How Long Does an LED Last?
The life of an LED is dependant on the engineering of the product it is in and the environment in which it is meant to operate. The exact same LED chip can last 500 hours in a poorly-designed product and over 50,000 hours in a well-designed product. The key factor is how quickly the heat-sync can get the heat away from the LED. An LED is typically considered “dead” at 70% of initial light output. A quality product that offers 90 foot-candles of illumination will still provide 60+ foot-candles 20-25 years from now (an 8-10 hour/day office environment).
What is Colour Temperature?
Colour temperature is one characteristic of visible light measured by the Kelvin scale. Generally, the human eye functions more effectively when viewing objects illuminated by a light source whose colour temperature is closest to that of mid-day sun.
What is a Lumen?
Luminous Flux is the total “effective” output of a light. Luminous Flux is expressed in Lumens. The larger the lumens, the greater the output of the light.
Why consider LED Technology?
LED (Light Emitting Diode) Technology offers enormous benefits for indoor lighting applications. Because of their long life, durability (no filament to fail), and efficiency (lumens/watt), LED lights provide significant service cost and power consumption savings.
The colour spectrum of light emitted by LEDs is close to the colour spectrum of the mid-day sun. Generally, the human eye functions more effectively (better vision) when viewing objects illuminated by a light source whose colour spectrum is closest to the colour spectrum of the mid-day sun.
Why not Halogen?
90% of the energy emitted by a halogen down light is in the form of heat, not light.
Halogen lamps are believed by many consumers to be economical to run due to their low-voltage operation. However, this is a common misconception. They do in fact consume an excessive amount of energy and operate at such a high temperature (around 300 degrees Celsius) that they are proven to have caused 57 house fires in Victoria alone during an 18 month period. In NSW, 75 fires have been attributed to halogen lamps in the past 5 years.
Why Not CFL?
Since announcing the proposed ban on incandescent bulbs, the Government has widely supported Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL) as a suggested replacement.
They can be purchased today from any supermarket.
However, while CFL’s last several times longer than a conventional lamp, they also contain Mercury. The presence of Mercury may create difficult and expensive long-term disposal and recycling issues.
Jeff Hu