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Comments: 710 +- News: Panasonic's New LED Bulbs Shine For 19 Years on Wednesday September 16, @01:56AM
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kdawson
on Wednesday September 16, @01:56AM
from the shine-on dept.
from the shine-on dept.
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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."
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ROI (Score:5, Insightful)
$40 still seems pretty pricey for a light bulb,
one that saves 23$ a year, which lasts a whopping 19 years ? yup, some people are stupid.
Re:ROI (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:ROI (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:ROI (Score:5, Interesting)
CFLs in my house have died within a year: the ones installed in the bathroom and kitchen. They don't like the humidity and heat which is why I'm not surprised. The others have lasted since Feb 2007. Brands don't seem to matter.
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Re:ROI (Score:5, Funny)
Brands don't seem to matter.
If decades have mottos, that should be the motto of the "00s".
Since everything comes from the same factory in China, brands no longer matter.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I swear to God if anybody does that to me when I'm moving into the house they've sold, I'm turning up
Re:ROI (Score:4, Interesting)
(What I would do if swapping to LED bulbs would be to put the bulbs I take out in a box somewhere and reinstate them when leaving.)
Yeah I would put cheap globes in too. On a different but related note I have a relative who, when he inspected a house he was buying would hide items which he wanted to own, then retrieve them after taking the place over.
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Re:ROI (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:ROI (Score:4, Interesting)
In a lamp test by a Finnish magazine the 3 EUR fluorescent lamp died at 3000 hours. The more expensive ones are still going on but starting to show longer warming times, stains/cracks and other problems. In addition to these problems fluorescents are hazardous waste and should be recycled. At 10x longer lifespan the LED light sounds like a good deal to me.
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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.
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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.
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Re:Light bulb as a service (Score:5, Funny)
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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]
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Re:Light bulb as a service (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot to finish your thought with "if you compeletely and unjustifiably overreact.
That's pretty much what businesses and schools do in our litigious age. A local school in my area was recently closed for two days over an old barometer that got dropped in one of the science classrooms. They brought in a professional cleanup crew and spent $80,000 to have the mercury spill cleaned up.
Now I can understand closing off the classroom where the spill happened but closing the whole school seems rather excessive to me. $80,000 for cleanup seems really excessive. But that's what they have to do in this day and age. Otherwise some parent would freak out ("OMG, you mean my kid was within a quarter mile of spilled mercury?! I read someone that stuff is as dangerous as Dihydrogen Monoxide!") and they'd be writing that $80,000 check to a law firm instead of a cleanup crew.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Should CFs be disposed of properly? Yes.
Is one broken CF a hazmat issue? No.
Re:ROI (Score:4, Insightful)
You only save $23 a year if you compare against an incandescent bulb, which is like comparing your car's fuel economy against a school bus. When you compare these bulbs to CFLs, they make much less economic sense, unless you're worried about Mercury pollution.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And what's a little mercury pollution? Its not like that stuffs harmful.
I'll take LEDs any day over a CFL. I refuse to switch to those, they're just too hazardous for home use. I'll go to leds when the color temperature works out, until then its good old incandecents.
Re:ROI (Score:5, Insightful)
accidents, overvoltage or simply moving out of the apartment
accidents : LED's are VERY durable.
overvoltage : do you live in a third world country ?
moving out : take them with you
19 years
more efficient : maybe OLED's, and they're not market-ready. And 2 years from now means I allready have my investment + 6$ back.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There are places where the cost to reach a light bulb to change it is prohibitive. It could be theater marquee lights, lights atop a vaulted ceiling, or places behind a recessed opening that takes a lot of disassembly to get to. So even though $40 might be expensive up front, not having to set up scaffolding 30-40 feet up to get to some fixtures is worth it to some.
Not impressive lifetime for an LED (Score:5, Informative)
Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope they put a capacitor in there with a bridge rectifier instead of just ignoring half of the 50/60 Hz cycle.
Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems an interesting comment, but I don't understand it.
Could you explain this to me?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of LED christmas lights seem to have a visible flicker noticable from half a mile away. They probably don't have anything along the lines of smoothing capacitors in them. Hopefully we are talking about better technology though
Re:Hope they put a capacitor in there (Score:5, Funny)
Resistance is futile.
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LED diffusion problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Summary Misleading (Score:4, Interesting)
Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years
TFA
The bulbs use only an eighth the power of incandescents. That means a 60-watt-equivalent LED bulb would cost only 300 yen (about $3) a year instead of 2,380 yen ($25.80)--a significant savings over a lifetime.
The box pictured on the right has "6.9w", which if as good as a 60 watt incandescent, is probably only a watt or two better than the equivalent CFL.
Light temperature (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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.
Dimness (Score:5, Interesting)
LEDs are great (Score:5, Interesting)
The main issues to look for with LEDs is some of the cheaper ones give out a horrible ghostly white light. The box should say what colour temperature they output, and the best ones output 3200K warm white light similar to traditional incandescents. You wouldn't even know its an LED unless you stared at it. The other issue is only some bulbs work with dimmer switches, but there are models which do that too.
The case for LEDs in other kinds of fixtures is probably less clear cut. LEDs are fairly directional so they probably require some refractive covering to be useful in hang down bulbs. But in the meantime there are plenty of CFL solutions which again save a lot more than traditional incandescents. I really don't see why anyone would bother with incandescent bulbs unless they are ignorant of how much money they're losing or they have have highly specific needs that other kinds of bulbs do not provide.
Re:But still... (Score:4, Insightful)
So incandescent bulbs are a bad thing in most of the world for about a third of the year (summer) and in some of the world most of the year. If you happen to be running air-conditioning at the same time as an incandescent bulb, you're just pumping money out of the window.
Not to mention the fact that having a heat source 6 inches from your ceiling is generally not the most efficient way to heat a room. It makes far more sense to save the energy wasted from the bulb, and spend it in an efficient central heating system instead, where strategically placed radiators and vents can put the heat where it's actually needed.
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Re:But still... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But still... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But still... (Score:4, Insightful)
Canceled out? Please review how subtraction works. You mean reduced, not cancelled.
If you replace your incandescents by CFL's or LED's you'll produce less heat from your lighting, so in winter you'll need to run the heater more. However the total electricity use will be the same.
In summer (summer being defined as the months, weeks or days the heating is not being run) the heat from the incandescent will be wasted, and if you have air conditioning will make your air conditioning run harder.
Things will get better if you dump your electric heaters. They are expensive and there are shitloads of better systems available.
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Re:But still... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wah? You're losing me here.
Using silly made up numbers, assuming conservation of energy and double entry book-keeping:
With incandescents in winter:
In winter your heating bill is, say, $100.
Your lighting bill is, say, $100. $90 of that is heat, $10 is light.
So your electricity bill is $200, $190 for heat and $10 for light.
With CFL or LED or whatever in winter:
Your heating bill is now $190 ('cos the CFL/LED is not giving you the heat it used to)
Your lighting bill is now $10.
So your electricity bill is $200, $190 for heat and $10 for light.
In summer, with incandescents, your lighting bill is $100 and your air conditioning bill is $190.
In summer with CFL/LED's your lighting bill is $10 and your air conditioning bill is $100.
Like I said, silly made up numbers, and you can possibly correctly claim:
But that has nothing to do with your initial claim that the heating effect of incandescent bulbs in winter canceled out their electricity savings all year round.
Wah? You said you had electric heat! Is electricity cheaper than fuel oil in New England?
But it's so easy to get a low rate loan to buy, and property is such a great investment!
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Re:But still... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that if you're using a heat pump vs resistance heating, the unit's SEER value comes into play. My units are SEER 13, so every unit of energy it takes to run the beast pumps 13 units of heat around.
So using incandescent lights for heat actually wastes money - that Watt going into the bulb could be used to provide 13 Watts of heat instead of just 1 (0.9, actually).
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Re:But still... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But still... (Score:5, Funny)
If you are using AC, you are wasting money at TWICE the rate.
Note to self: never post AC. Too expensive.
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Re: (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 da
Re:But still... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously I don't know nearly enough about your situation to advise you, but I am not persuaded that heat produced due to inefficiency of lightbulbs or other devices is an economical source of heating.
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Re:But still... (Score:4, Interesting)
Your gas central heating is a much cheaper way to heat your house compared to incandescent bulbs.
Electricity is about 10-14p/kWh, and gas about 3p/kWh. Even with old heating it's still cheaper; my new condensing boiler is 85% efficient and was probably quite cheap (I rent, and everything else in the flat looks cheap), yours may well be even better.
I agree extra insulation is much more useful though. I'd like to see the government take the Green Party's economy-stimulation suggestion up: subsidise adding insulation to houses. Some incentive for landlords to add insulation would be good too, but I think this might happen with the home rating thing.
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Re:But still... (Score:5, Insightful)
- CFLs have a power factor of around 0.5, which means they use twice as much power as rated. For example a 15 watt CFL uses 15 watts in your home, but then it uses another 15 watts at the central power plant due to the need to "rebalance" the power and restore the PF to 1.0. TOTAL == 30 volt-amps burned
Except that the power company puts PF correction in far sooner than the power plant, and while it doubles the amps for wire resistance calculations(until it hits the power company's correction equipment), it actually doesn't double the wattage used. More like 5-10%. They build PFC in pretty much as standard on high quality high efficiency computer power supplies, why would you think the power company couldn't do the same? And there are better bulbs out there with active PFC.
- New technologies have allowed folks like GE to build 60 watt incandescants that only use 30 watts while still providing the same brightness. So the net usage is the same as the CFL. No need to abandon the old bulbs.
Neat tech, but like I said, a 15 watt bulb with a PF of .5 doesn't mean it's using 30 watts. So the CFL still has a leg up of aobut 50% more light per watt than the new higher efficiency bulbs.
- CFLs *hate* heat. CFLs hate cold. CFLs hate humidity. CFLs hate dimmers.
I have CFLS in my unheated north dakota garage. the 12 watters start a little slower in the winter, but are still going strong. I have a 23 watt(100watt equiv) in my bathroom. It's been there for over a year, hasn't quit yet. Not instant full brightness - but I like that for those midnight trips. I don't have a dimmer in my house, but it's a five minute job to swap the dimmer out with a CFL compatible one(remember to get a dimmable CFL).
It sounds like you're buying cheap bulbs, and your dimmer is probably the old resistance type, not the newer electronic pulse type.
- CFLs hate being turned on and off. Rapid cycling makes them die as quick as an incandescent bulb. So you've spent 5 times as much for a bulb than doesn't last any longer.
In 6 years the only CFL to die on me was from being dropped.
- CFLs have a warm-up time. Turn it on to read your paper, and you have to wait 5 minutes before you can see the writing. Turn it on to go down the basement stairs - and you can't see the steps because it's still too dim (a safety hazard).
For me it takes longer for my eyes to adjust to the new light level, open the book/paper, whatever. The 100 watt equivalent in the bathroom has the longest start-up time, and even it is pretty much instant on, just at ~40-60 watt equivalnet for the first 10 seconds.
If the stairs are too dim, put in a brighter bulb. Heck, I wonder where people like you are getting your slow starting CFLs from, because none of mine take that long. I have two incandescent bulbs left in closets, and the only reason they aren't CFLs yet is because they haven't died, and I use them too little to bother.
I use a mix of GE and Sylvania bulbs, what are yours?
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Re:Philips (Score:5, Funny)
Because in 18 years a bunch of heavy-set guys in Panasonic overalls will come around and make sure your Philips bulb has a little "accident".
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Re:More useless trash (Score:4, Insightful)
You had 38 CFL bulbs that all died in less than a year. Meanwhile other people (myself included) are seeing multiple years of life out of ours. As you note, it's can't possibly be something unusual in your case; you have electricl voodoo, and have a line conditioner. That's interesting.
For no particular reason, I'm reminded of the guy I know who complains that every single romantic relationship he's in ends messily. He's wisely concluded that it's impossible for any man to have a healthy, long-term relationship with with women. I'm sure there is some valuable lesson there. [despair.com]
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