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

[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Okay, perhaps my info is out of date -- it came from architectural lighting sources, but maybe ten or fifteen years back.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.