Sunday 17 April 2011

Analyzing When Buying LED Light Bulbs


1. Top-quality LEDs: LEDs have wide diversification & lots of types are useless for indoor or outdoor lighting applications. The finest LED chips emit light with a Color Rendering Index of 85%. LED light bulbs that use top-quality LEDs will last much longer than the novelty bulbs that lots of are selling & 60% longer than lots of competing bulbs that use inferior LEDs.

2. Liftime Cost: While the preliminary cost per bulb is still high, the total lifetime cost of an LED light bulb is actually much lower than that of equivalent CFL & incandescent bulbs. Taking in to consideration energy costs as well as resources necessary & time to replace shorter-lived CFL & incandescent bulbs, an LED bulb that lasts 80,000 hours has a much lower lifetime cost.



3. Led bulbs chips: LEDs do generate heat, & this heat is the largest issue that manufacturers face developing LED lighting applications. Manufacturers can now produce individual LED chips that are as bright as a 100-watt incandescent bulb, but these LEDs are practically are useless for general lighting because installing them in a fixture creates ventilation issues that have not yet been solved. LEDs installed in fixtures & bulbs must be ventilated properly, & the better the chip, the more difficult it is to properly chilled. There's lots of LED light bulbs on the market that do not take this in to consideration & either use cheap chips so they do not ventilate them, or do not ventilate their chips properly, significantly reducing its lifespan. While the typical LED light bulb is barely warm to the touch, if the chip is not properly ventilated, it can fail prematurely.

4. The lifespan of the led bulbs: The lifespan of an LED light bulb ought to be its half-life. LED light bulbs do not burn out, they gradually fade out. When a seller says an LED bulb will last 80,000 hours, they mean that at that point, the chips will have reached 50% efficiency, & the bulb need to get replaced. So, the bulb might last 100,000 hours or more, but its efficiency will have degraded greatly by that point. Using this 100,000-hour life as a selling point is therefore misleading. While LEDs do not last forever, they will last 50-75 times longer than a comparable incandescent & 6-8 times longer than a CFL.

5. Dimmable Led Bulbs: Dimming an LED light bulb is tricky. LEDs need constant current to operate. Because of this, if a standard dimming method is applied, it will flicker at regular intervals, or worse, basically not work. In order to dim a LED light, a 0-10V dimming module is necessary in order to trick the LED in to emitting less light. In theory, all LED lights are dimmable with this module, but it is pretty hard to install.

6. The leds color temperature: Color temperature & beam spread are the other key tools for comparing LED lights. Both color temperature & beam spread are measured in degrees. Color temperature refers to the color of the light emitted(warm white led, daylight white led and cool white led). In general, 3000 Kelvin is warm white (closer to infrared light) & 5000 Kelvin is chilled white (closer to ultraviolet light). Chilled white is brighter because it is the natural color of LED light, whereas chips that emit a warm white light need a phosphorous filter to warm the color temperature, thus reducing the chips brightness. Beam spread is the angle of the light that is being emitted, you can see a presentation of the beam angle. The lower the number, the more like a spot the light is.

7. Led bulbs lumens: When searching for LED light bulbs, you need to understand lumens. The lumen is a standard unit you can use to compare LED light bulbs to standard bulbs, such as incandescents & halogens. Roughly, a lumen is a measure of brightness and the more lumens you get, the brighter your room will be. Lumen quantity is important, but perhaps more important is lumen quality, i.e., luminous efficacy (lumen/Watt). Todays quality LEDs have a luminous efficacy between 80-90 lumens/watt.

8. Choose a reputable manufacturer led bulb: Searching the net for some led light bulbs, you will quickly find that the LED light bulb market is inundated with many kind of products. Lots of these led bulbs are comparatively cheap (less than $15); however, you may find that lots of these LED bulbs consist of open to doubtful craftsmanship & doubt materials. Nice LED light bulbs cost over these cheap ones because they use high-quality chips with prices firmly set by reputable manufacturers like Cree. This means that though these LED light bulbs are more costly, they are far superior.

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