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
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 .
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.
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.
Now this definitely makes my head spin!!!
What is important is can these LEDs be plant growing LEDs at $3 a light?