An LED lamp is a type of solid state lighting that utilizes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a source of illumination rather than electrical filaments or gas. LED lighting is generally expected to supersede most conventional forms of lighting in the near future. Advantages include:
- High durability - no filament or tube to break
- Green technology – they have low production energy costs, are mercury free and do not have to be treated as special waste.
- Long life span - LEDs last 50,000 - 100,000 hours before light depreciation occurs.
- Low power consumption – could reduce electricity bill by up to 80 % due to high lumen per watt output. Normal incandescent light bulbs produce 15-20 lumens per watt; modern fluorescent bulbs produce between around 70 lumens per watt; and current LED methods allow for an output approaching 100 lumens per watt.
- Colour variance and controllability – LEDs come in a huge variety of colours from warm white and cold white through to full colour spectrum output . A good RGB device ( one with red, green and blue channels ) can give out over 1000000 different colours and is controllable via a small chip which can be coded at source to a specific colour output . Such a device can be further controlled by an infra red or radio frequency by a hand held device or just a switch.
Other effects that can be achieved are programming the colour control chip to react to sound or music.
- Flexible application – small size of LEDs can lead to unique lighting devices.
- Low heat generation – super efficient ; most of the energy is given out as light rather than heat.
Having said all this, they are not quite able to replace the terribly inefficient halogen we all use as a standard. Halogens are relatively short lived as a device , lasting some 4000 hours and massively inefficient , giving out most of their energy as heat.
A global race is on to replace the halogen retrospectively with an LED alternative and most experts agree we are just a few years away from this event. There are devices currently available in the MR16 and GU10 fitting but most, if not all, compare to around a 25 watt halogen rather than 50 watt and they are, at present still expensive.
It must be noted that like most electronic consumables, there are huge variances in performance and reliability available on the market . At Blowzone we always specify quality fittings that have been tried and tested ; we always use reputable LED diodes produced by branded market leaders and all of our electronics are produced in the UK. We even have our colour control chips coded to our own colour cycle.