$60 Light Bulb Debuts On Earth Day 743
theodp writes "How much would you pay for an amazing light bulb? On Sunday — Earth Day — Philips' $60 LED light bulb goes on sale at Home Depot and other outlets. The bulb, which lasts 20 years, won a $10 million DOE contest that stipulated the winning bulb should cost consumers $22 in its first year on the market. Ed Crawford, the head of Philips' U.S. lighting division, said it was always part of the plan to have utility rebates bring the price down to the $22 range."
Good for some... (Score:5, Interesting)
I wont be buying any though....well maybe a few as a stop-gap but, not many.
I have been getting RGB LED strips, and looking to totally replace the house lighting. Part of the problem here is the "bulb". Yes, if you stick to a bulb form factor, and be backwards compartible, it can be hard to get enough light from LEDs, and expensive to build out etc.
However, bulbs were just the first invention....what makes that form factor so superior except for backwards compatibility?
I am looking at long strips, more like flourecent tube fixtures than bulbs. Can use many cheaper LEDs instead of a few expensive big ones... can use RBG LEDs and thus be able to change colors, or even white temp.
Of course, the stips are cheap pre-made, cheaper than I can find the LEDs on them in fact (cheapest price for 1000 in bulk was more expensive per LED than buying strips of 150 at a time) and the strips have limiting resistors, which are a major source of power loss (would be better to drop the resistor and use a constant current circuit.... but having to desolder or jumper smd resistors on each and every segment of the strip defeats the purpose of buying strips to make it easy)
Still though.... at $60/bulb.... ouch. and...its still just a bulb... with a single light color?
Re:20 years? (Score:2, Interesting)
CFLs generally don't fail that fast. For the most part, I've only replaced 1 or 2 CFLs in 4-5 years. However, there's one exception...I have one pair of lights on the same circuit where I've replaced the bulbs probably 3-4 times each. Seems to me there must be a problem with that circuit getting a bad power supply. I suspect that is what your problem is too. I've no idea if LEDs hold up better then CFLs in that circumstance.
Re:*SHOCK* (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay. But the light bulb is heavily subsidized. I get rebates from my power company for a variety of things. I've gotten rebates on CF bulbs in the past. If rebates were part of the rules of the competition, then I don't really understand your objection.
Re:20 years? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I have two of them in my garage. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the light color really okay? That's my main concern. I've often been underwhelmed with the spectrum offered.
subsidised or not it's to much (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean really, you can't drive adoption with a $60 bulb. Most people at the store going I've got 3 bulbs out are going to go "hrm $15 dollars or $180" Which do you think they are going to pick?
I'd love to know the Margins on this.
Re:*SHOCK* (Score:1, Interesting)
Because rebates are false savings, especially as they are practised by power companies. You can buy a green, eco-friendly, low-power Model XYZ A/C unit for $300 this year, or wait until next year when your power utility offers a $100 rebate on that particular model BUT the price has magically risen to $400.
I'm willing to bet the $60 Philips lightbulb is a $22 lightbulb with $38 in "rebates" layered on for the beenfit of Philips, the power utilities, and various other green advocates.
Re:*SHOCK* (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Philips (Score:5, Interesting)
I've taken apart a number of Philips' premium lighting products (both top-end CFLs and also electronic ballasts for fluorescent and high-intensity discharge lamps).
I was pretty surprised to see absolutely nothing but the best components. All the capacitors were either high quality metalized film, ceramic or premium ultra-long-life high-temperature Japanese Al electrolytic from a tier 1 manufacturer.
Similarly, the active components were heavily over-specified 100% avalanche rated rugged MOSFETs, with high quality protection (diode clamps and current limiting resistors) on the gate drives.
While cheap Chinese CFLs often use garbage grade components - I was pretty surprised at the quality of the commercial lighting products - but then I suppose that's why these units command such high prices.
An investment by the power companies (Score:5, Interesting)
Ultimately it comes right out of our power bills
Perhaps the power companies see it as an investment. Subsidizing the development (and eventual economies of scale) of technologies that use less power will allow a power company to put off expensive upgrades to generators and the grid for a few years.
Re:Philips (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't worry, the LEDs will still have tens of thousands of hours left in them when a $.02 capacitor blows its guts out and terminates the driver board because a $.05 capacitor would have bloated the BOM too much...
Friending you for that comment, cause that's probably what will happen.
Hmm... digging around some more, I find this breathless press release [philips.com] that says the competition dictates a minimum three year warranty. Funny how they advertise 20 years but promise only 3. Keep that in mind when deciding to purchase.
Living in southern climes (N hemisphere), I personally look forward to cheaper LED bulbs, though I think the whoop-de-doo is overestimated for people who live in northern climes or for rarely used lights. This is one place where the Republicans were right... I want a 75-cent bulb for my coat closet, not a $3 one and certainly not a $25 subsidized one.
I have an L Prize bulb (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had it for a month.
I love it. Very bright, great light.
To be honest, the only place it falls down is in the electronics.
Compared to $30 EcoSmart 60W bulb I got from Home Depot, the L Prize starts up slower (about 0.25sec versus instant), can turn red when it dims (sometimes the blue LED driver circuit cuts out and the red stays on) and sometimes when you turn the L Prize off it flashes once about 0.25sec after you turn it off.
Finally, putting both bulbs on an oscilloscope, the L Prize also has a messier current waveform, far more harmonic distortion than the other bulb.
What gives? This is a great bulb, but the electrics seem like they could use some improvement.
Any comments?
Re:Philips (Score:5, Interesting)
For some reason, the 'lightbulb' form factor seems to bring out the worst in designers of driver boards: Your basic, boring, overhead fluorescent tubes can be found running until their electrodes eventually degrade on some 80's inverter that has probably seen at least a dozen tubes come and go. LEDs, similarly, seem to last forever in their miscellaneous applications; but the moment they get shoved into lightbulbs half off them are either not receiving power, or in a series chain with a blown one, long before you get to start worrying about serious dimming or phosphor breakdown.
Neither tubes nor LEDs are, themselves, immortal of course; but it's just frustrating to see how often it's the driver board that keels over and dies long before the (generally not user-swappable) light emitters themselves are ready to go...
Re:money back if not delighted? (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>Have your wiring checked
Yeah that really saves me money. Spend hundreds of dollars on electrician to save a few pennies per year with CFLs. Besides it's NOT the wiring. I have CFLs that date back to the 90s and still work, but newer Philips and GE CFLs that only last 6 months. The problem is in the bulb not the wires..... I'd sooner go back to incandescent than deal with the hassle (similar to how I downgraded to the older XP rather than deal with the hassle of vista).
Re:*SHOCK* (Score:4, Interesting)
If you tell me who your power company is, I will attempt to show you that you are wrong about the rebates available to you. Before you answer too quickly, consider that many rebates are available from places other than your one power company. My CFL rebates, for instance, were from some company in Seattle, but I live in Wisconsin. Why? I don't know. Nevertheless, I still bet your power company has some kinds of programs, because I've never heard of one that doesn't. But you can show me my first, by telling me what company supplies your electricity, and I will do the leg work of googling "[company name] + rebate".
Re:Philips (Score:4, Interesting)
I use $5 battery powered motion-activated stick-up LED lamps for closets (with $3 worth of eneloops in them.) Mainly because there's no wiring run to them in this old house. They never blow out, and I rent, so if I move, they get tossed in a crate, no need to carefully pack them. Those closets where there was a socket used to blow their bulbs once per year. I'm now 7 years in on the stick-up lamps, so it's some time yet before I'll make my money back on those compared to replacing bulbs, and I annually top up the batteries so there is little convenience benefit versus changing bulbs, but considering a motion sensor for 120VAC costs as much as the lamp+batteries, in some respects I already have made my money back. They aren't powerful lights, but why I would need 40+W of light to find my vacuum cleaner is beyond me, and being magnetically attached means I can grab them to use them as a flashlight if needed. FWIW LED lights unlike CFLs are probably more tolerant to very occasional use and applications where they are turned on/off a lot (e.g. via motion sensors) than even incandescents.
Re:If 20 years is gaurunteed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not if you keep the receipt in your freezer. There is a small area of my freezer that I have specifically designated for thermal paper receipts. They do not ever fade as long as they are kept cool. I keep my thermal receipts in a sealed baggy in my freezer so that condensation does not get on them.
Re:To be banned in 2020 (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is in power generation. New electric plants are a huge investment. No matter what technology you use, an electric plant will affect the environment: hydro plants require damming rivers, nuclear plants generate waste that nobody wants, and coal plants spew out mercury and other nasty toxins. Even wind turbines make noise and kill birds. So electric companies don't want to build them, because they're a giant PITA, which makes them really, really expensive. And as a customer, if your power company has to add a generator, guess who will pay for it? Existing customers are not exempt from rate hikes, so they are generally opposed to this construction, too.
Electric companies have another pressure: increased demand in the form of new customers. People add kids, buy big TV sets, and electric cars. Factories add machines. Contractors build new neighborhoods. They all need the electric company to provide additional power. But if the electric plants are already at capacity, how do we add more users?
Turn to the economics of supply and demand. If we can't add any more to the supply, we can raise prices in order to cut demand.
If an incandescent bulb costs you $1.00 to buy, but $10.00 per month to operate, and lasts only one year, and an LED bulb that costs $60 to buy, $1.67 per month to operate, and lasts 20 years, which would you buy? Most people are actually really stupid, and continue to buy the $1 bulbs because they're "cheaper", not realizing the real difference is $121 per year vs. $23 per year. I'm suspecting that you'd be smart enough to eventually decide "the light from this $1 bulb isn't worth the extra $98 per year."
Instead of raising all the rates, we can use a curious property of electricity generation: generators have a "peak" capacity, but rarely have the demand to consume it all. If you could shift some of the peak load to off-peak times, you could add more clients without having more generators. This is where the Smart Grid comes into play. If I'm operating a smart grid, I'll sell you off-peak electricity for $0.10/kWh. But if you want to burn electrons on the hottest day of the summer, it'll cost you $5.00/kWh, because I have to fire up the really expensive peak-time natural gas generators. So my smart grid can tell your appliances that electric rates are going up to $5.00 for a few hours. You can set those smart appliances to "don't run the dishwasher or electric dryer unless the cost is less than $0.25/kWh."
Another way to cut demand is to increase efficiency. We know incandescent bulbs are highly inefficient. And incandescent bulbs make up a large percentage of electric use in this country. If we can replace all the incandescent bulbs, the nation as a whole would save as much as 25% of today's electricity demand (yes, lighting is a huge part of today's demand.) That defers a lot of new plant construction, perhaps giving more efficient or less polluting technologies (such as solar, geothermal, or tidal) time to evolve. And it doesn't raise electric rates for everyone today.
Overall you're participating a shared national system, which is exactly why the nation has the right to try to optimize it. And I don't want my electric rates to go up in price because you imagine you have some "right" to cheap bulbs. (I still don't remember the line in the Bill of Rights where Madison wrote "The right of the public to use inefficient devices on the national electrical grid shall not be infringed.")
If it bothers you that much, take the real libertarian way out of this problem. Run off the grid. Buy your own generator and make your own juice. Nobody's going to tell you how efficient you have to be, you can figure that out on your own. You get all the benefits: make as much or little power as you want. And you get all the drawbacks. You get the generator noise. You get to exhaust the pollutants into your own back yard. You get to pay the fuel truck to deliver a tankful of gas every month. You get to pay for the generator and its maintenance. But it's all your solution.