LED's hit the Home Market
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 09.11.06
Fast Company called the compact flourescent "the light bulb that can change the world"- Perhaps they should have waited a few weeks. Now LED's are getting really interesting, as the fixtures go mainstream and affordable, like this 90 dollar desk lamp from Sylvania. Other models start at $ 46. The LightingBrilliance line of fixtures is interesting for another reason- according to marketing director Laura Fuller, "We make light bulbs, not fixtures, but with LED's we had to build the fixture around the light." The fixture will burn for 20,000 hours or fifteen years with normal use. ::Osram Sylvania via ::Globe and Mail
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It would be nice to see a power switch for these lamps before the transformer. The transformer will alone will be using up to 5 watts, at 24 hours that's 120 watts. So in most households the CFL might still save the most energy use. Frankly it would be nice to have a switch on all transformers, because how many of us actually unplug them. "Good design is about thinking past the obvious."
It looks very nice, but does Sylvania manage to get the point that many other LED lamp manufacturers miss? That is, the energy savings is great, but powering the lamp from a wall transformer that sucks power -even when the lamp is off- seems to defeat the purpose. I've seen far too many household LED lights with this arrangement and just wondered if anyone has seen how this one operates? I couldn't tell from looking at the Sylvania product literature.
Something clever I saw recently was a house with light-switches on the walls that turn off certain power outlets (those located where lots of electronics stuff was). This allows you to make sure your transformers aren't wasting juice without having to unplug them.
Powerbars can be used to do that too, but something they can be in hard-to-reach places.
MGR - my parent's 60 year old house has wall switches that control outlets, but they're there since there are no built in ceiling lights.
Is there even a transformer on this? Most mains powered LEDs I have seen simply series up the LEDs and use a capacitor to limit current. This also means that they are un-dimmerable with a standard household dimmer or able to be used on an inverter since they are non-sinusoidal power sources and the current limiting impedance is low at the higher frequancies
The product literature is quite sparse (no information about lumens output), but I was able to determine that it has a 120 V to 12 V transformer. The transformer is not shown in the literature.
I wonder what the quality of light is. Like the color temperature. Also I haven't heard of anybody solving the problem of ambient lighting with LEDs. LEDs make good task lighting like the lamp above. But it's poor in applications where you are trying to light up a room because the light doesn't spread well. They are working on it though.
Compact fluorescents and LEDs have comparable energy consumption, both much better than incandescent. CFLs spread light all over, LEDs are more directional. LEDs are dimmable either by flickering each one or by turning off sets of LEDs. The devil is in the details of LEDs: the special treatment to reflect back-scattered light, the optics to spread light evenly, how efficient the transformer is, etc. LED products like this and the Herman Miller LEAF need to get out so the designs can rapidly improve.
In the UK, every wall outlet plate has a switch on it. I hate the primitive US wall sockets with no switch and that cheesy cover plate that never quite lines up around them.