They’re here: reasonable LED bulbs
By “reasonable,” I mean bulbs that produce as much light as a 100-watt incandescent. Hank Green at Ecogeek has the story:
… The new Evolux line at EarthLED puts off just as much light as a 100 W incandescent but consumes only 13 W. A 13 W CFL, on the other hand, puts out about as much light as an 80 W incandescent would. [see photo at the Ecogeek link - LG]
… The new line also promises to be cheaper than CFLs over the life of the bulb, not so much because of energy savings (though that helps) but because of the bulb’s lifetime. CREE’s LEDs are rated at over 50,000 hours, which is more than a decade of use…and 5X longer than CFLs.
… Besides being more efficient and longer lasting than CFLs, the bulbs also contain no mercury, are significantly more durable and won’t shatter if dropped, and never get too hot to touch. They’re about to release another version of the bulb that will turn any lamp into a dimmable lamp. Simply by turning the lamp on and off quickly, you can select 150 lumen, 750 lumen, or 950 lumen settings. …
More at the link.
Glad the LED’s don’t have Mercury.
Can you imagine the hassle of breaking a bulb that has even a teensy bit of Mercury in it ? One tough choice: either clean it up yourself & risk going Mad-Hatter or call in a HazMat team to dab it up. Thinking
the Haz-Mat option would be quite costly. If one cleaned it up themselves & didn’t dispose of them properly (as per many pages of federal/state regulations) one could face a huge fine & maybe even a little jail time.
hyperwarp
12 April 2008 at 8:17 am
Quite a few places offer recycling of compact fluorescents. I believe that Walmart does, for example.
LeisureGuy
12 April 2008 at 9:03 am
That is a $90 dollar bulb !! Prices will be coming down, so I think I’ll wait a little while. For some good info on LED light bulbs, and much lower prices ( of course on lower output bulbs ) http://www.DonsGreenStore.com is worth a visit.
Joseph
12 April 2008 at 11:05 am