LED Lighting

Chapter 5. Non-Bulb Lighting

LED bulbs will have so much impact due to the fact that they are direct replacements for the lights people have used for years. A standard, household bulb—the A19—can be easily replaced with an LED model with nothing more than a few turns of the wrist. This means that, using existing infrastructure, tremendous amount of energy can be saved every year…and billions of dollars worth of bulbs can be sold. Just how much energy are we talking about? A 2011 Energy.gov report put the potential savings at 84.1 tera-watt hours (TWh) a year if only the A-type bulbs in the US were switched to LEDs. And while the standard household bulb is important, it’s far from the only application of solid-state lighting. Aside from the A19 there are also PAR, MR, GU, and other styles of bulbs. And those replacement models are just the start. The LED will extend to fixtures, like flood lights, tube lights, bay lighting, and even street lights (see Figure 5-1). There are also LED lamps, in the common use of the word “lamp,” like the one found on your desk or side table.

LED lamps have been around for years now. This is partly due to the fact that they don’t have the same expectations set for them as their bulb-based counterparts. In the case of a task lamp, LEDs have clear benefits: they don’t wear out, they don’t put out much heat, and individual LEDs can be placed in series, allowing for clever designs that an incandescent could never pull off. Cost sensitivity with a stand-alone ...