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You have
three primary lighting options on the market now on a
commercial basis. You have the original incandescent lights
which are slowly being phased out. You have CFL's which
will follow suit for different reasons and you have LED, the
eventual answer to problems of the other two. Let's take a
look at CFL's and try to understand why it was only a
temporary fix to the core issues with incandescents and why
LED's are will be the end-game for lighting. So what's the
problem with CFL's?
First,
what is a CFL bulb? CFL stands for Compact Fluorescent
Light(ing). Basically, they took the technology of the
fluorescent bulb and squeezed it down to a smaller (hence
the compact) form factor so it could run in existing
sockets. Essentially, a CFL uses electricity to excite gas
trapped in its tube. The gas then emits this extra electric
power as light. Traditional fluorescent lights require a
ballast, an electronic gateway that controls the quality and
quantity of electric power to the gas so that the light
output is stable. CFl's have their ballast built directly
into the base or socket of the bulb individually which is
why they tend to be a little longer than their incandescent
replacements (more so when they first came out). So what
benefits did CFL's bring to the market allowing them to
survive and flourish against incandescent lights?
Incandescents have two very big weaknesses. First, they are
terribly inefficient at generating light. They are much
better at generating heat with 90% of the energy output
being heat. Secondly, they are very fragile and susceptible
to failure both due to the vacuum glass housing and the fact
that some substrate must be heated to very high temperature
in order to generate the light. So high cost to generate
relative amount of lumens and short lifespan. That's where
CFL's came on the scene.
CFL's
are more efficient in terms of converting electricity into
light. If a 60 watt incandescent generates a certain amount
of light, the corresponding CFL might drop that to 23 watts
or less. We're using half the energy now to power our
lighting requirements. The lifespan of the average CFL bulb
is also much higher. If an incandescent standard bulb
typically lasts 2000 hours, you can expect to get roughly
double that or 5000 hours from a CFL. So all good news,
right? Why would we even look at LED's then as a superior
value proposition to CFLs.
CFL's
come with some nasty baggage. First, there are very toxic
chemicals required to make them work, most notably mercury
and phosphorus. As mentioned above, they do eventually fail
and if you have 100's of thousands or millions of bulbs
being disposed of each year (some properly but many end up
in the trashcan and landfill) each year, you quickly have a
toxic nightmare. It's not a long term fix to our lighting
needs solely based on this disposal issue. What about the
lifespan and cost of lighting power benefit?
What
positives that exist and originally ushered in the CFL light
to market are only magnified by LED lighting. LED lights
are even more efficient in terms of watt to lumen conversion
than CFL with that same 60 watt incandescent coming down to
roughly 3 watts for LED lights. They are also much more
sturdy with that CFL lifespan of 5000 hours increasing to
50000 hours for our LED lighting technology. This is why
our LED lights, over a 5 year window, will significantly
beat both incandescent and CFL's as a value proposition.
Light bulbs will now make the important journey from expense
to investment and future generations will thank us for the
effect on the environment for generations.
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