New $3 LED Bulb Lasts 60 Years
The battle between CFL and LED bulbs may finally be over thanks to researchers at Cambridge University who have developed a $3 LED bulb that lasts for 60 years. The bulb, which is smaller than a penny, is 12 times more efficient than tungsten bulbs and three times more efficient than fluorescent bulbs.
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Cambridge’s new 100,000 hour, mercury-free LED bulb uses a man-made semiconductor called gallium nitride that is grown on a cheap silicon wafer. Previously, gallium nitride has only been grown on pricey sapphire wafers.
According to researchers working on the project, the first low-cost LED bulbs could be in stores as early as 2011.
Photo Credit: Graham Turner
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January 29th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Nice… The really big story here is “Mercury Free”! Can’t wait, hopefully they’re out before 2011
January 30th, 2009 at 5:46 am
I wonder how the color will be in the early models. It took awhile for CFLs to get it right.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Color isnt too hard to adjust in LEDs since its just a mixture of phosphorescent materials.
January 30th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Really a lot more mercury, and carbon, and soot will be reduced at your local coal plant rather than not using a cfl.
January 31st, 2009 at 2:10 am
Always in the future !!!
I have been hearing this kind of song and dance for 50 years.
It is just a scheme to get investor money and it never pays a dividend.
January 31st, 2009 at 3:15 am
just watching is right. Ive never even heard of these so called “led lights”. I call shenanigans.
February 1st, 2009 at 11:44 pm
wow hopefully it will be in production.
February 7th, 2009 at 4:52 am
LED replacement light bulbs are here TODAY. I just bought a bunch at Sam’s Club. Made by Lights of America, $14.86 for 3, 40W of soft white light for 1.5W of power consumption. Just replaced a bunch of 7W CFL’s in our ceiling fans. Turn-on time is instant and they work great in cold temps outside, unlike a lot of CFL’s. Color is perfect….they just need to market them with frosted glass to reduce the glare when you look at it.
February 8th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Now is the time to get a seed – starter grow bed going, and may be hydroponics in the winter months will pay off with nice greens for Northern climates! If this is true, and the power consumption is the typically low LED levels, we have a food miracle on our hands! Growing indoor gardens in the darker months will become child’s play! One Web site now instructs on the use of xmas LEDs and has great success, these larger, brighter fixtures will revolutionize home gardening and have the potential to feed hungry people world wide! They will also reduce power consumption by a credible factor and obviate the use of heavy copper wiring in homes for lighting, a huge environmental and cash savings! We are on the threshold of a new era! Post (GRD) great republican depression Americans will have been conditioned by the catastrophic events of the GRD to make mind bending changes in their lives, this will be one of them, more solar and wind powered homes, more greenhouses, and may be they will even see their way to doing things mathematical metrically, as the entire world outside their small backwards little space does! Who knows! Electing Obama was a miracle, seeing GM go to the bottom and beg for socialistic government help was another! Come on G d, fill in the rest of the blanks, we are waiting!
February 12th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Sounds great, but I agree that the real question is when it will come to market and how much it will cost. For a good solution available right now, check out the new Pharox LED bulb. Requires just 4 watts of energy (!) to replace a 40-watt incandescent. Prices on this latest generation of LED bulbs are getting more reasonable too… http://tinyurl.com/d2ar8o
- Aaron Dalton, Editor, 1GreenProduct.com
February 20th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
We should have known profit from the led lightings whose long lifespan,stabilities of light glare as well as green conservations.In addition,high power but
less source consumption,real a energy savings.By the way,WjGOOD does well .
May 28th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Let see they just made CFL’s dimmable but their dimming capabilities are not very good at the lower range, they tend to flicker. When the LED replaement is put out shure the non dimmable will be cheap and good CR factors will be horrendous making people shy away again. Lets just see how they will perform in the real world.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Just wrote an article about this, and you’re jumping to conclusions that aren’t yet proven. First of all, the Cambridge group has barely managed to grow the LED wafers on small pieces of silicon in the lab, which is a long, long way from mass production.
Secondly, it turns out that the sapphire substrate is only a tiny portion of the cost of LED bulb manufacture– one 2-inch sapphire substrate costs about $25 and can be used to make 1,000 LEDs, so the silicon is not really a very exciting “breakthrough”.
Thirdly, the consensus in the field is that Humphries (the Cambridge researcher putting out the press releases on which the news articles are based– and on which his grant renewals depend) has a habit of over-hyping his results, and that the problems with silicon substrates will still be difficult to solve large scale.
Major companies are working toward lower-cost, higher-brightness LED bulbs, however (absolutely the wave of the future) by standardizing production and making the light engines modular, so that economies of scale can be introduced. Prices for home-quality lighting LEDs will be coming down soon, and since they last for so many years, you’ll actually save money by using them instead of CFLs.
June 4th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Now this definitely makes my head spin!!!
What is important is can these LEDs be plant growing LEDs at $3 a light?
November 30th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I am all for L.E.D. bulbs. I think some of the
manufacturers should offer a promotional price
so some of us can afford them. Any one know of
such?
December 18th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Watch how fast this gets swept under the rug and forgotten about.
January 3rd, 2010 at 9:33 pm
i wonder how many lumens they put out…..
January 4th, 2010 at 8:00 pm
I have 2 Lights of America LED lamps, purchased at WalMart in Rochester NH.
1 LED lamp is a 120V ‘40W incandescent replacement lamp’. Light output is rather blue, and only projects in one hemisphere – with the base down, in a table lamp stand and a white lamp shade over it, the upper half of the shade is illuminated, the lower half is not, the separation is a clearly distinct line. Failure #1: not as omnidirectional as either CFL or incandescent.
Other LED lamp is a 12 VDC bipin reflector type intended for track lighting. It consumes less than 2 watts, I am powering it with a 12VDC 300mA wall transformer (1.5 watts would be 120 mA load, plenty of room). In this lamp, 4 individual LEDs out of 20 total are not working, bulb has approximately 1200 hrs on it. I would call this lamp to be clearly ‘end of life’ (I’m a career Electronic Engineering Development Technician, I’ve done MTBF studies and reliability testing in the past). Failure #2: longevity is not as advertised. Even when this lamp was new, light output was really low compared to the incandescent it is to replace.
All in all, LED lighting is best for niche applications where acceptance is determined by the user, and, LED companies needs to admit LED does NOT match lumen outputs of incandescents in both directionality and intensity.
January 13th, 2010 at 11:55 am
I don’t like buing lightbulbs that last longer than I do…