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Relative to other lighting
technologies such as incandescent and fluorescent/CFLs, we
could almost leave this page blank for LED’s. That might
throw some people so we’ll compare one of the greatest
strengths of LED lighting over other available technologies
and a key factor in their savings to the owner.
Maintenance and Replacement costs and effort goes way
down. When we compare watt to watt and bulb to bulb costs
in our “How LED Saves You Money” article, we don’t even
include the financial cost value of labor associated with
the more frequent changing of incandescent and CFL bulbs but
it’s there. So let’s into the maintenance and replacement
requirements for LED’s so we can can contrast those with
other available technologies.
The key term here is a little
electronics 101 called Solid State. Simply defined, Solid
State describes an electronic component that is made out of
solid materials. An example of a transition would be the
old computers than ran on vacuum tubes and today’s
transitors. For some reason, we’re still lighting our world
with 1950’s technology. Incandescent and fluorescent lights
are not solid state. They break, they burst, and in
general, they are more fragile. Much more fragile as anyone
changing a bulb knows for experience. There are more things
to go wrong and invariably, breakage and failure can infect
about 20% of finished incandescent bulbs. There’s also the
intense ability of heat to wreak havoc on any system
(literally a law of physics…one of the big 4) and the small
world of the light bulb is not immune to our laws of
physics. On average, incandescent bulbs will last about
2000 hours. fluorescent and CFL’s will last about 8000
hours although they steadily lose their ability to light
(lumens) during their life. What about our LED lights?
10,000 hours? 15000 hours? Higher. In fact, you’re
looking at 50000 hours. There’s just less to go wrong with
a solid state electronic component. This factors heavily
into the cost structure (and advantage) of LED’s over any
time period beyond 1 year. So what impact does this longer
lifespan have on the business owner prescient enough to make
the switch?
The obvious impact is in the
form of labor. You may think…”How much time does it take to
screw in a lightbulb” which quickly leads to a few bad
jokes. If you have 100 lights in our building not to
mention 1000 lights or 20,000 lights, it starts to add up
quickly. Why? Because incandescents are going to go out
after about 241 days at 10 hours a day. That’s only 5
minutes to switch out (assuming they’re accessible) but you
multiply 5 minutes by 1000 lights and now you ask the
question, at $20/hour, can I find something better for
skilled labor to do with their time? Yes you can. The
answer is to have them put in LED lights and then forget
about them for years.
ZeroHedge.com, a snarky but
informative financial website has the tagline, “On a Long
Enough Timeline, the Survival Rate of Everyone Goes to
Zero”. That’s true for all things including LED lights. So
what’s involved at that point? This is the genius of our
particular LED lamps. When most LED lights fail, the entire
light fails and needs to be replaced. We felt even that was
wasteful so we built our technology around a chip or
“driver” that pushes the electricity to the LED light. We
consider 20% reduction in light be time for replacement but
you only need to replace the driver in most cases. This
approach is substantially less expensive than other LED
lights where the entire lamp is replaced. The rest of the
industry will be catching up with our technology for years.
You will already have it today and it will start saving you
today. It’s good to be early.
When a driver does fail,
you will send the lamp back to us, we’ll switch out the
driver for a new one, and send back the refurbished lamp.
The cost is much less to you than to replace the entire
lamp. Why throw out the computer because the software has a
bug. We don’t why…but 99% of business and residences do it
every year at their considerable expense. |
