Save Energy Now
LED Lighting
New, highly efficient, high-tech lighting has flown in under the radar and is on the market now. LED lighting.
Most people by now know about Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL) for home use, and are aware of how much energy they save and how long they last in comparison to old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs.
Many people don't yet know that the next generation of light bulbs is here and already far outperforming CFL.
LED lamps have arrived.
LED Lighting is the New Way
Light-Emitting Diode lights use even less energy than CFLs, and they last long enough that many of the will be inherited by your heirs.
LED lamps are very new, so there's still a cost differential as they ramp up into the mainstream, but they already more than pay their way. And the sooner the public gets more energy conscious and notices LED lamps, the sooner the price will drop even more. Already, it's pointless to even consider buying a flashlight with an incandescent bulb. The LED flashlight will outlive it in every way, plus cost no more. Plus the LED flashlight is safer for long-term use. As the battery voltage drops with an incandescent bulb, the filament cools, and when it does its resistance drops, draining the battery even faster, so near their end of life incandescent flashlights go from some light to now light very quickly. LED bulbs just very slowly get dimmer over time, because as the voltage drops, the LED consumes less and less power.
Early LED light bulbs cost as much as 50 times more than incandescent bulbs, but EVEN at that huge differential, the lifetime cost of bulb end energy was still less than a sixth of the incandescent cost. Now that LED costs are plummeting the savings are even bigger.
Start saving now. If you're on a budget, do an eBay search for LED light or LED flashlight.
Already on the market are LED light bulbs for home lighting, LED flashlights, LED desk lamps. LED headlights and taillights, and LED Christmas lights.
Some LED bulbs don't actually work as well in older cars because the older electronics assumes a high current draw, and therefore the car electronics sometimes thinks LED bulbs are burned out even when operating just fine.
LED Advantages
LED lamps produce almost no heat, they light instantly (unlike CFLs) they can withstand jolts.
Some white LED lamps have a bluish tint, but more and more color-corrected LEDS are hitting the market closer to the color temperature of sunlight.
LED lights can be used with dimmers. CFLs can't.
Ever since LCD monitors for computers started shoving aside the old energy-inefficient, bulky, heavy CRT monitors, their backlights have been very thin CFL tubes. That has made the backlighting the biggest single point of failure in LCD TVs and LCD monitors. The next generation screens are starting to appear now, using LEDs for backlighting.
The Marketplace
Congress is talking about a law to force consumers to abandon incandescent bulbs by around 2012. Long before then the market will have automatically taken care of the issue, because probably by then end of 2009, few people will still be in the dark about the enormous cost of staying with the old energy-burning technology.
Unfortunately the battery manufactures who stand to lose a lot as people phase over to LED flashlights must know where the skeletons are buried at places like Walgreens and other drug stores. Although LED flashlights are already as cheap as incandescent bulb flashlights, and offer overwhelming advantages, the drugstore shelves are still lined with incandescent bulb flashlights. Maybe it's that the drug stores also don't want to lose that income stream. Tell your favorite drugstore that they are selling obsolete junk that keeps our dependency on foreign oil high and that you will buy your LED flashlights online if the drugstore won't do the right thing for their customers.
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