New light

[unixronin]

So you thought LED lights were the most energy-efficient lighting coming to market, huh?  Guess again.  An outfit called Luxim has a new gas-plasma light technology they call LiFi.  The new LiFi bulb is the size of a gel capsule, and delivers 140 lumens of instant-on, very high visual quality light per watt with very little waste heat.  (Compare that to around 10-12 lumens per watt for an incandescent bulb, 13-15 for halogen, 35-40 for compact fluorescent bulbs, or about 80-90 lumens per watt for the brightest production LEDs.  Wikipedia has a handy reference table here.)

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The problem with LEDs that no one it talking about is the heat. You can get some lovely lighting effects with LEDs, but only for short periods at, what I consider, reasonable light levels. They just tend to burn themselves out. LEDs also don't "stack" particularly well, you can't just add more for more light. I love 'em, but they just are not close enough to use.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, exactly. The 5W Luxeon Star units are getting pretty close to the sustainable limit of heat dissipation. I have an Inova X0 flashlight that gets a claimed 130 lumens out of a 4.8W LED, and it's a bright little sucker — I love it — but after a few minutes of operation, the whole damn flashlight is getting warm. I've seen LED bulbs with arrays of as many as 120 LEDs in them that are supposed to be a replacement for a 60W bulb, but, come on, 120 emitters? And the damned things cost $130 per bulb. No-one's going to buy those in quantity.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

i wonder if they shouldn't try lasers spliced up and collimated to produce some nice light. someday.

bright-guy.com ha some nifty flashights.

i've personally held a 6die, 1000 lumen LED job. sweet mother. brightest 6v LED i know of is around 220 lumens. not too shabby.

but what really makes my heart flutter, is the HID flashlight :> oh yah.

#

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

So, can we buy them at the local hardware store?

(Can't buy LED units there, either.)

Also, the switch from type to type saves fewer watts each time. Going from incandescent to CF saves 60 watts, from CF to LED saves 8 watts per...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

So, can we buy them at the local hardware store?

I wish. But apparently you can, or soon will be able to, buy them in your projection TV.

Also, the switch from type to type saves fewer watts each time. Going from incandescent to CF saves 60 watts, from CF to LED saves 8 watts per...

True. But you save a lot of power if you're going directly from incandescent to these, without the mercury disposal issue of CFLs.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Mercury is why I'd rather use LEDs, plus the bit about lights such as in bathrooms, where you only have them on for ten minutes or less. CF uses _more_ energy in that kind of application.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Y'know, Mythbusters actually did a segment on that. They looked at how long lights of different types need to be on to "amortize" the startup power surge. The specific target myth was the one that says "if you're leaving a room with fluorescent lights for longer than N minutes, it costs more energy to switch the lights off and turn them back on when you come back in than it does to just leave them on" (for various cited values of N ranging from about 3 to 15).

CFLs were, I think, the longest of the types they tested ... but it still only took something on the order of one second.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Okay, perhaps my info is out of date -- it came from architectural lighting sources, but maybe ten or fifteen years back. CF units with the straight tubes, rather than the curlicue type now on the market. Still have a couple of those in use.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think the switch to solid-state electronic ballasts made a huge difference there.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Projection TV? What's that?

[skellington.livejournal.com]

Nifty.

I forwarded this to one of our hardware guys to see if we might use it for our display backlight.