Discussion on:

GE Smart LED light bulb promises 17 years of service, nine-watt draw

Too bad it will take over 100 years to make up the diffeence in price. Also, note the amount of mercury in a modern cf bulb can be offset by the amount of mercury not released into the air by coal powered electrical plants when replacing a standard bulb and even more if the cf bulb is disposed of properly.

I just love those technological advancments that do nothing more than put more money in other peoples pockets. Hybred cars..what's the point...they already made affordable cars that made terrific mileage, but lets make a more expensive way to save fuel..etc...etc...etc...

The best thing to do is use less or be more smarter with what you use. But there may be some that can't do that....we'll time will tell, but for now, I'm not putting too much stock into LED bulbs just because a few techno writers think they're cool.

Someone needs to check their math. If used only 3 hours a day - everyday - you would save $4.00 a year (at .11/KwH)for that one lamp. That is if electrical costs don't increase, which we know they will. Not counting the cost of all the incandescent lamps you would buy, the lamp will pay for itself in 12.5 years. Quicker if it is normally left on longer. At 3 hours a day the lamp should last almost 23 years, burn even less coal than a Compact Fluorescent, and no mercury! LED is the future of lighting and will become cheaper.

Its a basic calculation, if you have this bulb on for 5 hours a day it
will save you 15 cents a day, about $1 a week, in a year it will save
you $50. This is beyond the fact that you will just be buying one and
not replacing it for years. Actually I would think that the true test
of whether this is a good thing for you is what color spectrum you get
out of this thing. Is it a bright color, warm, what is it?

AJ,

The problem is that you most likely work at bagging grocery's
and don't understand the technology of LED's and what they
bring to the future. That cool little computer you are typing on
I'm sure has one type or another of an LED. Yes they have their
place. but, you would not have smaller computers that run
longer on battery if it were not for LED technology. Thus less
plastic to use in making them and so forth. Same for TV's. Less
plastic less reliability on Oil!

LED light bulbs bring the same future for anyone who likes to
have a say in how much their electrical bill costs. By the way,
The government has rebates to pay for these lamps as well.
Chear up, you voted for Obama and your getting your change.

what are the odds that you will be around the light socket you bought this ridiculously un-cost-effective light for, in 17 years???

LED lighting is the way to go if they can get the color spectrum and brightness right in the future. There cheap,dependable,durable use less energy and produce less heat which lowers cooling costs. We are using them in a highrise building in place of mr16 lamps and love them. If we could replace every lamp in the buildings with LED lamps our company would save tens of thousands of dollars a year in electricity and manpower by not having to change them as often.

What if these are like a lot of CFL bulbs in that they just fail to work for as long as the claim. I've had many CFLs that claim to last 7 years go out in a couple of months to a year? If that is the case with these bulbs then you're out $50? I doubt many that buy these will retain the receip and even if they do would they be allowed to return a bulb a year or two later??

I'm stock piling 75 and 100 watt incandescent bulbs now. I'm 50 years old and by the time I die, I'll only have about 100 of each left...

It's always sad to see someone say that They are Withholding some technology. No, the reason you haven't seen it before is that the product cost too much. And no, They are not withholding a 100 Mile-per-Gallon carburetor either. I've seen that claim for a good fraction of my 59-year old life too!

i have many cf bulbs and some led bulbs installed in my home. i would replace all of the rest if the cf and led bulbs were able to be dimmed so you can adjust your lighting to your needs instead of full on or full off.

We have replaced the lighting (Green Ray LED) in our building- 26000 sqft. We were using 226,000 kwh per year and reduced it to 66,000 per year! That?s just by retro fitting our current fixtures.
The cost is there but we will see the Return On Investment (ROI) in about 3 years. As the bulbs become more popular, the price will decrease.

Consider that CFLs also cost more than $30 when originally introduced. The cost curve should be steeper for LEDs than CFLs because the CFL base design (essentially a AC-to-DC transformer) can be leveraged into LED designs. Just installed several Phillips PAR38 LED bulbs, replacing CFLs. Color purity for "warm while" is better than CFLs. They're instant on, and should not dim over time as is the case with CFLs.

Smartplanet, slow people. This breaking news you have unfolded,
is old news to the likes of about 10 other manufactures. Take a
little time and look at Toshiba, they have already been in the
market and are on the 2nd gen. 25k hrs is old news, is it
dimmable? NO. Toshiba has been making light bulbs since 1895.
So next time you take a little money from GE, make sure the
product is really state of the art, cuz your about 1yr behind.
Phillips, Sylvania have also beat the mark. FYI I heard GM is
coming out with a Hybrid car.

40W lamps are fairly useless. I did however do a job about 25
years ago where I found pairs of 60W lamps being used for decorative
purposes in wall lights. I changed them for 40W giving a saving of 1/3
in electricity costs. A low tech solution but there was a lot of
lights. I would use LED lamps for the same purpose. The low energy we
have now usually don't give enough light to be practical and LED stop
lights on cars are useless in day time. These are not well developed
enough and are too expensive. Go back to the drawing board and come up
with something decent. Intel said they have one that can be used as a
street lamp. That may be handy it would save on labour keep changing
the things.

Will they come with a 17 year warranty to back up those claims? My LCD TV was supposed to last 60,000 hours and died in less than a year (couldn't be fixed since it was 11 months old - no parts available). The CF bulbs I bought at first have mostly burnt out already. I have hopes for LED, but lets face it, the production costs, and likely the false claims of performance will be disappointing. Kind of like the instant on CF's that take 2-5 seconds to brighten up, cost a lot, and don't last nearly as long as the old non-toxic waste bulbs.

I can buy a CFL for $1 or $2 on sale (I would not pay more because they have a high failure rate). A typical CFL that produces 60W actually consumes 13W of power. So I am going to pay quite a bit more for a lousy 4 W of difference ? I take my spent bulbs into a local hardware store as many take them in for recylcing. I could used Dimmable LEDs but I will wait for prices to come down. Sometimes people get into splittling hairs. Yah you can buy this great technology that consumes less but that technology is awfully expensive. If it is going to take years to get your money back it probably is not a good investment !

G.E. is a very powerful lobbyist in D.C. Why do you think there will be laws demanding the use of energy sipping products that G.E. conveniently has "just made" which very expensive.

Well, G.E. isn't dumb, that's for sure. Too bad Uncle Sam is.

Gee, I'm going to run home right now and replace all of my 40 watt incandescent bulbs with these wonderful LED bulbs. And the best part of it is this will cost me nothing, since my home does not have any 40 watt bulbs. They are too dim and inefficient to be worth using. 40 watt bulbs provide less than 75% lumens-per-watt of light and over 1/3 more heat-per-watt when compared to a 100 watt. The lumens-per-watt relationship for tungsten filament incandescent bulbs is not linear, it is logarhithmic based on this table:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

Comparison of efficacy by power
(120 Volt lamps)
Power Output Efficacy
(W) (lm) (lm/W)
5 25 5
15 110 7.3
25 200 8.0
35 350 10.0
40 500 12.5
50 700 14.0
55 800 14.5
60 850 14.2
65 1,000 15.4
70 1,100 15.7
75 1,200 16.0
90 1,450 16.1
95 1,600 16.8
100 1,700 17.0
135 2,350 17.4
150 2,850 19.0
200 3,900 19.5
300 6,200 20.7

My semi/enclosed fixtures are limited to 60 watts by the manufacturer due to heat/fire hazard issues. Other lamps have 100 or 150 watt bulbs. Most of the 60 watts have been replaced with CFLs.

I'm still waiting for affordable 2000 and 3000 lumen CFLs to replace the others. Part of the problem with CFL and LED replacement bulbs is they appear to be only affordable to manufacturer in the low-light-output bulbs and these are not good replacement candidates for lights and lamps that are designed for single medium to high output bulbs, say 100-200 watts.

Many single bulb floor and table lanps are not practical to convert to multi-bulb arrays to get the needed lumens with low lumen bulbs. Many of these lamps are also designed for an omni-directional bulb to provide a balance of direct-down light along with diffused light through the shade and reflected light bounced off of the ceiling. LED lights are very directional, behaving like reflector incandescent bulbs, and are mostly suitable for aimable light installations using multiple bulbs/lamps to replace a single omni-directional bulb.

Given the higher unit costs with lower lumen outputs and limited ability to replace the mature-design of incandescent bulbs, LEDs and CFLs still have a ways to go to replace them wholesale, especially if they require replacing the existing fixture or lamp for no other reason than to compensate for the limitations of the current crop of alternatives. This doesn't sound very efficient to me...

@GuntherGump

G.E. is a very powerful lobbyist in D.C. Why do you think
there will be laws demanding the use of energy sipping
products that G.E. conveniently has "just made" which very
expensive.

Yes, but GE is not a powerful lobbyist in my country, and we
are also phasing out incandescent globes.

I love it when Americans blog to sound like they are seeing
through the conspiracy, but are so naive they have not even
looked past their borders to form their opinion, let alone
worked out the science or the economics.

There have been a few organisations here that have given out
free CFL globes, and that is what we use. These were private
companies that offered these globes.

We have had many years of use from the free CFL globes, some
of which I have changed to lower wattage as they are too bright,
even after a few years of use.

The incandescent globes in this house used to blow more often
than they should, the CFLs have not met the same fate.

Well, G.E. isn't dumb, that's for sure. Too bad Uncle Sam
is.

Too bad you are easily misled!!!

LED globes have been a developing area for a while, getting
them to the commercially viable stage for these applications
has taken some time, it is good to see GE joining in.

Yes, the price is high right now, but they will still pay for
themselves.

This is a lot like PV Solar, up until now the payoff time was 20-
25 years. I can now get a solar array with a 4 year payoff
though one of the energy providers here. This means solar is
suddenly very worthwhile.

And I bought my first CFL globes about 20 years ago - they
were quite expensive and heavy and nowhere near as efficient
as the current ones, now they are a few dollars, and I use 11W
in my bedroom ceiling, which is uncomfortably bright, I use 8W
in my standard lamp instead most of the time. Previously I
would have used a 60W globe, which would have cost $1 and
failed every 11 months.

To me this is now a no brainer - based on 20ish years of CFL
experience.

To me something that is even more efficient and longer lasting
and comes on instantly is even more promising when it gets to
be cost effective.

I recently installed a LED lamp for the front porch, it is a 1W
LED which ultimately uses about 2W due to the transformer.
This cost me $30 as it was on special, it is normally $70. The
power cost would be around $5 per year if it was on 24/7. This
means that in normal use the cost of the whole fixture is
greater than the running cost, which is fine - so over a 10 year
lifespan it will cost between $30 and $80. A non LED fixture
could have cost me that, without the power bill and I would
have had to change the globe, which I will not have to do.

The fixture is stainless steel and a solid plastic diffuser, it is
very rugged and not going to rust. One day the LED will burn
out.

Why would I be better with a CFL or an incandescent fixture?

Does GE's power in Washington have anything to do with my
use of LEDs and the savings I am experiencing here? I think
not!!!

Does GE's lobbying mean that I am suffering by getting free
light bulbs and saving quite a bit of electricity here? I think
not!!!

Would any conspiracy theorist or pro pollution lobbyist like to
argue otherwise here?

Its about time! Its true that LEDs don't have a wide color spectrum,
and that is a problem, thats why you might not want to replace all
the lights in your house just yet. Get a few and see how they are,
the first two I had (a decade ago) hurt my eyes after a while.

Hopefully by the time the gov'mit phases out incandescents they're
have more of the problems fixed with CFL and LEDs. LEDs have a color
spectrum problem and CFLs flicker (some people even vomit if around florescent too long) There are a couple other promising lighting
technologies too, but generally the gov'mit doesn't think about the
problems with there legislation before passing it. Tax incentives
aren't a bad idea, encouraging companies to no longer manufacture incandescents is a little worse. Illegalizing them would be
completely unconstitutional. In a half a century a significant
portion of civilian consumer power will be generated clean and
local. Its likely we'll be generating more power than we can use
driving down the cost of power. Only people in apartment complexes
(places without enough real estate to generate the power) will be
buying very much power. Part of this will be because power efficiency will increase to the point when there is absolutely no
demand for it to increase further.

You can graph the growth for this stuff and extrapolate to see for
yourself.

I would just like to add that LED lights are easily dimmed and nearly everyone has many inside their vehicles which do just that. The instrument lighting and all those lighted switches use LEDs and they can be dimmed. Being diodes, they operate on DC which is pulsed at a rather high frequency, I think around 1500 Hz, so you don't see the flicker. Then the duty cycle is varied by pulse width modulation to adjust the light output. This is the same practice used to control DC motor speed. You can buy kits to build such controllers in hobby shops, especially those catering to robotics hobby followers.

people will buy them. Also there are some rooms in the house i am in that if you remove the 100 watt bulbs you cant see anything which means we will have to install for 40 watt or equivalent another 3 light sockets for each 1 100 bulb removed. Nothing else is bright enough. Some people don't think before acting you are just making things worse. take away 100 watt bulbs to lower power consumption you can end up raising consumption to more 40x3=120 so removing 100 and 75 watt bulbs still a good idea. I doubt it. All this just retain the light levels. We already use 20-45 watt in everything else that doesn't need as much light to see what you are doing. And as for led lights price prevents people from buying. We will by them only when they are the same price as all others. I don't care if it 17 years of service If you can't afford it you can't afford it. I know people that have problems just buying regular lightbulbs at 4 for $1. Keep adding more to some people you are just committing murder.

@richardw66

A 11w CFL is "uncomfortably bright"? Really? My experience with 11w CFLs (equivalant to a 40 watt bulb in lumens) is that they do not provide enough light to do anything except avoiding tripping unless they are massed or supplemented with bright task lights.

On a equivalent lumen replacement basis and current cost, this GE LED bulb does not provide a compelling ecomomic argument, at least for lights that are bright enough to do something. Unlike almost all articles and commentators on the subject, I will provide my numbers.

GE claims a 25,000 hour or 17 year life span for their LED bulb. That is an average use of 4 hours per day, 365 days per year. Claimed life span is always suspect; I get a little over half on the CFLs I use on average, so lets base our comparison on 10 years at 4 hours/day (1460 hours/year).

I will also assume a lamp using a single 100 watt incandescent bulb for comparison. Based on the chart in my previous post, the bulb produces 1700 lumens. I currently buy them in bulk for about $0.50 for a bulb that is rated at 1500 hours, but lets assume it lasts 1000 hours; this means I will use 1 to 2 bulbs per year for a total of 15 bulbs. Currently, power cost here is about $0.11 per kilowatt hour. Lets assume a 3% inflation factor for electricity and replacement bulbs. Electricity consumption per year is 100w * 4 hours/day * 365 days/year /1000 w/KW = 146 KWH/year. Therefore, our total cost by year for the 100w are


Year elec cost bulbs/year bulb cost
1 $16.06 2 $1.00
2 $16.54 1 $0.52
3 $17.04 2 $1.06
4 $17.55 1 $0.55
5 $18.08 2 $1.13
6 $18.62 1 $0.58
7 $19.18 2 $1.19
8 $19.75 1 $0.61
9 $20.34 2 $1.27
10 $20.95 1 $0.65
Totals $184.11 $8.56

$192.67 Total Cost w/100w bulbs

Now using the GE 9w led at 450 lumens per bulb, it will take 3 bulbs to produce 1350 lumens; while this is only 80% of the 100w bulb, I'll give this to the LED. Lets assume we can get one of the LED bulbs for $40; we need 3 so our total bulb cost is $120. Electricity consumption per year is 3 bulbs * 9w each * 4 hours/day * 365 days/year /1000 w/KW = 39.42 KWH/year. Therefore, our total costs by year for the 3 9w LEDs are

Year elec cost bulb cost
1 $4.34 $120.00
2 $4.47
3 $4.60
4 $4.74
5 $4.88
6 $5.03
7 $5.18
8 $5.33
9 $5.49
10 $5.66
Totals $49.71 $120.00

$169.71 Total cost w/ 3 9w LED

My $27 savings over 10 years is less than compelling, especially considering that I will need to buy a replacement lamp to hold the required 3 bulbs for the necessary light.

When the 450 lumen LED bulb price comes down to $10-$12 each or a $40 LED bulb will produce 1500 lumens, an economic argument would be compelling. Until then, not so much.

What, you say, I don't need a 100w bulb, a 40w will do? OK, using the same prices, the math on that works out to a 40w bulb cost of $8.56 and a electricity cost of $73.64 totaling $82.20. The LED bulb costs work out to $40 and $56.57 electricity cost. My savings is $25.60 over 10 years, still less than compelling.

Once again, the cost argument is less than compelling when one looks at being an early adopter competing within an established commodity marketplace. There may be compelling arguments to adopt this LED bulb, but economics is not one of them.

Richardw66 - "in my bedroom ceiling, which is uncomfortably bright, I use 8W
in my standard lamp instead most of the time."


...and your eyes still work well enough to type? Amazing!

Environmentalists claim that the mecury saved from the environment by using CFL's is greater that the mercury found IN a CFL bulb. Why then don't we forget about the expesive, regulated recycling and simply throw them away? Net result - less mercury in the environment! Let's not forget all of the chemicals and processes used to make LED's!

If they want to replace incandescents with flourescents in a big
hurry, why don't the manufacturers figure out what the cost may be
in 3 years' time and start selling them at that price now? Starting
out by gouging the customer to "recoup research costs" just delays
mass-implementation - much like the idiot baseball team in Toronto
not making enough money so raising the ticket prices - so fewer
people coming to games so the team losing even more money, a vicious
cycle that they can't figure out.

Make things affordable and the market will respond... if LEDs were
the same price of incandescents NOW, I (and many millions of other
people in this market) would be out replacing our 25 watt bulbs
right away to take advantage of the savings on our utility bills.

As it is, only the early adopters/bleeding-edgers will sh ell out
big bucks for replacements while the rest of us wait fro more
realistic - and affordable - prices.

You want to see changes? Make it affordable and short-circuit the
year or more wait until prices match what's available now...

What makes economic sense for home use is to keep using CFL for a few more years. If you have a fixture that is hard to access or are paying union wages for people to replace bulbs, then it makes sense to use a $45 LED bulb, but for most purposes figure on going through a couple of more CFLs per fixture. In six - eight years the price & light output of LED bulbs will be a lot more attractive.

In 2010 the competition for LED bulbs is CFLs; $4 for a couple of CFLs looks mighty attractive in the short run while you wait for the LED technology to improve.

I think one of the issues with CFL's is radio frequency emissions. Some articles say they are harmful to us. Filters that would cost very little and would eliminate the problem in the CFL's have been left out. Is there an RFE issue with the LED's?

It's good news to us, the cost of LED lighting is high but we will see the Return On Investment in coming, LED light become more popular and the price will be decrease too. http://www.fosintl.com/

about 6 months ago I purchased (2)LED 2A15 120v 60Hz, 2.5 w
0.45A
China j9s. The 2 bulbs were packaged in a plastic bubble
package.
Both bulbs have now failed, Home Depot where I bought them
said no warranty? I know that typically light bulbs have no
warranty but when I pay $40.00 some odd dollars for 2 bulbs, I
certainly would expect them to last more that 6 months. They
were mounted in an outdoor receptical (ventilated) Lantern. The
electrical system has an industrial grade surge protector and I
had a dusk to dawn light sensors attached.

Thank you

Tom Stevens