Low–cost LEDs May Slash Household Electric Bills Within Five Years

[wuushew]

A new way of making LEDs could see household lighting bills reduced by up to 75% within five years. Gallium Nitride (GaN), a man-made semiconductor used to make LEDs (light emitting diodes), emits brilliant light but uses very little electricity. Until now high production costs have made GaN lighting too expensive for wide spread use in homes and offices

However the Cambridge University based Centre for Gallium Nitride has developed a new way of making GaN which could produce LEDs for a tenth of current prices.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090129090218.htm

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. And just like with CFLs...

Once they are in wide use, the energy companies will raise prices to compensate for the loss in revenues.

[wuushew]

2. You would still save on the cost of lamp replacement

100,000 hours vs. 750 for an incandescent. Sign me up.

[customerserviceguy]

4. Electricity would still be in great demand

for space and water heating, cooking and all the other devices that utilize electricity. Forty or fifty years ago, our grandparents' would have been shocked (pun intended!) at the number of things we use electricity for these days.

If we're going to plug our cars into the grid someday soon, saving a few kilowatts on lighting will help us out!

[HillbillyBob]

5. Solar water heaters produce water in excess of 125 degrees, most

produce water up to 180 degrees. Solar heated water can also be used as the base for radiant underfloor heating, most any house can be retrofited, even slab floors can have radiant added then a new flooring put over it.
Solar Air heating can take up a great deal of slack to reducing the need for fuel oil, wood or coal.

[customerserviceguy]

8. They are great, I used to have one

and in cloudy Western Washington State, no less! But they are not practical for apartment buildings that have relatively small roof areas for the number of people living under that roof.

[tridim]

3. I'm game, as long as they get the spectrum right.

I couldn't stand the early CFL's white spectrum, now they all seem to have the proper yellow cast.

[HillbillyBob]

6. They are improving the LEDs with newer warm white.

I copy/pasted a part of an article that explains.
We have a few LEDs here. The first couple were too blue, one is just right color but is too dim for reading, its a good filler light for the tv room. I have a couple in the plant room for starting seeds for the spring garden and saving the tropical plants we have over the winter seem to do a good job, but it does take several of the red/blue panels with some of the white panels to see by. The red blue are the proper wave lengths for the plants to do well.
I have a Phalinobplsis orchid that has bloomed for 4 months , the usual is they bloom one month on the stem, the stem dies and the plant splits, this one has repeatedly bloomed on the same stem 3 times!
There are newer LEDs that are much brighter, though we have been in budget crunch and have not been able to buy them yet. Also they tend to be directional so we will be recycling the older light fixtures and putting in new ones(they are cheap trailer type anyway).

http://ledlightsathome.com/2007/12/07/a-lesson-in-color-temperature/

"Color temperature has a specific scientific meaning. If you use the term “warm glow of light” to describe a typical incandescent bulb, a color scientist will correct your naive description. Similarly, the description “warm white” for a particular type of LED that mimics incandescent light closely is a misnomer.

Wikipedia, of course, has a full discussion of color temperature and several nice diagrams. I’ll summarize here.

Some LED products provide their color temperature. Some are labeled simply “warm white” because we lay persons think of the yellowish glow of an incandescent light as “warm”, though they have a color temperature close to the relatively cool incandescent lights.

Natural daylight is around 5000 degrees, while incandescent lights are around 3800 degrees.

Oddly, reds and oranges are at the cooler end of the scale (under about 2000 degrees K) while the hottest temperatures (16,000) are blue.

Thoroughly confused now? It is probably best to divorce in your mind the concept of temperature as a measure of heat/cold from any color "

Snip

The rest of the article is at the link, also check out the wikipedia article.
The LEDS really do last and use much less power.
Our goal is to get our power consumption down to where we can put in a 1 or 2 kw solar installation with a generator backup and possibly a small wind turbine.
Around here we usually get a brisk breeze at Sunrise and Sunset and on cloudy days.
With a battery back up we should be close to off grid.
We have already changed to a front loader washer. It really saves on water and power consumption, uses 1 table spoon of detergent and does not beat our clothes to death like the top loader did. We also have an energy star deep freeze, and will be replacing the kitchen fridge soon, the range we will replace with an induction cook top too.
We have already started to add insulation, find pipe and electrical wire penetrations and plug those with Great Stuff foam in a can, and added insulated black out curtain liners. We are much more comfy too! It was 20 degrees out this morning and we are using a 23,000 btu kero vent-less heater it was 68 inside.
We plan on putting in a solar water heater this summer and then radiant under floor heat if budget permits. We should be fossil fuel free at least for the house in the next 5-10 years, then we will only need fossil fuel for the car, the back up generator and the farm equipment..and we are working on that too.

[madokie]

7. Have you checked our gasifiers to fuel the farm equipment?

http://www.gengas.nu/byggbes/index.shtml

I build heating stoves that work on the gasifier principle that produce a lot of heat with no cresote build up at all. When I first developed the concept I had no knowledge of gasifiers and only found out later while doing some research in what to do with tons of sawdust and waste limbs etc of a saw mill business that I realized what my stove design is. Anyway there is a lot of info on gasifiers and how to build them step by step, or however much guideance one might require, out there.

[Kolesar]

9. Envisiage a house where some loads are only activated when the PV panels are in the sun

...and producing electricity. I am imagining wiring the house so that the sump pump, attic fan, air conditioners, etc only run when the "prepaid" electricity from the panels is available. I would buy electricity for other hours.

As for wind potential, the the American Wind Energy Association http://www.awea.org/smallwind/ can help you evaluate your site.

[TreasonousBastard]

10. I spent about two years designing lighting for...

showrooms and offices, and it's fairly simple:

"Full spectrum" lighting emulates a tungsten lamp that emits all the colors. Color temperature, as used in lighting, is the relationship between blue and red light, ignoring greens, violets, and other stuff-- it assumes full spectrum since it started with full spectrum sunlight and tungsten light. Tungsten light tends to be between 2800K and 3500K, with special coatings used to cool or warm the color.

Flourescents and LEDs don't start out as full-spectrum, and are weighted toward blue, green, yellow, or some other color. Warm-white flourescents are very yellow, and cool-whites are greenish. Your brain adjusts color so you can't see this unless you're outside looking at windows with different lighting in the rooms so you can compare.

Full-spectrum flourescents use a different balance of phosphors, generally adding red, which is the most expensive phosphor (ther reason most cheap flourescents have sucky color) and can do a fair job of emulating tungsten photfloods at 3200K, noon sunlight at 5000-5500K, or north skylight at around 7500K.

There's something called the color rendering index (CRI) on many flourescent packages, and it ranges from a low of 60% for warm whites to 96% for the best full spectrum flourescents. Anything over 90% is really good.

Now, with LEDs, the problem is that they have a much narrower spectrum and red ones will give you a very narrow red, blue ones a narrow blue, etc. It's difficult to get decent color balance when you're dealing with such tight wavelengths and no harmonics or middle colors. No cyan, no violet... Most of the "white" LEDs I've seen so far are a ghastly blue-white that might be OK for diamonds and stars, but really sucks when when you want some ambience in the room. I fooled around with lighting up some red and orange ones to see if they add anything to the white, but they just muddle things up.

I would stick with good flourescents for now until they get better LEDs-- the cost and energy savings going from flourescent to LED isn't so much that you should look like the undead every time you look in a mirror.

[tinrobot]

11. LEDs last a really long time.

Once you buy one, you're set for at least a decade.

I wonder how the light bulb companies will stay in business.

[Abq_Sarah]

12. I've wondered that about the flashlight companies

I've got about a half dozen mag lights that I converted to LED and any new flashlight I buy is LED. How many can they conceivably sell before people just don't need to replace them anymore?