New Near-Production "Super" Lightbulb Lasts 60 Years, Costs $2.85

I'll buy one (believe it) when I can get it at my local hardware store!

Icarus

 

Getting good diffusion will be key, this has been a drawback of LED's. I would hope they can put these into any existing form factor. I assume that in 10 years prices will be down to CFL levels of $1.5-2.00 bulb.

Wonder how they will do in mid-Winter outside...now that would be nice for when I must have on outdoor lighting.

I'm not sure what they were referring to with regards to flicker in other green designs. None of my CFL's have ever flickered except when physically failing...and that didn't last long.

 

The flicker (rapid on and off) is inherent in the design, a normal person will not see it but that doesn't mean the brain doesn't register it, it is probably discarded as useless information before being passed to the processing unit and being made aware to you for evaluation. At least that is how I understand it.

 

I saw this research article a couple of months ago and am looking forward to seeing this in production. I've never seen an LED flicker, they usually lose some of their luminosity and then just die, note the fact the new Prius LED headlamp design retains 90% of it's original out put over its lifetime.
These new LED's would be incorporated into the existing designs already in place, which are an amazing array of applications for both residential and business.
As for LED's in cold weather use, they work well. If you've ever seen an LED bulb they have pretty impressive heat sinks. Though their output in terms of wattage is very small compared to other lights it's incorporated into such a tiny area. That's a lot of heat! For a comparison in heat, a one watt laser can start fires!

 

I have one of those LED conversions from LEDTronics as a porch light at my hobby farm. It works fine even at -40. The CFL's will absolutely not work below +10 F

A lot of folks here found that out when Manitoba Hydro was giving away CFL's to customers. They tried them outside on potlights, and discovered they don't work at all in winter

A good outdoor lamp, with very long life and instant start capability, even at -40, is an induction lamp

QL Induction Lighting System

Although expensive to buy, compared to flourescent and HPS lighting, the cost savings just in relamping usually pays for the product

 

Fluorescent bulbs flicker, as they are driven by high voltage AC. LEDs do not inherently flicker, but if driven by AC they flicker with each cycle. It's easy to see with common LED Christmas lights. When you stare at them you don't see it, but turn your eyes rapidly or move the LEDs quickly and you will see a series of pulses that make the LEDs look like dotted lines.

DC powered LEDs also flicker if driven by pulse width modulating (PWM) dimmers, which is a very common method of dimming LEDs. On the other hand, PWM dimmer frequencies can be very high, which makes the flicker very hard to see.

Tom

 

does the flicker induce fatigue? that's the one thing I don't like about typcial tube flourescents. I don't notice this with CFLs, particularly to lower temperature ones (~2800K)

 

Florescent lights flicker at 120 Hz (in the US, Twice the AC rate). If the phosphorescent coating has a long persistence (like glow-in-the-dark toys), the flicker is averaged out. Low temperature phosphors tend to have a longer persistence.

JeffD

 

Cheap LEDs flicker at 60 Hz since they are half-wave.

Tom

 

The commercial and industrial electronic ballast's I'm familiar with will operate at around 20 KHz. This is thought to reduce fatigue.

There are many advantages to using electronic ballasts to drive flourescent lamps, the primary advantage being energy efficiency. Another advantage is longer tube life, usually 20,000 hours. There are safety advantages too

Say a tube goes out. A regular ballast will try to restrike it, will not be able to, and will continue to try to restrike the tube until the ballast burns out.

Things tend to get pretty hot, you usually cook the ballast, sometimes there is a small fire. With an electronic ballast, it has protection built in, so once a tube fails, the ballast will remain off.

The induction lamp I mentioned earlier also has very high operating frequencies, so it's better for industrial task lighting. It also offers instant on operation, and instant restrike after a momentary power dip

 

One won't see 120 Hz flicker from what I can tell, this is particularly true due to persistance. (I can still see my CFL's for awhile when I turn them off in a dark room.)

For me monitor flicker begins to disappear around 75 Hz in CRT's. Larger CRT's were more susceptible to the problem and in bigger CRT's I can detect it up until around 85 Hz where it is gone. 60 Hz with a CRT was maddeningly fatiguing to me, enough to hack the drivers for higher frequency and hope to fry the monitor rather than put up with the flicker. I suspect that the size of the screen sensitivity is an issue with peripheral vision being more distinguising of flicker. It is this portion of our vision that tends to detect movement. (I'm not sure if the cause of that is one of simply geometry of the eye and the location of the source, or of one of adaptation, since being sensitive near the edges of one's visual field is very useful in self defense.)

At any rate, CFL's have not shown me noticeable flicker. I have of course seen far too much flicker in old fluorescents, usually due to bad bulbs and/or bad ballasts.

 

(sigh)
Even as an early adapter, being willing to spend > $100 per, on multiple occasions, I'm so very burned out on buying my share of what are claimed to be appx 90 degree beam, appx 3000 kelvin, appx 900 lumen bulbs ...
God forbid I should want/hope for dimmable, and/or candlabra sizes too

 

I prefer my industrial clients go out on an edge to act as guinea pigs. There is no way I'd drop + $100 on some gadget that is bleeding edge and will die an early death, along with the company that made it

"Too bad, so sad ..."

 

I've had good luck with the standard CFL's by narrowing to just a few sources (not the major name brands like GE which I've had only bad experiences with), but those within housings to replace globes and reflector/flood style bulbs have been a disappointment.

GE for one should just give up on CFL's and leave the market to somebody competent. Their junk is saturating the market and wrecking it for decent designs ("Microsofting" it as it were.) Their dimmable CFL's I tried didn't work well at all--very little turn down.

Now, I do have a very good dimmable fluorescent, but it is a double-circline bulb in a torchiere. It turns down about 4:1 which is pretty good.

Candelabra would probably best be done in LED style. CFL's just don't make sense in that size range. I've replaced the candelabra style chandeliers we had. The fixtures wouldn't have made sense with CFL's as they needed clear type bulbs anyway. (I really didn't like the style.)

 

Au contraire mon ami Shawn,

I have a number of 3 watt CFL candleabra bulbs that work great. In our off grid solar powered house, we use these for all kinds of small applications. 3-5 watts of good light can be a lot,,if it is used well.

Aside from buying local, this is where I have found the best selection of bulbs. Energy Saving Store Home

Icarus

 

Icarus,

Unfortunately, no. I've seen those, and don't find them a good match as a replacement. They wouldn't work well for the applications I have had for candelabras (including carriage lights.) Not that they wouldn't be fine for things built specifically for the soft white sort look (except possibly the geometry since they tend to be longer/fatter, a factor in many other non-CFL fixture conversions of course), but for ones where the design is to reflect the bare filament on many mirrored surfaces it just wouldn't work visually.

Spending somewhere in the range of $7+ for such a small quantity of light is an order of magnitude more per lumen than what I'm used to for CFL's. However, I can understand how that would be compensated for in places where the total lumens had to be kept to a bare minimum (off grid, etc.) But in my case where I was looking at replacing 16 bulbs in one fixture and 10 in another, the cost of these vs. the standard CFL's for replacement fixtures was roughly $180 to $21--offsetting 1/3 the cost of the fixture replacements.

 

IKEA has these CFL candelabra bulbs for $3-$5.

 

It seems that Philips has submitted the first entry for the L Prize.

New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/technology/25bulb.html?hp

 

Thanks for posting that. I take exception with much of the tone of the NYT article. CFL's have hardly been the failure/debacle that the NYT author portrays. There are plenty of good CFL's out there. If you shut down Feit and GE's CFL production you would eliminate most of the worst products overnight.

I wish they had posted a lumens figure for this bulb rather than just stating it uses 1/6th of the power of a 60W incandescent (10W). I've got 40w equivalent CFL's that use 9W with 10,000 hour life and 550 lumens output. The cost? About $1.50/bulb. So the quote about how "This has now leapfrogged what C.F.L.’s can do†is a bit hard to swallow. Instead it looks like they might actually be getting to the point where the LED is performance competitive with a standard CFL...except at a much higher initial price.

It is good to see them making progress on general LED lighting though. Hopefully the per bulb cost will come down rapidly.

It is also good to see the Energy Dept. verifying claims. Now they just need to get their asses in gear with existing CFL's to cull those that can't produce instant on bulbs...