'Most energy-efficient' light bulb

I have been using led lights on my reef tank for about 4 yrs now. A nice mix of royal blue, red, cyan, and neutral white. The color achieved via blending these spectrum's is great for growing corals and appealing to the eye as well. And in the past 4 yrs I have moved on throughout my house and installed led lights in most fixtures. In regular lights it's the lens that makes the difference, giving you a better spread or a more narrow beam depending on which one you choose. The nice thing about led's is when coupled with a backup power supply like solar power I can still run my coral reef tank during a power outage pretty easy as it doesn't require the same amount of power metal halides would require. The same holds true for my pumps they are all low voltage as well. I have a few lights in my house I leave on 24/7 because they are led and burn only 4 watts but put out the brightness of a 40watt bulb.

You can also hack a burnt out cfl bulb, depending on how many led's, add a mini driver or resistor to the led's to handle AC voltage and you have a screw in led bulb. Alot of work for just one bulb so after all said and done i'm sure it wouldn't as effecient than just buying one, more along the line's of an experiment or class project imo.

They already sell LED lightbulbs. They even make a wifi-enabled light bulb called LIFX; that you can control the color and brightness with your smartphone.

I've seen multi-packs of regular LED lightbulbs at Costco. The catch is that they are fairly expensive up front. In the end, however, you'll probably reap a net savings in energy and replacement costs.

I'm slowly replacing all my CF (the curly looking energy efficient bulbs) as they burn out with LED ones. I have a feeling that the light they emit is also better for you. I have heard that CF's put out a spectrum that isn't good for humans.

I think the catch with these are the equivalent wattages

12 watts, equivalent to a 100-watt incandescent bulb.

Philips best is 17 watts equivalent to 74-watt, so the efficiency is a bit better.

Mine is my house are 6w (32w), seems bright enough but then I have multiples in each room.

reply to post by MystikMushroom

They already sell LED lightbulbs.

I retired an old 300 watt 22 inch cathode ray monitor for a 26 inch LED Vizio razor which uses less than 40 watts.
That in turn allowed me to modify the power backup to run on low self discharge NIMH battery packs.

These green efforts tend to compound so eventually it might be practical to get off the grid completely with a solar
panel farm.

reply to post by WOWGamer


Good point Gamer, I hadn't thought of the lamp shade issue with the shape and all....my guess is either there will be a glass bulb around the "new buld" or you just wont be able to use one at all IMO.

Maybe the next step will be to develop "new lamp shades" adapted to these bulbs...

I CALLED IT FIRST!!!!

reply to post by Teye22


Head off to your local Ikea & you'll see LED lights not only for sale but actually running in their uplighters. Currently on sale too & much much cheaper than the likes of the equivalent Philips ones:

www.ikea.com...

reply to post by luvthetruth


Just look up "LED Grow Lights"

There are a lot of them specially designed for... um ..... indoor plants.

P

LEDs are pretty slick in how effective they are, are pretty much the way flashlights are going now. Nothing else provides as much light and endurance with a given battery. Soon enough for automotive applications, and it'll be unlikely you'll ever have to change a lightbulb on a car. Still kind of pricey for household lighting too, but like others have said, wait for mass production to kick in and defray the costs.

Of course they still aren't suited for high temperature applications such as ovens (LEDs tend to die rather quickly when they get too hot), but there is a fairly obvious work-around for that - keep them away from the heat by channeling the light with fiber-optics.

However there's been a patent on that already... www.google.com...

We'll probably see LEDs used in ovens (both conventional and microwave) as soon as that patent expires. (I'm guessing the license holder is being a bit stingy and only releasing to high-end manufacturers, or we should be seeing that method of redirecting light used all over the place by now.)