LED lights are the future

I've been meaning to write a blog about LED lighting for a while now and it seems  suitable to dot now that this years winner of the Nobel prize in physics have been revealed. Those that came up with LED lights.

Well The EU banned traditional light bulbs 2012. Before that the alternative to lights bulb was energy saving lamps. And those of us who tried them out didn't like them at all. They were supposed to last longer than light bulbs and used much less energy. That was the only good thing about them. They were expensive and sensitive to thrusts. Like if you had a heavy shopping bag and slammed it a bit hard down on the kitchen table when you got home from grocery shopping, chances are the energy saving lamps worth 20 € or more in your shopping bag was broken. You couldn't dim them. You were alls supposed to dispose of them separately, you couldn't throw in your trash can. Since there were no clear guidelines on where to bring them I bet most still ended up in the household waste. Releasing the mercury they contained where the waste was disposed of. I bet by 2020 you will have a hard time finding a energy saving lamp in the store shelf. It was a temporary solution that will be phased out by itself during the next few years.

The next solution was halogen lamps. Most lighting in our home right now are halogen lamps. They look and worked like traditional light bulbs, they are cheap and uses a lot less power than traditional light bulbs. The downside is they still use a lot more power than energy saving lamps and get hot. They have been blamed for causing a number of house fires.

Then LED lamps came along. First they were expensive, then they got cheaper. Still not as cheap as halogen lamps but almost on the same levels as energy saving lamps. We got a LED flashlight to use at work it uses one AAA battery. I haven't dared to look straight into it's light. Fearing it might cause me to see a bright light for several hours afterward. I have a 6D cell Maglite at Home, this little LED flashlight brings out more light than the Maglite does.

Compared to light bulbs LED lamps are using about 1/10 of power that light bulbs needed, even less than energy saving lamps. They also last a lot longer and are not that sensitive to thrust. They are getting cheaper as they become more common. Some of them look a bit weird but that's not really an issue. The only bad new is that if you need dimmable lamps, those kind of LED lights are about as twice as expensive as the normal LED lights. This is the future.