IKEA Commits to Efficient LED Lighting

A $20 Philips 12.5W 805Lumen LED A19 Bulb

Retail giant IKEA has declared a war on inefficient lighting. Today the retailer announced that it would phase out all non-LED lighting products in its ubiquitous blue retail stores by 2016.

LED for the win!

80% less electricity, 10x longer lasting!
Philips claims their 12.5 Watt AmbientLED *60W eq* will save its users around $130 worth of electricity, while also being fully dimmable. 


With winter fast approaching, artificial lights become a more visible part of our lives. Old light bulb technology gobbles power! These LED bulbs use state of the art technology to produce more light with less waste.

Think of the time you will save not having to fiddle with your fixtures for decades. The Philips ambient LED will last more than 20 years if used for several hours per day, every day: maybe even longer- only time will tell :) If time is money, LED lights will save you even more!

I have had a long and varied interest in LED technology. It was the LED that inspired me to learn more about artificial lighting technology in college. Blue- LED's were the thing that really sparked my interest: I had long played with red and green versions.  When the blue-one launched, it meant that full color LED screens and full color applications would become possible, and it was the blue ones that turned out to be so important to the LED penetrating the mainstream lighting market. "White" leds are actually phosphor driven "blue" LED's. A white LED has a phosphor layer that is driven by an LED that emits energetic light of a much different frequency than the light that is emitted by such assemblies. This LED driven Phosphor technology is what made quality "Warm White" LED's possible. 

The history of the LED and its applications is very interesting. Read about this and other aspects of LED's on my favorite website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode

The aforementioned Philips LED can be found at home depot for about $20. Read more about it on the philips website.
http://www.usa.philips.com/c/energy-saving-light-bulbs/ambientled-12.5w-a19-soft-white-dimmable-046677409906/prd/en/

I read about this news on The Verge. Please have a look~ http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/1/3437044/ikea-leads-led

The Source Article : 
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20121001006043/en/IKEA-Sell-LED-Lighting-2016


From Wikipedia on the LED 

Advantages

• Efficiency: LEDs emit more light per watt than incandescent light bulbs.^[98] Their efficiency is not affected by shape and size, unlike fluorescent light bulbs or tubes.
• Color: LEDs can emit light of an intended color without using any color filters as traditional lighting methods need. This is more efficient and can lower initial costs.
• Size: LEDs can be very small (smaller than 2 mm^2[99]) and are easily populated onto printed circuit boards.
• On/Off time: LEDs light up very quickly. A typical red indicator LED will achieve full brightness in under a microsecond.^[100] LEDs used in communications devices can have even faster response times.
• Cycling: LEDs are ideal for uses subject to frequent on-off cycling, unlike fluorescent lamps that fail faster when cycled often, or HID lamps that require a long time before restarting.
• Dimming: LEDs can very easily be dimmed either by pulse-width modulation or lowering the forward current.^[101]
• Cool light: In contrast to most light sources, LEDs radiate very little heat in the form of IR that can cause damage to sensitive objects or fabrics. Wasted energy is dispersed as heat through the base of the LED.
• Slow failure: LEDs mostly fail by dimming over time, rather than the abrupt failure of incandescent bulbs.^[102]
• Lifetime: LEDs can have a relatively long useful life. One report estimates 35,000 to 50,000 hours of useful life, though time to complete failure may be longer.^[103] Fluorescent tubes typically are rated at about 10,000 to 15,000 hours, depending partly on the conditions of use, and incandescent light bulbs at 1,000 to 2,000 hours. Several DOE demonstrations have shown that reduced maintenance costs from this extended lifetime, rather than energy savings, is the primary factor in determining the payback period for an LED product.^[104]
• Shock resistance: LEDs, being solid-state components, are difficult to damage with external shock, unlike fluorescent and incandescent bulbs, which are fragile.
• Focus: The solid package of the LED can be designed to focus its light. Incandescent and fluorescent sources often require an external reflector to collect light and direct it in a usable manner.

[edit]Disadvantages

• High initial price: LEDs are currently more expensive, price per lumen, on an initial capital cost basis, than most conventional lighting technologies. As of 2010, the cost per thousand lumens (kilolumen) was about $18. The price is expected to reach $2/kilolumen by 2015.^[105] The additional expense partially stems from the relatively low lumen output and the drive circuitry and power supplies needed.
• Temperature dependence: LED performance largely depends on the ambient temperature of the operating environment. Over-driving an LED in high ambient temperatures may result in overheating the LED package, eventually leading to device failure. An adequate heat sink is needed to maintain long life. This is especially important in automotive, medical, and military uses where devices must operate over a wide range of temperatures, and need low failure rates.
• Voltage sensitivity: LEDs must be supplied with the voltage above the threshold and a current below the rating. This can involve series resistors or current-regulated power supplies.^[106]
• Light quality: Most cool-white LEDs have spectra that differ significantly from a black body radiator like the sun or an incandescent light. The spike at 460 nm and dip at 500 nm can cause the color of objects to be perceived differently under cool-white LED illumination than sunlight or incandescent sources, due to metamerism,^[107] red surfaces being rendered particularly badly by typical phosphor-based cool-white LEDs. However, the color rendering properties of common fluorescent lamps are often inferior to what is now available in state-of-art white LEDs.
• Area light source: Single LEDs do not approximate a point source of light giving a spherical light distribution, but rather a lambertian distribution. So LEDs are difficult to apply to uses needing a spherical light field. LEDs cannot provide divergence below a few degrees. In contrast, lasers can emit beams with divergences of 0.2 degrees or less.^[108]
• Electrical polarity: Unlike incandescent light bulbs, which illuminate regardless of the electrical polarity, LEDs will only light with correct electrical polarity.
• Blue hazard: There is a concern that blue LEDs and cool-white LEDs are now capable of exceeding safe limits of the so-called blue-light hazard as defined in eye safety specifications such as ANSI/IESNA RP-27.1–05: Recommended Practice for Photobiological Safety for Lamp and Lamp Systems.^[109][110]
• Blue pollution: Because cool-white LEDs with high color temperature emit proportionally more blue light than conventional outdoor light sources such as high-pressure sodium vapor lamps, the strong wavelength dependence of Rayleigh scattering means that cool-white LEDs can cause more light pollution than other light sources. The International Dark-Sky Association discourages using white light sources with correlated color temperature above 3,000 K.^{[111][not in citation given]}
• Droop: The efficiency of LEDs tends to decrease as one increases current.