subject: Benefits of LED Lights Replacement [print this page] Benefits of LED Lights Replacement Benefits of LED Lights Replacement
The forthcoming future of home lighting will shortly be the extensive spread adoption and utilize of green energy-saving LED lights. Although the present market for LED lights products is mainly designed for supporters and experts, the positive factors of LED lighting will boost market demand for more affordable LED lights. SSL (Solid-State-Lighting) is an attractive area and its been forecasted, that in the near future, energy-saving LED lighting products are going to be reliable and low-cost enough to replace incandescent and fluorecent lights for ordinary use in our homes, in public places, in car parking lots, in street lights, in outdoor signs, in super markets, in shopping malls and offices.
The working lifespan of current LED lamps is 100,000 hours in theory. This will be even more than 10 years of consistent operation, or in another caculation, say 33.3% operation (that is 8 hours per day), 34 years of lifespan. The long operational life of an LED light is tremendous advantage in contrast to an incandescent bulb or a fluorescent tube, which is somewhere within 4000-6000 hours.
Speaking of cost, it seems a little unfair to LED lights. Many people like to carry out some straight comparison between the cost of LED lights and traditional lights such as incandescents, fluorescents and halogen lamps. With incandescent lamps, the real and hidden cost is the electricity bills and the maintenance cost (including the replacement bulbs and the labour fee). When comes to the commercial sector, for example, for shopping malls, car parks, office buildings and skyscrapers, maintenance fees for replacing the light bulbs or light tubes, can be tremendous. While LED lights here could be a perfect solution.
As soon as developed effectively, an LED circuit can come to 70-80% efficiency, that means 70-80% of the electrical energy will be converted to light rather than other forms of energy for example , heat. While for incandescent bulbs, only 10- 20% of electric power is used to produce light, meanwhile, 80-90% of electricity has been wasted to produce heat. Take a simple example, say if I light up my room with a 100 Watt incandescent bulb (8 hours per day), and the energy expense is 10cents/kilowatt hour, then for 1 year, my energy expense for this bulb would be $29 expense, but $23-$26 of this $29 will be wasted to heat the room, only $3-$6 is actually devoted to light the room. And if an efficient LED light is used, the energy expense would be only about $9-$11 per year - 60%-70% saving on energy per year. Please take into consideration that the savings on maintenance and replacements during the next years has not been mentioned yet.
Despite the fact that LED lighting hold remarkable advantages in comparison with traditional lighting.The prime obstacle to the wide adoption of LED lighting is still the present relative high cost of LED lamps as the primary investment. Despite the price keeps dropping down, LED lamps are still expensive. Typically, a 3W LED globe bulb, replacement of a 25 watt incandescent, value ranges approx . $40. Although LEDs are expensive, the initial cost will be paid back in long term, by saving electricity and mantenance costs. The best value comes from commercial applications where maintenance and replacement costs are extravagant.
It is estimated that as the new developments of LED technologies comming, there will be progressively more LED light adoptions in residential lighting applications. In fact, LED technology has been explored and developed for several decades but only an a few years ago, as the white light LEDs were developed, LED lighting began pratical for illumination. And in these short few years, a rapid raising industry has being formed. This could also be a proof that LED lighting has a very hopeful future. And this future won't be very long.
