[Vadi]

I got LED lights for my PC spot here and it is nice. I use the older 12W Philips 60W equivalent bulb and also their 7W LED spots. The lightning is kind of minimal, but looks nice, and the lux amount is enough. The spots get lukewarm, the bulb pretty hot. The bulb is expensive, but I am an enthusiast I guess, and for one room it ain't that much, especially for a gadget that important.
I found a site where someone measured the spectra of some lights, and the LEDs aren't that bad. link Looks like the new one good optimized for more lumens at the expense (?) of a big red peak in its spectrum.

[Blazkowicz]

you're right, if you want to be a green guy you need a computer room, a kitchen and that's all
inter-generational housing may be even better, so is living downstairs with the heat going upstairs, so is pooling the house, sharing washing cycles and cooking for everyone at once. so the green future is about four geeks living in a basement with their moms living together upstairs.

[Vadi]

Actually it also feels different. Having those spots burn over thousand lux on you without any heat is nice. The bulb I bought because of the spectrum, and needing it on all the time next to the spots to illuminate the ceiling.

[Grall]

Organic LEDs starting to make the moves...!

[Grall]

I was thinking, would it be feasible to use a small, traditional wound transformer in a LED screw-in bulb? Simply pulling down the voltage with resistors creates waste heat, and a proper transformer should be loads more efficient. Since the wattage it needs to handle is small, it shouldn't need to be very big or heavy either; some LED bulbs draw as little as 1.2W.

Passive transformers are frowned on in electronic gadgets these days because they draw a lot of standby power, but since lights are quite literally switched off entirely when not in use, this should not be an issue.

Whaddya say? Or don't tell me nobody cares about this topic anymore.

[Dave Baumann]

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/1/34...ikea-leads-led

Looks like Ikea will help in driving the prices of LED bulbs down.

[Davros]

They just need to be brighter, you cant buy a led lightbulb thats the equiv of a normal 150w

[Grall]

A "normal" 150W? That's a hella strong bulb, I've never seen any regular incandescents on sale with that high a wattage. In Sweden, the highest were 100W, and Philips has a replacement 17W bulb for those - although availability across the globe seems spotty.

I think 11-17W LED lamps are enough for most people, the Philips lamps are even dimmable it seems, for those who care about that sort of thing...

No idea what crap it is IKEA plans to sell though. Probably won't last for 25 years if going by the general quality of their CCFL lamps, that's for sure.,,

[Blazkowicz]

40W incandescent level would be a tipping point for me.
The main issue is I have upwards pointing fixtures (including a dual bulb one), which originally had "candle"-shaped incadescent bulbs in it. So I need something as omnidirectional as possible and that should even emit little direct light if possible.

Price is a big concern, meaning if I buy crap I will be stuck with it. If I have to invest 60 euros for two or three bulbs, it's for a decade. I should even be able to resell them. We might witness a new thing, a market for used light bulbs.

Meanwhile (my bulbs are all dead) I think I'll buy, exploiting a seeming loophole, incandescent bulbs for kitchen air extractor. Even lowest wattage of incandescent seem banned nowadays, first you could still buy 60 watt, then 40 watt, then maybe 25 watt..
http://www.darty.com/nav/achat/gros_...m_term=1010573

[nutball]

Originally Posted by Blazkowicz

Meanwhile (my bulbs are all dead) I think I'll buy, exploiting a seeming loophole, incandescent bulbs for kitchen air extractor. Even lowest wattage of incandescent seem banned nowadays, first you could still buy 60 watt, then 40 watt, then maybe 25 watt..

In the UK the most direct replacement for incandescent is now halogen, which looks and feel like the old incandescents but come at wacky wattages (28, 42 and 70 IIRC) and seem to have a slightly different colour temperature.

I'd like to go LED but the idea of spending £60+ just to populate one rail of spotlights makes me pucker and cross my legs.

[Grall]

It's a short-term cost though. Those halogens will burn out far quicker than the LEDs, and draw a ton more power while doing it (and generate a ton of waste heat as well.)

[nutball]

Originally Posted by Grall

It's a short-term cost though. Those halogens will burn out far quicker than the LEDs, and draw a ton more power while doing it (and generate a ton of waste heat as well.)

Sure, and if I had £60 sitting around in my bank account, and I couldn't for the life of me think of think of anything more entertaining to do with it than spend it on expensive and worthy lightbulbs, then I'd buy some LEDs. That's £60 for one set of spotlights, not the whole house!

Or I could put the money towards an HTPC+TV for the kitchen that the missus is banging on about, or an upgrade for my server/RAID/NAS box, or some speakers for the conservatory, or I could maybe feed the cats this week (they lookin' at me funny, like they want to eat me!). By the time I run out of other fun or more necessary things to do with the money in the here-and-now, LEDs will be much cheaper!

[Blazkowicz]

Even if it's halogen I have to find it easily, cheap and of the right socket, "small screw" not big screw, bayonetta or "two tiny legs".

CCFL are an option but I have an habit of seeing them unreliable. But everything is unreliable except LED. Anyway I feel good since I don't run a car, you now, they could do something like ban all cars with an engine that goes over 60000 watts but they don't do it.

[Grall]

New Japanese research makes OLEDs over 90% energy efficient: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/...-heavy-metals/ !!!

...Well, no. Apparantly, energy-to-light conversion efficiency is only about 19%, comparable to current high-end LED bulbs the article states. Too bad. Maybe some day, in the future eh?

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by Grall

New Japanese research makes OLEDs over 90% energy efficient: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/...-heavy-metals/ !!!

...Well, no. Apparantly, energy-to-light conversion efficiency is only about 19%, comparable to current high-end LED bulbs the article states. Too bad. Maybe some day, in the future eh?

You misread it. It has 90% efficiency in getting the triplets to change state to singlets and thus emit light when they relax. That is compared to traditional high efficiency phosphorescent OLEDs (not standard LEDs) which uses heavy metals to achieve nearly 100% efficiency in getting triplets to emit light.

Hence, this new method is roughly equivalent to the current high efficiency phosphorescent OLEDs (using heavy metals)...not LEDs.

Regards,
SB

[Grall]

Wikipedia has had a cool update recently:

Originally Posted by [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode"

Wiki[/URL]Cree issued a press release on February 3, 2010 about a laboratory prototype LED achieving 208 lumens per watt at room temperature. The correlated color temperature was reported to be 4579 K.[50] In December 2012 Cree issued another press release announcing commercial availability of 200 lumens per watt LED at room temperature.[51]

I wonder how long it might take for products to make it out into the retail channel using these 200lm/w LEDs, and also what kind of brightness levels we might see. Maybe there could finally be some nice 90W+ incandescent equivalents using these.

...Just hope they won't cost a million bucks each...

Edit:
Looks like you can't put weblinks inside quote tags. Can't be bothered to fix it.

[Pete]

Originally Posted by Grall

Edit:
Looks like you can't put weblinks inside quote tags. Can't be bothered to fix it.

You can, but the formatting is very finicky. You forgot QUOTE "s and a ], and your URL "s messed with the QUOTE "s (and were unnecessary because there were no spaces in your URL, DUHHH*). And an extra space with the QUOTE "s will also result in failure. Our parser is very sophisticated, obviously.

Yours:

[QUOTE=[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode"]Wiki[/URL]

Correct:

[QUOTE="[URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode]Wiki[/URL]"]

I can't help but thinking the effort I put into this post might have better spent fixing the offending REGEX, but whatevs.


* [/DUHHH]

[era]

well i recently bought some led bulbs powered by USB port itself and can control them through an interface

[smw]

There is now a kickstarter for the led bulb Nanolight http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...icient-lightbu
Not 200lm/w but still 133lm/w is not too shabby and they even have a 100w equivalent for Grall

[Grall]

*Ding!*
Achievement Unlocked: Uncle Moneybags
Pledge $10,000 or more on a Kickstarter project.



...Just kidding. Wouldn't mind doing it though, if I'd had unlimited funds to spend on trivial things... Interesting hardware though. I've seen those bulbs mentioned somewhere before on the webs, can't really remember where though. That design is rather distinctive.

The PCB should come in a chrome version though methinks, unless you run the bulb all naked (and 1600 or even 1800lm piercingly bright LEDs...no thanks!) there's going to be reflections inside the fixture itself, so for maximum efficiency you want all light going outwards, not being absorbed by the shell of the bulb itself...

[Sxotty]

Personally I think they should make light fixtures with the transformers in them and then DC lighting could connect directly. It is wasteful to have inverter-transformer in each LED especially when trying to deal with candelabra style fixtures.

[MfA]

They'll always need some inductors for buck conversion because they are current driven ... but if you started at say 12 volt DC they could be a lot smaller.

[Sxotty]

My theory is they (buck converters) would be smaller, cheaper, and then the power components in the candelabra fixture could be more efficient as well (and more expensive). Maybe someday it will happen, who knows when though.

[Grall]

I figure, LED-optimized connectors for fixtures is basically just a matter of LEDs achieving a decent price/performance ratio, and companies getting together with some org like ISO for example and hammering out a spec. It happened with halogen bulbs, so why not LEDs?