Panasonic's New LED Bulbs Shine For 19 Years 710
Mike writes "As lighting manufacturers phase out the incandescent bulb, and CFLs look set to define the future of lighting, Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years (if used 5-1/2 hours a day). With a lifespan 40 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, Panasonic's new EverLed bulbs are the most efficient LEDs ever to be produced. They are set to debut in Japan on October 21st. Let's hope that as the technology is refined their significant cost barrier will drop — $40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb, even one that promises to save $23 a year in energy costs."
Not impressive lifetime for an LED (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:5, Informative)
You really think Philips would try selling a half-wave rectified LED emitter for $40? That would be so unbelievably awful, you'd probably see return rates close to 100%.
Hell, even the LED Christmas lights I bought at Wal-mart last year are full-wave.
Re:Light bulb as a service (Score:5, Informative)
till you break them and contaminate the room in mercury. Professional remediation is about $3000.
You forgot to finish your thought with "if you compeletely and unjustifiably overreact.
Re:ROI (Score:5, Informative)
I have only CFL's in my house. not one of them has broken since i moved in in june last year. 3 of those i brought with me from my previous house, which i have i used there for nearly 5 years.
Bad mathematics? (Score:5, Informative)
$40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb, even one that promises to save $23 a year in energy costs
You must be an accountant living on the outdated system of monthly and quarterly figures.
To have an amortisation within 2 years and outright profit for 17 years afterwards sounds like a pretty damn good investment.
Re:Light temperature (Score:2, Informative)
From link in TFA: Available in "Daylight" and warm "Lamp" colors
Not that they list a figure for what these are. I've seen cheep 'warm white' CFLs that have a colour rating higher than the expensive brand 'cool white'
Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:2, Informative)
A typical bulb sees 50Hz 110V or 240V coming into it. When the signal goes above 0V it starts to glow, when it goes below 0V it starts to glow, back and forth faster than the eye can see.
LEDs don't work on a negative signal so the signal needs to be rectified. Half wave rectification means that when it goes above 0V you start getting power to the LED, when you go below 0V you don't. So the LED is on for only half the time. Full wave rectification flips the negative part to the positive side and you get something more closely resembling what normal bulbs do.
In real laymen terms:
Full wave is fine,
Half wave is a flickery mess.
Long life bulbs cost versus cost of replacement... (Score:4, Informative)
I was talking to the facilities manager at the local University... about cost to replace bulbs in some of his buildings.. In some cases it is literally in the many tens of thousands of dollars range. They have to bring scaffolding in with a small crew to erect and move around. (Doors too small for a lift.)
He would be more than happy to pay $42/bulb IFF it meant he didn't have to go back in for two decades.
Re:ROI (Score:5, Informative)
The bulb in TFA (I know, I know... but it wasn't in TFS) is rated 6.9w consumption, and is presumably the 60w-equivalent referenced in the summary. Most "60w" CFLs take around 12-15w if memory serves - so these LED bulbs are about twice as efficient. Save $23/yr for 19 years vs $12/yr for 5 years (you say 10, but they're usually rated to five and I've almost never seen one last more than two; they seem very sensitive to older wiring). It pays for itself in less than two years compared to an incandescent, and in four compared to a CFL.
Of course, that's all assuming they actually last that long. I don't doubt the power consumption ratings, but as I said I've never seen a CFL last anywhere near it's rated life. My understanding is that they have a limited number of starts due to the ignition ballast (which is external to the bulb in standard fluorescent tubes); I'd assume that if you have older wiring or other factors that may cause frequent power sags you'll burn through those starts unusually fast. That seems to be the case at my house, or would at least make some degree of sense to me. I could be dead wrong about the reasoning, but CFLs unquestionably die faster than incandescent bulbs around here. Hopefully this isn't an issue with LED bulbs.
Re:ROI (Score:2, Informative)
I've yet to have the spiral CCFLs last over 1.5 years.
Same here. They can last that long in theory, but the ballasts go dead in a year or two. If a LED works like it should, it will be ballast-free and actually last until the thing burns itself to a crisp inside.(ie - failure from wearing out vs defect)
Also, don't underestimate the benefit to the utility companies which have to generate extra power for CF bulbs vs other technologies. Less load means less brownouts and so on. If these are full-wave, in fact, they will use less than half the energy of a CF, looked at this way.
Re:Light bulb as a service (Score:4, Informative)
"Mercury concentration in the study room air often exceeds the Maine Ambient Air Guideline (MAAG) of 300 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) for some period of time, with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp. "
study [maine.gov]
Re:Light temperature (Score:5, Informative)
This is because the really bright white LEDs are actually monochrome blue, they have a phosphor that converts some of that blue light into other colours, but not normally enough for a nice (sun like) colour.
There are other techniques that seem to convert the frequencies better; or they could use the old trick of putting different colour LEDs in one bulb. But for the moment if you want highest efficiency you're stuck with lots of blue in the light and a "cold" feel.
One point though, white LEDs are normally closer to the spectrum of the sun than incandescents, it's just that the blue spike is in the opposite direction to the very reduced blues you get from a incandescent. This is a known problem, so the conversions will continue to get better.
Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:2, Informative)
Addendum:
And the capacitor is there to keep the current going for the time the voltage is around 0V. This isn't really a problem for incandescent light bulbs since they after-glow for the time there is no voltage on the bulb, so you get a consistent glow. This is not the case with CFL's as they only marginally afterglow, and even worse with LEDs since they don't glow at all when the power is cut.
Without it:
Normal lightbulb: pretty consistent light
CFL: 50hz or 60hz flicker
LED: 25hz or 30hz flicker (without rectifier).
No wonder people get headaches from standing around in CFL's all the time.
Re:But still... (Score:3, Informative)
Where I live the norm is to have thermostatically controlled gas central heating. Also the difference between summer and winter daylight hours is significant. Air conditioning is extremely rare in domestic properties anywhere in the U.K.
This means in the summer I hardly use artificial lighting, until late at night where the heat output of an incandescent light bulb can make a noticeable difference in taking the late night chill off a room.
In the autumn and winter, I have the central heating on when it is dark because it is cold, and as it thermostatically controlled the heat from the incandescent light bulbs means my central heating works a little less. If I replace these with energy efficient bulbs it will just make my central heating work harder.
The advantage of any energy efficient light bulb where I live is going to me marginal at best, and potentially negative when you take the manufacturing of the bulb into account.
Just because you happen to live somewhere where all this is not the case does not mean I don't.
I have saved more carbon output by insulating my house properly and installing a modern condensing boiler than I could ever save from switching to energy efficient light bulbs by several orders of magnitude. If every house in the UK was brought up to the same standard of insulation as mine is now we could easily meet our Kyoto targets doing just that.
Re:ROI (Score:3, Informative)
Don't buy bulbs from IKEA... I have no idea how they make their bulbs so shit, but honestly, they are.
Re:ROI (Score:3, Informative)
Yes there is, the manufacture and importation of incandescent lightbulbs at 100W and over into the E.U. is now illegal.
Re:What kills bulbs (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, in the mythbusters test the only bulb that lasted a month was the LED (see 14:00 here [google.com]).
Re:ROI (Score:3, Informative)
The basic numbers, LED versus CFL (Score:2, Informative)
But compact fluorescents cost $2, save almost as much power/year, and last about 10 years. They are the most cost effective.
Indeed, CFLs are the most cost effective, as long as you don't actually use any math.
However, I do like math, so I shall try using some.
First, let us look at the cost of the bulbs themselves. The Panasonic's cost $40 and are rated for 40,000 hours. A batch of 60 watt equivalent CFLs I have in my hand (Bright Effects brand that I purchased at Lowes) cost $12 or $2 per CFL. The CFLs are rated at 8000 hours. So I will need five CFLs instead of one LED bulb.
Now let us look at energy use. The CFLs use 13 watts each and the LED with the highest light output draws 6 watts. Over the life of the led bulb, that works out to 6 watts * 40,000 hours = 240,000 watt hours = 240 Kwh. The CFL will use, over the same time span, 13 watts * 40,000 hours = 520,000 watts = 520 Kwh.
The question now becomes, what do you pay for a kilowatt hour? Where I live in the Orlando area, we are paying about 15 cents/Kwh. The LED bulb would wind up costing $36 for power and the CFL would cost $78.
This gives us total costs of:
LED: $40 (the bulb) + $36 (energy) = $76 (total)
CFL: $10 (5 bulbs) + $78 (energy) = $88 (total)
This analysis also assumes your time is worthless. If you put any value on your time, the numbers obviously get better for the LED. The quality of the light is also ignored here. LEDs come on instantly, while same CFLs can take a bit of time to reach full output.
Personally, reducing the number of bulbs I have to replace by a factor of five is quite valuable to me. My house has about 120 bulbs, and the ones that are very hard to reach or that are on all the time (about 20 of them) are already LED based. As the LEDs get cheaper, I'll replace the remainder.
Obviously, for people with cheap electricity, CFLs will still come out ahead (as long as little or no value is placed on the time for changing bulbs).
Re:ROI (Score:3, Informative)
This is NOT informative, just plain wrong (Score:5, Informative)
The things contain a switch mode power supply, like just about every small mains powered device nowadays. The SMPS converts input to a current output for LEDs, which is what they need for best efficiency. It does this on both halves of the AC cycle. This added complexity contributes to the cost, but not as much as you might think.
Early LED bulbs that ran off cheap transformers used for SELV lighting used series resistors, but the current is very variable and they are, basically, crap. They got away with it because big arrays of cheap LEDs were used. A long term solution really needs not more than two or three high power LEDs in an envelope, because this helps to drive down cost. But this requires an advanced power supply.
Re:ROI (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not impressive lifetime for an LED (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, we're talking high-power LEDs here.
The high power comes at the price of shortened life.
Re:ROI (Score:4, Informative)
Re:LEDs and dimmers (Score:2, Informative)
Well, I dont know how it's done, but from the press release..
The 7.6 W standard type and the 5.5 W compact type LED bulbs are dimmable from 10 percent to 100 percent.
Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:1, Informative)
The advantage of full wave rectification is not that the light source is brighter or dimmer, but that the light source no longer appears to be BLINKING LIKE A MOFO. A 60Hz blink is pretty annoying on the eyes.
Re:But still... (Score:3, Informative)
More useless trash (Score:3, Informative)
I switched the whole house to CFL. Every light. These bulbs are supposed to last 3-5 years.
I have replaced EVERY CFL BULB IN THE HOUSE within a year. EVERY ONE. GE Brand. No electrical voodoo in the house (I have a line conditioner even at the main). EVERY ONE. I shipped every damn one of them back to GE and Philips for a refund and explaination on why they failed. ZERO response.
Yeah my electric bill went down. $4 a month after replacing EVERY BULB in my house. That is 38 bulbs. You only save oodles of money provided you run them 5 hours a day constantly to cover the cost of the bulb. If have those 5 minute hall and closet lights along with perhaps 2-8 bulbs on for 5 hours (reading lamp, kitchen lights) you lose money. I barely saved money due to the living room lights being on all day. The livingroom, kitchen, and my office are the only high use lights and effectively had to subsidize all the other lights in the home. The $4 a month doesn't cover the $90+ spend on the bulbs...
Now every bulb was replaced back then as the old incandescent ones died off. So they were replaced over a 6 month period when we moved in (The old bulbs were at the oldest 4 years old.) So it can't be blamed on a bad batch of bulbs or a specific store (Target, Home Depot, Menards, and Walmart were sources for the bulbs)
So the CFLs being cheaper is pure bull shit as far as a home is concerned. That useless philips halogen crap in the garage that was supposed to be a 5 year bulb worked out to 8 months and didn't survive the winter.
Total scam in my opinion on CFLs. Until they can get an LED to match a 100 watt bulb (because I like to be able to see in my house rather then some crap ass 60-watt equivalent...) get it as cheap as a normal bulb, I keep my nice 100 watt incadescents thank you. When they burn out I don't have to fork over $3 to replace them.
I won't even get into the discussion about the quality of light from CFLs and LEDs vs. Incandescent bulbs... more useless ineffective crap to protect your new found god...
Telling us it saves $25 bucks a month if bullshit. I'll buy 1. It goes in my garage. If it can survive 3 years I MIGHT consider buying a second one for the bathroom and if that survies another 3 years... then we'll talk. So far this low-energy lighting scam is just that.. a scam as far as my experience has gone.
My criteria from now on: Full Spectrum, 100 Watts, NO STROBING, NO FLICKERING.
CFLs are a joke and LEDs have a long way to go. Too bad it looks like government has to subsidize and legistate to prop up yet another failure... How long till they ban those nice incandescent lights... oh wait...
Re:But still... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But still... (Score:3, Informative)
I have a light meter and have measured warm-up time of various CFLs. All the ones I had (six models from four brands) were at full brightness by a minute and a half. I've never seen one which didn't immediately put out enough light for reading.
Re:ROI (Score:3, Informative)
Well, most people still use incandescents. There are also some places where CFLs don't work as well, but an LED would be just fine.
Also, if you look a little further up, the LED lights still pay for themselves times two or so against CFLs over their lifetime. And that's with a brand new product. CFLs weren't a lot cheaper when they debuted.
Re:But still... (Score:3, Informative)
Not to dismiss your other arguments, but I work in lighting, specifically in designing test hardware for LED lights that run off commercially available dimmer switches, and I've spent years renovating houses, and I have never seen a resistance-type dimmer switch. The way a resistance dimmer would work, would be to dissipate the power through resistance in the wall, meaning you'd have up to the light bulb's rating of heat being generated in the tiny space of the box in the wall -- an incredibly bad idea, a fire hazard, a safety hazard, and likely to burn the next person who touches the switch because it'd be so hot.
Old-style dimmers use a triac, triggered by an adjustable resistor/diac, that chops the AC sinewave, holding it at zeroV for a while before letting it through. New-style dimmers do exactly the same thing only they let the AC rise, then chop it to 0, and they use more sophisticated electronics to do it. If you left/right reverse the waveform, you practically can't tell the difference between the two types.
This is a minor point, but one that comes up a lot in talking about dimmers. If anyone has seen a pure resistance-type dimmer, ever, I'd love to know about it.
Actually, I did see one once. It was in a museum in Iceland, and had been used in a farmhouse in the 1930's, that was using a hydroelectric generator and the resistive element served to regulate the power to all the lights in the house. It was about the size of a shoebox and was mounted on the wall with a big steel heatsink extending outwards from beneath it.
Re:This is NOT informative, just plain wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, any good bulb worth buying uses an actual LED driver that acts as a constant current source. But even they still often use cheap electrolytics, meaning your LEDs will still have 95,000 hours of life in them when the bulb dies because the crappy caps they're using on the input and output sides of the switcher have failed.
If you're looking at a light and want to know generally what they're doing, see if you can count roughly how many LED's are in the fixture. If there are over 30, chances are it's a series string being run on rectified AC. If there are only a dozen or less, it's got a real driver and should at least give you reasonable efficiency, although no guarantees on lifetime. In an ideal world everyone would design LED drivers and use all ceramic or Nichicon caps, which have lifetimes measured in decades rather than months, but that'd cost a few pennies more and people will always buy the cheapest thing they can buy, particularly when you're working in a price range that's already an order of magnitude more expensive than the (incandescent) competition.
Re:But still... (Score:3, Informative)
t doesn't matter. The point is that a 15 watt CFL is actually using 30 volt-amps, so it's only saving half as much energy as a 60 volt-amp traditional bulb
I'm a triple-degreed electrical engineer. Not an idiot.
You're a triple-degreed EE who doesn't know how power factor [wikipedia.org] works, and yes that does make you an idiot. Idiots can get degrees, who would have thought?! If you didn't have the degrees, then you'd just be excusably ignorant (but in either case a jackass for talking like you weren't ignorant).
Cluephone: PF of 0.5 does not mean the CFL actually consumes twice as much energy. It consumes a somewhat larger amount of energy because of extra resistive losses in transmitting the extra current. The CFL itself consumes the same 15 W, and the power company needs to generate the same 15 W. They also need to cover the extra resistive losses, but that's not anywhere close to equal to the real power consumed by the bulb, and doesn't put a CFL anywhere near any kind of incandescent.
Re:More useless trash (Score:1, Informative)
There's one of these guys in each /. thread about CFLs. I don't know what the point of them is now, but back when CFLs were a novelty they presumably were able to dissuade some people from upgrading.
At this point, when nearly everyone will know lots of people who use CFLs and don't have this problem, it seems useless to troll like this.
But since we're exchanging anecdotes, nine years ago I lived with some friends, we did a whiteboard calculation and worked out that it made sense to immediately replace all the incandescents, so we did that. I'm still using my share of the CFLs we bought in the flat where I live now, not a single one has failed.
Several of those CFLs have now been running for an aggregate over 15 thousand hours.
The weirdest thing about the "CFLs don't work" trolls is that CFLs are just a more convenient version of a long lifespan technology that had already been widely in use long prior to CFLs. Its as if someone was trying to convince you in 1980 that no-one would ever be able to make a personal HiFi smaller than the Walkman.
Re:This is NOT informative, just plain wrong (Score:3, Informative)