It seems that recently the world has gone mad for LED lights. You can not open a trade journal or home improvement magazine without reading about the energy saving benefits offered by Light Emitting Diode lamps and fittings. Indeed since they first made an appearance on the mass market about seven years ago, LED Lights have come a very long way.
Pushed by previously unheard of levels of investment in both Research & Development and marketing by the majors such as Philips, Osram and an incalculable multitude of unknown brands manufactured in China, LED Lighting technology does now represent a realistic alternative to both Halogen and compact fluorescent light bulbs .
Lamp life, light output and the increasingly more important, and the light efficiency of LED is now a whole leap away from the models of just a few years ago. These forerunners to today’s lamps often, if not usually, made wholly unrealistic claims about lamp life stating figures such as 70,000 hours, when in some cases they were failing to equal even an incandescent bulb’s performance of 1000 hours! This wave LED a bad name and naturally lead to skepticism among early adopters. Furthermore the light output of the early multi-diode lamp was actually pretty poor and could only be realistically used as a form of accent lighting such as kick space or stair lights, rather than sole source or task lighting. The problem was further compounded by the cold bluish light quality of early LED which was not particularly pleasant to most peoples’ eyes.
LED lamps now offer considering better lamp life, with many of the major brands quoting and exceeding 50,000 hours. Light quality has been radically improved and different common color temperatures such as white, cool white and warm white to suit most applications. Light efficiency is another area in which LED now performs considerably better. This is the measure of the number of lumens per watt and gives a much more accurate picture of a lamp’s performance than simple wattage ever did. So a 5w LED lamp of five years ago will have a very different output than a 5w lamp of now. In the years to come we will all get used to ‘lumens per watt’ or light efficacy, but for now it is still an alien concept to the majority of domestic buyers.
The energy savings offered can not be ignored, what ever other short comings it may have and in a time of economic uncertainty and with a very pressing need to reduce carbon emissions LED is a serious proposition. Is it still a replacement for Halogen? We believe so.
