopants’, encased in plastic.
Perhaps I’m missing something here. Have you any evidence that LED’s are chemically or environmentally harmful?

Calvi36
“In my country, why not build more hydro-electric dams, god knows we have enough water!”
Because the enviro-socialist-zombie-hippies saw fit to make policy sure to ban further building of dams for fear of potentially destroying sensitive local environment in and around river systems. Which I believe was the product of the hair brained argument that the current life in and around the rivers might not be able to adapt. The logic being that just because the rivers already having dams went right ahead to start teaming with life at the moment of its creation might not be true for a new dam. The so called precautionary principle or what ever.
Of course one has to assume that plastering acres upon acres with solar panels are absolutely the bestest thing ever for the local environment what with all them critters now can spend time in the shade of crazed hippie ingenuity. And of course assume that millions of wind mills are the pillars of creation of the new green world less the avionic capable soup ingredients formerly known as birds. (Mosquitos +1.)

Henry@calvi36
Yes, I noticed the profits. We have a state owned energy company, which I think is better as they are more non profit orientated, We had a shortage of electricity some time ago due to bad planning in the past. We were asked to change the bulbs (which most of us did) but I am sure that this did not save all that much. They then decided to subsidise solar geyser installations. Like I said, after installing a solar geyser my consumption of electricity went down by 40%. I still have back up normal electricity for the days when there is no sun. (geyser switches on automatically if water gets too cold)
Visiting LA now, which has so mch sunshne. I am puzzled that no one here has solar geysers?
Likw I said, we all know global warming is a hoax but it still costs money to make energy so it is still better if we can save energy.

@ Bill Thomson at 3:49 am – Halogen bulbs are not intended to be used with dimmers. They need to run hot.
Interesting. They’re being marketed here as suitable for dimmers, and I’ve not found a dimmer friendly CFL in the usual places. Since I’ve finally run out of my carefully hoarded stock of regular incandescents these seem to be the only alternative. A bit of dodgy marketing? Or they know that technically they’ll work (they do) but maybe not last as long?

I don’t mind using LEDs or CFLs in the right situation, but incandescent bulbs in my opinion give off a better quality light. My main objection to the light bulb ban is that the government is writing laws arbitrarily to regulate something and not letting the free market work. If CFLs and LEDs are superior, they will win the day in the marketplace, just as iPods have replaced CDs, not because someone wrote a law banning CDs but because the new technology was superior. Likewise, no one wrote a law banning 35mm film…the list goes on.
Let individuals decide what’s best for their needs…

Diodes could have other uses, as many of them emit a laser like light of a single wavelength. Sun´s light is mainly a Calcium wavelength light, a warm yellow.

@ Dave Ward at 4:51 am – thanks for that info. The bulbs I’m using are these:
http://www.mirabella.com.au/products-energy-savers.html?Itemid=49&product=7 (better picture of the packaging at http://dicksmith.com.au/product/S8511/halogen-gls-42w-es-clear-energy-globe)
Your thoughts? As I said above, since normal incandescents are banned and I’ve run out of spares I just went for what said dimmable on the box. Is a false claim being made here or might it be just that they’re less than ideal for dimmers? Or might the manufacturer found a solution?

@Bill Thompson 4:26am
I was talking about leaded solder, not LEDs

When will we be asking for the power plants to be turned back on. Freezing in the dark, it’s the plan.

HenryP says:
February 10, 2011 at 9:00 pm
Even though by now everyone who is well informed knows that global warming is a hoax, it still makes good sense to try and preserve energyy. ……. Visiting from South Africa. I am puzzled that I don’t see more solar water heating (with a solar geyser). This is stupid. You can save 40% of your electricity bill just letting the sun heat your water for the geyser. Due to to a shortage of power , our (state funded) electricity company in South Africa is giving a subsidy for every installation built. This is an idea that must be implemented worldwide, as it is a good way to spend government subsidies instead of wasting it on “climate research”.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
I agree but, of course, it depends where you are. With the present state of technology, solar is very good at producing low grade heat. Electrity no, far too inefficient; but low grade heat definitely if you are in a sunny climate. Whats more, a suitable system does not have to be high tech, you only need to make a simple heat exchanger. This is really no more than a DIY job. The larger the area of the heat exhanger, the more heat captured and produced. A suitable heat exchanger does not need to be anything more sophisticated than a series of domestic radiators painted black and situated in a sunny elevation.
I am presently making a solar heating unit for my swimming pool (the unit will cover an area of between 25 to 30 sq m). Without heating, the pool can be used from early April through to about mid October. I expect with solar heating to be able to extend the season either end by about a month. The limit is the weakness/low angle of the sun by late November through to the end of February exacerbated by the cold air temperatures in January and February which means that you get cold quickly when wet.
If you are in a sunny climate not only can it supply domestic hot water, it probably could sustain the bulk of underfloor heating in the winter (during sunny days of the winter). A concrete and tiled floor acts like a large storage heater and even if the system (on sunny days) only produces heat for about 6 hours a day, this with the residual effect of the concrete floor is probably sufficient to keep a room warm all evenning.
Of course, the system would need to be supplemented since there will many days when there is no or insufficient sun but in the right climate, a solar hot water system could probably provide about 40 to 55% of winter heating which would make a big difference to energy bills especially bearing in mind how much these are going to escalate due to green levies which energy providers are charging to their customers.

Ultimately, this is exactly the sort of things we, as humans, need to be talking about. This is real environmentalism, and who doesn’t love the environment? Discuss, debate, talk, chat, etc., openly and fairly, in an atmosphere that is serious yet fruitful. Let go of pet theories, the convoluted and constrained attitudes, and just talk about what’s going on. After all, haven’t humans made grave errors in the past? Just because someone somewhere came up with a quick fix, well, since when do snap decisions become sacrosanct? All things should be open to debate, and I do mean all things. I’m a religious man by rearing and by nature. My religious beliefs have only become strengthened over a lifetime of testing and debate. All “scientific” men and women know this same principle can be applied to almost any belief or would-be solution. Indeed! It is the medium of innovation! Something is either true and will stand the test of time, or it is false and needs tweaking or perhaps an outright overhaul. Yes, sometimes you might truly get it right the first time, but if not… don’t get caught clinging to your phlogiston.

LazyTeenager says:
February 10, 2011 at 10:52 pm
———–
Get a clue and look at the balance sheet of an energy company. Somehow you are forgetting that energy does not grow on trees; it needs to pay for fuel, labour, plant capital costs etc. Energy companies are not hugely profitable.
And you are also fogetting the profits pay for your superannuation
/////////////////////////////////////////////
I do not know what planet Lazy Teenager resides on but it is certainly not planet Earth. In the UK, energy companies are raking in the profits. See for eample the article in the Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/household-bills/7292915/Energy-companies-making-105-profit-per-customer.html
There are probably about 25 to 30 million domestic customers in the UK so it is easy to do the maths. Then there is the profit that they make from business customers. They are extremely profitable businesses since they are effectively in a monopoly situation. There are only two good things that come out of this. The amount of corporation tax paid to the government and much of the high dividends they pay to the shareholders go to pension funds.

Anthony and commentors,
Thanks for the stimulating discussion on LED and CFL lighting. I have been researching LED lights (tried CFLs – hate the light color, the life, the cost, the cleanup if one breaks…) and do check LEDs out – the big hardware chains have an entire subsection of them.
LEDs are getting better and better and I think the recycling of LED bulb and spot sized lights will eventually become a no-brainer as there are good sized aluminum heat sinks on all of them and aluminum is an easy (and valuable) metal to recycle so I think there will be a market for the recycled heatsinks and a market solution to separating the printed circuit board and LED from the valuable heatsink.
Having said that, I am absolutely opposed to government intervention mandating the use of this or that bulb. Incandescent bulbs have a wonderful ability to reproduce color – there is not any artificial lighting I know of that matches that property of incandescent lighting. This is a valuable thing and if incandescents are effectively banned our lives will be poorer for it.

@Angry Exile – As Halogen lamps are still a simple filament there will be no damage caused by dimming, unlike most CFL’s with electronic ballasts. However the inside of the quartz envelope is likely to become blackened with metal deposits from the filament. According to the Wiki page this can be reversed by running at full brightness again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halogen_lamp
Of course any benefit of superior light quality and brightness will go out the door if you dim them! If you want long life dimmable lighting, and don’t mind conventional tube type fluorescents, these can be run with special electronic ballasts allowing complete control down to virtually nothing. I doubt if many domestic “sparkies” are familiar with them, but they are used in large numbers in industrial and farming environments.

Are these morons totally brain dead ? Does the University of California now give classes in terminal stupidity ?
For the un-initiated studies have shown that there are a sizeable number of naturally occuring materials in the environment that are known to be toxic.
Of the simplest class of these materials, the number presently stands at 92 known toxic materials, although at least one and maybe two of those that were believed to exist, have not yet been found in nature. The other 90 are pervasive and have known health risks. Some of them bring about death through asphyxiation when inhaled (like the UC study mentions) while other destroy cells and other parts of the body.
Hello ! Earth to UC Irvine ! Copper has been reported in more than trace amounts in the wiring in ALL homes and buildings in California. Likewise, the plumbing and piping in many houses and buildings, are believed to contain lethal amounts of copper, which can poison water, if it should get on the outside of the pipe.
As for Arsenic in LEDs, most modern LEDs contain no Arsenic at all. Modern efficient Red, Orange, or Yellow LEDs are quartenary crystals of AlInGaP. The shorter wavelength types are based on GaN or InGaN.
Back when I was making LEDs (red ones) we used a lot of Arsenic. The basic red LED material was GaAs0.6P0.4, emitting at about 645 nm peak wavelength; but the substrates were 100% GaAs, which we made right here in silicon valley. We had in our building in Si Valley, enough arsenic, to poison every living thing in the known Universe; plus all the parallel universes.
Anybody who worked in the departments with that material or with the recycling of that material, got tested every month for arsenic contamination. NO Employee, every tested positive for arsenic contamination. We also had Arsenic in gaseous form; Arsine, AsH4 which smells like garlic. Well we also had Phosphine, PH4 which is just as toxic. Don’t forget Silane, used in Silicon operations.
All our computers contain copper, and nickel.
Everything we touch, see or feel is made from some combination of these 90 basic toxic materials which are found in nature.
It seems to me, that we are wasting entirely too much money on total idiots at the Universtity of California Irvine; and it’s time to turn those fools out to pasture; maybe they can find some safe place out in the widerness; where they don’t have to worry about women and little children getting harmed.

I have a laundry room cupboard stuffed full of hoarded incandescents. Here in Canada, our wise “conservative” government banned the unfairly vilified incandescent bulb, which is set to fully kick in next year. I’ll be damned if the government feels it can dictate how I light my home by legislative fiat.

“And – noting that lead tastes sweet – he warned that small children could be harmed if they mistake the bright lights for candy.”
Really?
I mean….really….?
My three-year-old is no supergenius, but I’m confident he already knows that there is no overlap on a Venn diagram of “Things That Glow” vs. “Foodstuffs.” Even before he could talk, and only used basic sign language to communicate, not once did he point to the chandelier, and then signal “Hey! I wanna eat that!”
Maybe I sell the boy short, and he really is a supergenius.

“”””” Curiousgeorge says:
February 11, 2011 at 5:21 am
@M.A.DeLuca says:
February 10, 2011 at 8:47 pm
Wait. What?
Except for the anode and cathode, the guts of an LED are encased in a thick layer of plastic. “””””
Well that is just total nonsense. While the “anode and cathode” (hint to reader; that’s THE LED) do not have to be encased in plastic; the chances of finding ANY LED lamp where the “anode and cathode” are NOT encased in plastic, is about 27 orders of magnitude short of zero.
Light emitting Semiconductive materials have very high refractice indices; 3.5 is a quite typical range. A bare LED die sitting out in air, will only let about 1% of the total light generated inside, the die, to escape out ito the air. For an index of 3.5, the critical angle is 16.6 degrees, and the normal reflection coefficient is about 30%, so most of the generated flux is trapped insoide the die by Total Internal Reflection (TIR). Encapsulating the die in a plastic of index (n) will raise the light output by more than (n)^2; and with proper geometry you can get beyond (n)^4 times the light output.
The only time bare LEDs were ever used, was in displays that were required to be hermetically sealed for Military applications.
Both Phillips, and Cree Research are currently marketing some very good LED lamps. Phillips has a good 40 Watt Equivalent that is about $22; and I have a number of those in my house. I am systematically going through and replaceing all CFLs by LEDs, and also replacing Incandescents wherever I can.
Some Hong Kong Fooey LED lamps seem to have been designed by brain dead people. I haves ome that are about $15 and replace 15 Watt decortative lamps. The do not turn on instantly; take about a second to kick on for some unexplained reason that has nothing to do with LEDs. Also for some reason, those same lamps can NOT be used on dimmers.
Now there’s a smart idea; who has a candelabra with decorative bulbs, that is NOT on a dimmer.
LEDs are the absolutely perfect dimmable lamp. Incandescents are very inefficient when dimmed; the color temperature goes to hell, and they become near IR lamps instead of visible light emitters.
So why anybody is making a non-dimmable LED is beyond my pay grade to comprehend; you have to go out of your way to make an LED lamp that cannot be dimmed.
I told the folks at Frys that their whole LED lamp department, belongs at ToysR’us. It’s all kiddie stuff with no seriosu LED lamp products worth wasting your time on. I did buy some of the 15 Watt eventual turn on lamps, because they are nice spherical globes, and they go into the front hallway light which is not dimmable, and is always turned on by my wife, before she even steps through the front door.
I wouldn’t waste the money on LED bulbs that are some number of T 1 3/4 indicator lamps on a pc board (That’s 5 mm dia lamps if you aren’t up on LED nomenclature)
If you pick up any ordinary LED indicator lamp, you will see that there is about as much light coming out the back as comes out the front, and the ones that are supposed to be very narrow beam, aren’t. Hold them against a white sheet, and you will see the bright central spot, but with a great big wide angle ring halo around them; the result ofr TIR inside the plastic encapsulation; which is also why half the light comes out the back. The people who design these products, are mechanical packaging engineers, who think that Optical Engineering, is mechanical packaging usieng transparent materials. They don’t know diddley squat about Optical Design or the laws of Optics. Just look at the lousy designs of current auto tail lights that are LED based.
LED lamps are quite safe and not toxic when used for their intended purpose. You are more likely to die from a broken neck through tripping in an unlit hallway, than you are to get poisoned by an LED; and the margin, is that same 27 orders of magnitude.

I can’t believe you fall for this *crap*. It’s all doom and gloom, man’s fault, and, they even suggested a “tipping point” for cancer. Do you not read your own website?
So, the arsenic is semiconductors is in the wrong form to cause cancer. Their finding is crap.
The idea of copper being a fish toxin is a real knee-slapper. The anti-fouling compounds used on boats use copper to stop barnacle formation, but, copper is one of the most abundant metals on the planet *AND* and *ESSENTIAL TRACE ELEMENT* without which life in an oxygen environment cannot exist (see Cu/Zn Superoxide dismutase) among others. Copper pollution from LED’s is like spitting into the ocean.
Everyone likes to harp on the bogey-man of lead & mercury poisoning. Usually only kids get serious lead poisoning, and, that’s from eating lead paint (lead is sweet-tasting). That poisoning usually comes as developmental issues, not death. Mercury poisoning is tough to do. Mercury is present in ~50% concentration in dental amalgam and regularly leaches out into saliva and is passed through the intestine, basically eliminating it. Methyl-mercury is present in fish, and, people with a high fish intake can get methyl-mercury poisoning. Once again, the additional mercury from landfilling these bulbs is like spitting into the ocean. We have substantial mercury right in our own mouths, a practice that has been banned in some countries and may be banned in the US in the future. It’s mostly safe…. but sometimes not.
So, are these people really your allies in bringing back the bulb. It sounds like they’re the same people hyping the end-of-civilization in someone else’s field. They should not be supported.

Let’s face it. The switch from incandescent bulbs was just a scam that made some poiticians and civil servants very rich. CO2 my a**e.

Funny how you can no longer buy incandescent light bulbs, but there’s no problem buying a 3KW electric heater, or even a 500W halogen bulb

Rough calculations and non confirmed numbers (GIGO):
LED Chip is roughly 1mm X 1mm, doped layers are roughly 3 microns thick (Depending on type).
Arsenic is < 0.8% in doped layers.
One LED has about 50 mcg arsenic. About what you would find in 50 grams of beef or half that much shrimp.
Silicon is "7" on the Mohs scale of hardness, tooth enamel is about "5" (That's softer).
You would digest about 20 or 30 times more tooth enamel than arsenic, and the daily safe limit would probably be two or three strings of lights (just the arsenic, not the rest).
So go ahead and eat an LED.

I love these kinds of topic… as usual the final authority is from George E. Smith.
I’m entertained by the “Mr. Watts, be responsible” posts demonstrating how to confuse, befuddle, and exaggerate, while simultaneously showing the incorrect use of anecdotal data to drive an agenda.
I can’t even imagine the kind of muddled thinking that would lead someone to write about the chemical hazards of LEDs. As repeatedly stated here, the actual quantity of potentially harmful materials is insanely small, and difficult to even get to. The only potential hazard is going to be at the manufacturing facility where materials are stored in quantity.
And George E. Smith mentions something I’ve been explaining to people for a while now… white LEDs use phosphorus, which is the main reason they have a lifetime while red, yellow and greed LEDs from the 60s and 70s are still illuminating to this day.
The invention of the Blue LED and eventually White deserve proper recognition since they were something of a holy grail for a long time. The first white LED I bought was over $10, but today their very existence means practical solar powered lighting in remote poverty stricken regions.
I will also never understand why so many people are so against landfill sites. You dig a hole, you pile crap into it, you cover it up and let it sit for a few years, then you build industrial parks on top. What could be easier? In 5000 years, archaeologists will applaud our foresight in providing them snapshots of our civilization.

HenryP says:
February 11, 2011 at 8:23 am
Henry@RichardVerney.
A few years ago I was living in Nelspruit (RSA) – we heated the swimming pool with very cheap solar heating – gave us an extra month each side of the normal swimming time.
Take some 40 metres black hose pipe (standard garden stuff). Lay out in coils on a flat roof (garage ) – north sloping would be better (southern hemisphere solution).
Now; tap into the re-circ/filter pump with a Y junction (valve it so you can turn i off mid-summer).
I used to get 15C increase between input & output mid summer (needed to turn off or the pool became a bath …)
At the time the local swimming pool shops were selling ‘Pool Solar Heater Elements’ for a couple of thousand rand (was still about R12 : £1 ) – they claimed I’d need 6 to 10 units to warm my pool. And they were ugly contraptions about a metre cube.
A friend having seen my ‘solar heater’ just laid his out on the grass – not quite as good – but got some extra night time warmth from the ground .
Oh – I didn’t bother ever turning the solar heater off during the night – just during winter – if I remembered……
Like you; HenryP ; I totally fail to understand why there is so little solar heating in the tropics; I suspect the dead hand of Building Codes; Regulations and the lack of initiative left after a going through what is laughingly called an education system

“”””” 1DandyTroll says:
February 11, 2011 at 12:29 pm
Scott Covert
“LED Chip is roughly 1mm X 1mm, doped layers are roughly 3 microns thick (Depending on type).
Arsenic is < 0.8% in doped layers.
One LED has about 50 mcg arsenic. About what you would find in 50 grams of beef or half that much shrimp."
Lucky we need about 42 ordinary LEDs to give a fair amount of reading (blueish) light, but of course those 3 W power LEDs are quite good (but they contain more arsenic right, and have shorter life span.) """""
How many times do I have to say it. modern LEDS specially anything that is a 3W lamp, do not contain ANY Arsenic; neither as a light emitting material of a dopant in some other material. The Band gap of GaAs is enough to get near infra-red LEDse mitting at about 900 nm if they are ordinary zinc doped GaAs, which are quite inefficient, and more like 940 nm for the Liquid epi silicon amphoterically doped GaAs which is more efficient, because the emitted wavelength (940 nm) is longer, that the Ga As band edge absorption (900 nm, so the crystal is transparent at 940 nm, which is why they are quite efficient.
IBM developed amphoteric silicon doped GaAS (liquid epi) around 1966/7. Amphoteric doping means that Silcon is the acceptor dopant on one side of the junction and also the donor ropant on the other side of the junction. Since both silicon levels are relatively deep below the band edge the transition energy is lower which is why oyu get 940 nm IR, instead of the 900 nm band edge radiation.
Arsenic HAS been used as an alternative to Phosphorous as a dopant in Silicon, to make N-type silicon. Boron is the usual P-type dopant in silicon.
Depending on the way the crystal is grown, a Gallium Arsenide wafer can be differnt on the two opposite faces. I believe it is the 110 lattice face, that has Arsenic atoms on one side of the wafer, and Gallium atoms on the opposite side (talking cleaved crystal faces here). So the two sides are chemically quite differnt, but you can't tell them apart by eye.
A problem with all III-V semiconductor processing, as that unlike silicon which is elemental, Ga As or GaP are chemical compounds, and they can dissociate when you heat them. The vapor pressure of Arsenic ove Gallium Arsenide, is about 1 atmospehre at the melting point; so you typically want to do GaAS diffusions at the lowest possible temepratures, and use a sealed system with an overpressure of Arsenic to stop the surface from decomposing.
For GaP, the phosphorous vapor pressure, at the melting point, is about 35 atmospheres, so to grow Gallium Phosphide crystals, you have to maintain a phosphorous over pressure of about 40-45 atmospheres, so the crystal growing furnace tends to be somewhat bomb like; and needs to be housed in a blast proof room. Thery normally apply the 45 atmospheres of gas pressure over the melt by floating a layer of transparent Boric Oxide on top of the melt, so you can see through it, and watch the crystal grow (by remote TV you dummy ! ) You do not want to be near a GaP crystal puller, when it is operating.

bubbagyro says:
February 11, 2011 at 10:56 am
From Wiki:
White LEDs can also be made by coating near ultraviolet (NUV) emitting LEDs with a mixture of high efficiency europium-based red and blue emitting phosphors plus green emitting copper and aluminium doped zinc sulfide (ZnS:Cu, Al).
Gasp!

I think CodeTech meant “Phosphors” not Phosphorous in his post above.
If you look at the better designs of white LED lamps, you will normally see a yellow or orange looking domw somewhere inside the “bulb”.
For example, the 40 Watt equivalent Philips lamp, which uses about seven Watts of electricity, has a frosted white glass bulb same size and shape as a 40 Watt Incandescent; except it has a heavy metal heat sink around the neck area. But inside that frosted globe you can clearly see a yellowish globe about 1/2-2/3 of the diameter of the frosted case. That is the actual cerium doped Yag phosphor, and that is what really lights up when you turn it on; and those ones are instant on.
Inside that yellow dome is the actual blue 460 nm LED chip, near the centre of that dome. The early ones used to coat the LED chip with the phosphor, but blue light from the chip, that scattered off the phosphor without being absorbed, ended up going back to the chip and getting reabsorbed, since the diode can function as a photodiode for the same wavelength photons. The absorbed blue light creates an opposing current that shuts off part of the forward drive current so you can’t drive it as hard. That’s simply Le Chatalier’s principle in action.
By putting the phosphor remote from the die, the scattered blue photons still go back right across the dome, but now most of them miss the much smaller chip in the middle of the dome, so they simply go past it, until they hit the phosphor on the opposite side of the dome, and generate more yellow light.
These are the structural enhancements, that are slowly making white LEDs ever brighter. If you look in your while LED when it is off, and you don’t see anything that is yellow around the central region where the light would be coming from, then you are probably looking at a brain dead LED design.
Unfortunately most of the makers so far have concentrated on making more spot lamp types rather than spherically radiating “light bulbs like we are used to.
Both Cree and Phillips do make spherical lamp types, and you can get them in warm whites, that have been red goosed, or 6500 K daylight white.
And as codetech correctly observed it is the presnce of that phospher that leads to the life degradation. But these problems have been dealt with before in LCD displays and other situations. Poisoning of the phosphors by impurities tends to be the failure mechanisms. These should become less troublesome as time goes on. Of course you still can get the infant mortality failures, as you can see in LED traffic signals; but if they last a year, they usually will last forever; well within the 3:1 climatism fudge factor.

We have been using a CFL in our shed ever since last summer. They do work fine but when it comes to a cold Minnesota winter, they don’ t like to light! I replaced it with an old trusty incandescent bulb. I have also had a CFL blow out instantly when turned on! I pulled a new one right from the package, put it in the lamp and turned it on, it instantly “popped” and smelled of burning electronics…
I have lived here in Minnesota all my life and never heard anyone call regular light bulbs “heat globes”.

George E. Smith says:

I think CodeTech meant “Phosphors” not Phosphorous in his post above.

I stand corrected.
And I agree, challenges will always be met, the white LED will revolutionize all aspects of illumination, more than most people will ever probably be consciously aware of. The cheap 10c white LEDs I got from china were great… for about 5 hours, after which they tinged blue and faded to almost no visible light. I also have a white LED night light downstairs that’s been going strong for years with no visible degradation.
I look forward to self-illuminating ceiling and wall panels, soft ambient lighting with adjustable colors, all the possibilities that a cold, safe LED light can provide.
CFLs, on the other hand, are a complete waste of effort in almost every way. I despise the light quality, the complexity, the materials usage, the flickering, the sound, everything. They’re ugly and harmful. How could anyone possibly support replacing incandescent bulbs with these things???

While I don’t wouldn’t wish to dissuade anyone from doing experiments and taking measurements, I do wonder if the researchers discussed their concerns about “toxic” LEDs with the Electrical Engineering Faculty at UC Irving? I’m sure they could have provided their colleagues with a list of materials used in LEDs and saved them from a lot of work.
Will this group of researchers also grind up their computers, cell phones and other personal electronics and inform the public of the “toxic” content of these devices? I need to know if dropping my laptop will release a cloud of “toxic” vapor. /sarc rant off
Don’t worry about kids eating LEDs though, they’re too busy eating microchips…

“”””” Calvi36 says:
February 11, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Damn, George E. Smith, where do you find this stuff, my head hurts now! Just joking, it’s all good info. “””””
Who said anything about “finding”. How about “knowing” ?
I first got my feet wet in LEDs in 1965, at Monsanto corp Central Research labs in St Louis Mo. For them it was a few million dollars of exotic materials business; namely the III-V semiconductoir materials from which most LEDs are made. I actually first got involved doing Optics for packaging; but then later on doing driver circuits for red laser diodes. Monsanto had red GaASP laser diodes in 1966; but they only worked at liquid nitrogen temperatures, and at very high current densities. Try making a 100 Amp peak current pulse that is only 100 nsec wide (or the laser would melt. The laser chips were about5 mils wide and thick, and maybe 20-30 mils long, so astronomical current densities.
The original work on the GaAsP led system came out of the University of Illinois in Urbana under the eye of Professor Nick Holonyak; who in my view, is the most deserving candidate; who has not yet won a Nobel Physics prize. His students now staff the labs at places like Cree Research and Phillips Lumileds; Lincoln Labs, and some other Eastern folks.
Later on I got into an LED startup company, which at one time was the largest company in the world in LEDS; but we never had any equity funding; financed it out of our own pockets. In the heyday of the LED display hand held calculator, we had 72 crystal growing furnaces, making GaAs crystals about every three days, using the Gradient Freeze, Horizontal Bridgeman method of simultaneous synthesis and crystal growth. Each ingot weighed about 700 grams; and the profit from the sale of that material paid completely for the capital cost of the whole furnace. We were about to gear up to 144 furnaces (which we also built ourselves), when I made a breakthrough in snap on (non-immersed magnifier lens optics, which about doebled the viewing angle and allowed higher magnifiation. That crashed the need for more bigger monolithic LED chips; so we scrapped the expansion plans. In the gradient freeze process, you have to raise one end of the furnace (the colder end where the seed crystal was) while you heat up the ingrediants, and synthesize the Ga AS from 7-9s purity Arsenic and gallium. Then you lower the end, so the molten GaAS finally touches the end of the seed crystal, which is at one end of the Quartz boat, resting on powdered quartz sand. the you start lowering the Temperature slowly over 2 1/2 days, so that the crystal grows from the seed as the freezing zone moves along the crystal. To jack the end of the furnace up, and lower it again, we used ordinary scissors jackls from Sears Roebuck nearby. Like I say; we built the whole shebang oursleves, and also built our own Epitaxial GaAsP deposition reactors; including building the controllers for all of that. To lower the Temperature slowly on the crystal furnaces, we used an ordinary silicon diffusion furnace controller, whcih cost about $300, and we mounted a $7 Synchron clock timer motor on the front panel which was used to belt drive the ten turn helipot dial that turned the set point temperature down.
Monsanto used a $35,000 computer controlelr to do the same task as our 47 motor, which is why they thought we had one epi reactor and mayb four crystal growers; whereas we had 16 epi reactors, and 72 crystal furnaces; all of which we built ourselves.
We lost our market edge when the game shifted from GaAs substrates to Gallium Phosphide because we couldn’t afford that 1/2 million dollar high pressure bomb needed to grow GaP. We finally got out of it around 1980 with the remains becoming part of Siemens corp.
It was in 1966, maybe 67 while I was still doing the opticvs at Monsanto, that IBM developed the silicon doped liquid epi high efficiency gaAs infra red process. I desinged an optical package for that device to go into a card reader that IBM wanted.
It’s a very diferent game today. we used to turn out the room lights and look through a microscope to see the dull red glow coming from a piece of a wafer. Now they have to conform to some LED specific radiation hazards (eye exposure) requirements.
The AlInGap yellow ones are spectacularly bright; and that is the hardest color to make, since it goes from grellow to gold in only 5 nm wavelength change.
The future application of LEDs will be different from current lighting; to exploit the properties of LEDS’
And they are not likely to poison your neighbor’s cat.

Peter (commenting on my spray about lack of LEAD in a LED):
I’m well aware of the ROHS directive. LEDs for domestic and industrial lighting do not qualify for the exemptions, including the solder used for assembly of the the LED onto whatever else. Flight control systems and medical devices, perhaps. Some infrastructure, maybe. But domestic stuff, no. The ROHS directive applies across the board, not just to electronic components. So the stuff the components are assembled into (the next higher level assembly… and so on up through to the finished product).
————–
Angry Exile (and others) re the Halogen lamps: The more modern halogens don’t have so many problems as they used to. Its a good idea if you dim them, to run them at full brightness now and again. But even then with modern ones, its not such a big deal.
————–
Jeff Alberts:
I have been using CFLs for over 15 years (they do save me money on my power bill, and did even when I was paying $10 each for them). I have taken to writing the installation date on the base of each lamp when it goes in, and have done this for 10 years now. My observations are that the lamp quality has decreased as they became mandatory and the prices went down (volumes shipped went up). The claimed lifetime of about 3-5 x that of incandescent (ie about up to 5000 hours) is generally not met. I do have one lamp which is now so dim its close to useless but its the freak – it has been used for about 5-8 hours every day for well over 6 years. The norm, though, is that they last about 12 months, which in running hours is about 2000 hours. Not what is claimed at all. I have also had the CFLs explode when turned on, shattering glass and muck all over the floor. A quick poll at a meeting of lighting engineers revealed about 30% of the participants have had something similar. They are built to a price, and you get what you pay for.

I will only mention three interesting articles.
1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1340938/Eco-bulbs-health-hazard-babies-pregnant-women-mercury-inside.html
The Health Protection Agency [UK Government] says a broken CFL is unlikely to cause health problems. However, it advises people to ventilate a room where a light has smashed and evacuate it for 15 minutes.
Householders are also advised to wear protective gloves while wiping the area of the break with a damp cloth and picking up fragments of glass. The cloth and glass should be placed in a plastic bag and sealed.
CFLs are not supposed to be put in the dustbin, whether broken or intact, but taken as hazardous waste to a recycling centre.
Does every user know and practise these prescriptions?
2. http://notrickszone.com/2010/11/23/green-police-orders-confiscation-of-enviro-contraband/
Recently, the two German engineers quickly sold 4000 of the climate-killing bulbs as “heat balls”, and so they ordered up another 40,000 pieces from China. To get them through German customs, they declared the bulbs as “heat balls” – miniature heaters that could be powered by a standard fluorescent light bulb fixture.
Read the reaction of the Department of Environment!
3. A summary of the health effects of LEDs: http://www.afssa.fr/Documents/PRES2010CPA14EN.pdf
What are the risks of the artificial light of LEDs for our health?

In producing light from electricity, measured in lumens/watt, the BEST high brightness white LEDs are about 50% more efficient than a fluorescent tube, CFL or straight line. They also cost many times more on a lumen/$ basis. Fluorescent tubes are about four times more efficient than an equivalent light output incandescent light bulb. A halogen bulb is 15% or so more efficient than an incandescent, mainly because they run the filament hotter.
ALL florescent tubes contain mercury – it is required to generate the ionized mercury vapor gas that generates the UV light that hits the phosphors which then makes the white light. The amount of mercury in a GOOD CFL is less than what is in an average size amalgamated mercury filling in one of your teeth. I don’t know how much is in a 4 or 8 foot tube but since they are physically much bigger and higher wattage I would guess they have more. However, they’ve been around for 50 years or so and there never was a “mercury scare” and they break a lot easier when dropping one than a CFL does . Cheap (Chinese) CFLs usually have more mercury, sometimes 4-5 times as much, than a CFL made by a major and reputable MFR like Philips – even if they are made in China too.
Turning any fluorescent light on and off shortens the light of the fixture. It is not so much a problem with the bulb but the electronics. The ubiquitous 75W incandescent draws 75W of power when operating but since the tungsten filament has a positive temperature coefficient the resistance is lower when cold and thus when it is first turned on the peak in-rush is about 700W (about 7A @ 120VAC operation) . That’s why incandescent bulbs almost always burn out with a FLASH when first turned on.
Fluorescent lights also have an in-rush current but it is in the electronic control, called a ballast. The in-rush in a ballast comes from charging up the input filter capacitor on the AC side. It is limited some what by a negative temperature coefficient thermistor on the AC input that has higher resistance when cold.
The big fluorescent lights have ballasts made by Philips (Advance)., GE and other MFRs who, for the most part, know how to make a reliable ballast. There isn’t much room in a CFL for the ballast and they are low cost so their ballasts simply just aren’t as good and they use a smaller (and cheaper) rated thermistor that doesn’t limit the in-rush current as much. As a result they may have an in-rush in the 30 -50A range with a 120VAC input. Double that for a 230VAC light. The in-rush is hard on the electrolytic input capacitor which is already the number 1 failure component in the ballast. Put an even cheaper, lower quality capacitor out there and the CFLs will fail a lot sooner than expected, especially when turned on/off a lot. (They are not rated for how many on/off cycles they can tolerate only continuous on life.)
Also, the light quality of a good CFL (and any fluorescent) is also much better than the cheap CFLs. The bottom line is that you get what you pay for. HINT: write the date the CFL was purchased on the base of the CFL bulb. Then take it back to Walmart when it doesn’t last any where near the advertised “10,000 hours.”
BTW, you’ll often hear people saying not to turn florescent lights on and off because doing so wastes electricity. There really is no waste because the “waste” is in the in-rush which is simply charging up the capacitor where the energy is then used to power the light. Regardless, most of the in-rush is in the first half AC cycle, with less in the second half and less still in the third half cycle. By the end of the second full AC cycle the input capacitor is charged up and the input current has dropped to the operating current. Thus the extra power “waste” is only for 1/60 of a second or so and is negligible even after a few seconds when averaged out.
Are there toxic things in LEDs? Yes but they are in cased in nearly indestructible plastic (which is probably toxic too.) Anybody who says kids will get poisoned by eating LEDs like candy is either an environmental wacko or has some really dumb kids where evolutionary selection should come in to play. Besides, they eat dirt too which contains toxic materials. Should ban dirt too?
In any case, you can be sure that whatever toxic compounds are in LEDs there will be a lot more in cheap Chinese made LEDs. Probably in the plastic too. If they put toxic waste poison in dog and baby food you can bet they put it in LEDs too. FYI: I work for a company that has been manufacturing things in China for 30 years. We know the kind of sh** they do to save a penny.
Bottom line: good quality CFLs (from reliable, name brand MFRs) are a viable replacement and substitution for incandescent bulbs when you re looking to save money on electricity and bulbs. The mercury is really a non-issue. If they were really serious about it, they’d ban the bigger fluorescent bulbs. (And if they were really serious about AGW, they ban golf courses – more water vapor…). LEDs are really only viable for high maintenance lighting requirements (street lights etc) or if you really want to save electricity and don’t mind a 10-15 year pay back.

I dont know about LED, for sure they do not wotk for human eyes as well as filament bulbs (I use a LED for seeing in small spaces to fit components but when it is tiny, and hard to see, I use a conventional flashlight and I can se better. CFLs are good in select use, somewhere where it is on in the morning and off last thing they are good, do the job and use less power, anywhere else they use more power and short life, you just cannot keep switching them on and off! as for envriomental issues they are a disaster, not that it is an issue but is there comparisom of “carbon” footprint for a CFL and a filament bulb? I suspect any power savings are eaten up with the hugely increased manufacture cost. Even the use of tin solder is suspect, it whiskeres and ruins the circuit, matbe we need indepenent investigation of all eco friendly ideas, I doubt many stand up, from the cat converters to wind power to light bulbs the green agenda has to lie its way in.

So in the interest of science; and also to save my bank balance, I went out and purchased a bunch of LED LAMPS last weekend.
I bought several of the phillips Brand 40 Watt Equivalent bulbs, that I mentioned before, whcih are specced at 450 Lumens and 8 Watts of electricity (more on this later). These were from Home Depot; haven’t found them elsewhere yet. HD aslo peddles an ECOSMART brand of bulbs, described as “assembled in the USA” and distributed by HD. I’ll find out who makes them.
I bought their version of the 40 Watt lamp and it is rated at 429 Lumnes and 9 Watts of juice, so slightly below the phillips numbers. The bulb looks as well built and rugged as the Phillips and it works virtually identically. I’m happy with either one, and they were the exact same price $21.97 each. So we now have six of the 40 watt bulbs, five of them Phillips.
Phillips also had a smaller spherical bulb 15 Watt equivalent, that uses 3W of electricity. I got one of thsoe for about $12 and that is now playing hide and seek in my refrigerator. Very nice lamp; and should last forever in the frig.
I also splurged ant spent $37 97 on the phillips “60 Watt” equivalent bulb. This has three striking hot orange dome segments, as part of the outer envelope; and it is those three pieces which light up bright white. Very nice lamp, and it currently is in a dimmable fixture. It consumes 12 Electrical Watts. I’m going to pull out the dimmer, so that I can then install the non-dimmable decorative tear dop Phillips bulbs that use about 2-3 Watts each. Tehy aren’t instant on, which is why they aren’t dimmable. There’s about a 1/2 second turn on delay; but that is less annoying than the ten minute warm up delay of CFLs.
Note that both white LEDs and CFLs generate some of their light from phosphors; all of it in the case of the CFLs, since the mercury discharge is producing UV radiation, which excites the phosphors. So both have bulb lifetimes that depend somewhat on degradation of the Phosphor. Same problem as CRTs and the like. This is NOT a big problem for ordinary fluorescents, and shouldn’t be with CFLs and less so for LEDs. The fluorescents of all types also get an ion bombardment of the phospher fromt he residual gas in the bulb; and this is the likely source of much of the phosphor degradation.. Not a big factor in my book.
But CFLs will always end up less efficient, since they start from a high photon energy UV and waste a good part of that getting down to the blue region which is the first really useful part of the spectrum. So the blue sourced LEDs of the cerium doped Yag type, are likely to be right up near the top of the efficiency chain.
Now I mentioned previously that 400 Lumens per Watt is a theoretical maximum. (for a source C white light). Note carefully that is the conversion from radiant EM emission is Watts, to Luminous equivalent in Lumens; so it is “Lumens per radiant Watt.”
For an incandescent lamp, which is basically a resistive heater, virtually 100% of the electric energy input is converted to thermal radiation; which is broad band, so the efficiency in Lumens (light) per Watt (electricity) is pretty much the same as the “efficacy” which is Lumens (light) per Watt (radiant Energy). So fromt he consumer point of view that is what matters; how mcuh light do I get from my electrical buck.
Now the peak of the “efficacy curve” otherwise known as the “Photopic Luminosity” curve is 680 Lumens per watt at 555 nm wavelength which is a green color. That is for a monochromatic light source; not a white leamp. The 4oo number is the highest you can achieve for a white lamp that matches Illuminant C, which is some sort of Standard.
Now the 100 Lumens per Watt, that I mentioned as alab result for white LEDS, is actually Lumens of white light per Watt of total radiant energy emission; so there’s a conversion form Watts of Electricity in the radiation out.
For single color LEDs, it is fairly simple; the best ones have essentially 100% internal Quantum efficiency; whcih means that every elctron or hole that crosses the junction results in the emission of a photon (internal to the crystal. Clever optical packaging has extracted as much as 58% or so of that light giving a 58% external quantum efficiency (the current record mightt be higher than that.
The emission energy for the more efficient typses on transparent substrates, is pretty much band gap emission; and the material bandgap is not too different from the diode forward Voltage. So you have Voltage times electrons per second, at the elctric end of things; and you have pretty much the same electron volts of Photon energy (2 eV photons are about 650 nm red) times the photons per second which is close to the electron rate; so as a rough estimate, the radiant energy Watts, is quite close to the Electric energy consumed. Now bear in mind that that is for the primary radiation from the LED semiconductor. By the time the Phosphors do their thing, there will be some additional losses.
The the lamps have to use a driver scircuit to control the drive current qaccording to some algorithm the manufacturer chooses; allowing for ambient Temperature and such.
It turns out theat the simplest way to drive an LED off the AC, is to pair them back to back (parallel) and then put a big capacitor in series with them. The current will be C dV/dt,s o you figure out the Voltage maximum slope rate, and find an AC capacitor type of the right number fo microfarads, and their is virtually no extraneous loss of power, as would occur in a resistive current limiter.
Well the Power company is not going to like you doing that to your whole house, because remeber that that current will be purely capacitative, so the power factor is going to go totally haywire. Maybe if you run the right number of electric motors and other inductive toys and gizmos, you can correct that. But for a string of 20 mA lamps to make a Merry Christmas sign, I don’t think that PG&E will have a fit if you capacitively drive that.
I did check out some other LED lamp brands; some of them made in the land of Rare Earths; but I didn’t buy any. Sylvania has some comparable lamsp also made offshore. Everybody charges that $22 for the 40Watt lamp.
You can find 6500 Kelvin white LED lamps, if you like looking like the living dead.
Teh 60 Watt Phillips is a humdinger; but a bit rich for my pocket book; so I’ll stay with the one for the moment. Not at all into spot lighjts;
And don’t waste your money on the clusters of 397 of 5 mm lamps; other than as toys for the kids; or for them to eat instead of candy; those things are so inefficient; besides being way overpriced.
The serious players are making some good products. I’m down to my last two CFLs to get rid of.
I should add; seeing that WUWT is an international watering hole; that I’m sure the big European lighting companies, like Osram, and Siemens, and I know there’s some other biggies whose names I just can’t recall right now; and of course Phillips is European; all are in the hunt with serious Products; that can only get better.
Now my family can leave the lights on and not have me chasing after them.
[George you write so much great stuff but please , please I am begging you , won’t you turn on your spell check?]

“”””” [George you write so much great stuff but please , please I am begging you , won’t you turn on your spell check?] “””””
Izzat you Chasmod ? I didn’t know I had a spell checker ! I know Micro$oft WORD has a spell checker; but it only knows 1/10th of the words I use, so it gives all sorts of false spelling errors anyway. What good is that ?
I do try to re-scan everything I post to eliminate most of the dylsexic spelling flips, that my fingers make; but once in a while, they do slip by.
MODs have a free rein, open authorisation to make any spelling corrections they wish to on my junque; no questions asked.
But I will see what I can do to shape up.
George

“”””” Rik Gheysens says:
February 12, 2011 at 2:18 am
I will only mention three interesting articles.
1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1340938/Eco-bulbs-health-hazard-babies-pregnant-women-mercury-inside.html
Read the reaction of the Department of Environment!
3. A summary of the health effects of LEDs: http://www.afssa.fr/Documents/PRES2010CPA14EN.pdf
What are the risks of the artificial light of LEDs for our health? “””””
Well if the French are worried about eye exposure to blue light; they should really love the exposure to UV that comes from CFLs when their phosphors fail.
LED replacement lamps for incandescents; have no more Luminance than do ordinary incandescents. Try looking at the filament of a non diffused Tungsten or quartz halogen Lamp, and see how you like it.
So go back to whale oil if you don’t like LEDs; but stop treating us the people like we are total idiots. It’s far more dangerous being out on the floor of a disco joint; with it’s flashing strobe lights, and 150 dBm of what substitutes for music these days.
People today put several KW of audio, into their cars to locate all the rattles in their chassis, while they drive down the road; and they seem to come through that about as stupid as before; so what’s the big deal if they light their oil pan under the car with blue LEDs
Somebody should point out that Gasoline in a car is dangerous; not to mention smoking while you gas up the car. Come to think of it, the main problem with cigarettes, is that they just don’t kill people fast enough.
By the way; French people; and most Europeans, don’t smoke anyhow do they ?

Peter_Dtm says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/10/can-we-have-our-regular-old-light-bulbs-back-now/#comment-596794
Sorry I took so long to come back to you. My pool was 30 degrees C today, I am heating with these sheets that one puts on the roof . I have 5 sheets. The added advantage is that this cools the house…So your pool is warm and your house is cool.
I also have a solar geyser on my roof. The panels and the whole system basically works like the opposite of a radiator in your car. It saves 40% on my elctricity bill as I have free hot water, most of the time. The geyser is also on a timer switch for electricity for those days when there was no sun.
I recently visited LA (sunny California) and I was most puzzled to find that they do not seem to know these systems, or at least it is not widely in use. It is expensive to put in. However, due electricity shortage in South Africa, our (government run) electricity co. is giving subsidies if you install a solar geyser. I think that is something the US government must consider doing as well …..