LED V CFL.

I visited this subject 12 or 18 months ago Ian, and found much the same as you.

LEDs for general lighting are over priced, under powered, and need a lot of development before they are in the same ball park. The colour output is horrible for general use as well.

A friend of mine got some 12 Volt units to replace his power hungry down lights, and found they were great for this purpose. They are running nice and cool, compared to the little radiators he was running beforehand.

Cheers Don...

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Don McKenzie

Dontronics: http://www.dontronics-shop.com/

The World's Cheapest Computer:
DuinoMite the PIC32 $30 Basic Computer-MicroController
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Just add a VGA monitor or TV, and PS2 Keyboard.
Arduino Shield, Programmed in Basic, or C.

Last year I scrounged a couple of 3-bulb light fittings on freecycle, once my flat has been refurbed so I can put them up its a chance to try out various mixes of LED/CFL - but not before the price has fallen a fair bit further.

**Probably. My local supplier has Cree 10 Watt, mains operated (85 VRMS ~ 265VRMS) GU10 MR16 lamps, rated at 750 Lumen (for neutral white and cool white) and 560 Lumen for warm white, at $42.57 in one off quantities. 10 off quantities, the price falls to $38.31. Better prices could likely be found without much difficulty. **There are CFLs and CFLs. Some are shockers and some are quite decent. All the ones I use have lasted extremely well and exhibit a pleasing colour temperature. **Fair enough. I'm doing likewise, though I've already fitted several around my home. Reading lamps for my bed were 40 Watt halogens. I've replaced them with 4.5 Watt LED. The result is that the more focussed beam is better for my partner (or me) when reading, due to less light spillover and increased light available on the page. I'm experimenting with these:

Very impressive. Of course, heat sinking must be arranged, along with an appropriate current source, but the light output is both pleasing and impressive. At 800ma @ 12 Volts, the light is almost double the intensity in comparison to an 11 Watt T5 fluoro. Not only directly beneath the lamp, but also at off-axis positions as well.

Most recently, I acquired one of these:

When I have time, I'll take some comparative photos and measurements beside a 500 Watt halogen flood (yes, it is that impressive). I'm presently experimenting with suitable heat sinks. An AMD Athlon heat sink looks about right.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

I'm also experimenting with those strips. I have a situation with some wall lamps with two 18W Philips fluoros and an electronic ballast in a stainless steel enclosure with a frosted glass panel on top and bottom (up/down lamps on the wall of a stairwell). I have 3 of these and every one of them popped the e-ballast due to overheating after being left on for 3-5 hours a day over a 3 moonth period. The supplier sent out a sparky and replaced the ballasts but they are still overheating. It's simply a very poor design since the e-ballast is fitted inside a steel box with no ventilation and reaches over 80C. So I plan to strip the insides out, use a 12V SMPS where the e-ballast was (same size), adding a few vent holes, and mount one of these LED strip lights where the fluoro lamps were (one top, one bottom) bolted to the internal steel enclosure. They easily put out the same amount of light at 12V 400mA as the 18W fluoro. I took temperature measurements of the original fitting and will write up some details about the retrofit and re-measure the temperatures to see the difference.

Remember it's an international internet , 240v/led's for sale locally @ $27.00 cost $9us direct from the distributor , it cost us about $100.00 to equip our house , still not cheap but cutting the middle sales greed saves 60% or better

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X-No-Archive: Yes

At various times over the past few years some supermarkets have special offered CFLs at silly prices - one store even outed a few pallets of 11W CFLs at only 10p each.

The best SO I can remember for any CFL worth buying was Morrisons did Philips 18W at 99p - after a few days of not all that many shifting, they introduced a BOGOF offer at 99p.

I fear it'll be some time before LED prices get anywhere near that ballpark - lets hope the efficiency improves a bit by then.

**LED efficiency (for even medium quality devices) already exceeds that of CFLs. The drive is now to reduce costs.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

3x 9W 450lumen LED units to equal the light output of an 18W CFL doesn't sound more efficient to me!

Researchers at a UK university claim to have made a huge breakthrough in LED manufacturing technology that should slash prices - but expect a wait of 3 to 5 yrs before we see any evidence of that on supermarket shelves.

**The Philips Genie 18WWWB22 is rated at 61 Lm/W. The Cree LMH2 is rated at 80Lm/W. **I suspect it will happen a little more quickly than that. Prices have already fallen significantly in the laast few years. We'll see.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au

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IT will happen, look at the incredible drops in cost of every other electronic device in the consumer market

I can only compare the lumen outputs of the LED & CFL lamps I found side by side on the supermarket shelf.

Assuming they get the efficiency better than a CFL - there's always plenty of greedy suits to carry on cashing in for a while longer!

A quick writeup of the tests and results here:

**Interesting. In the sense that it is an appallingly bad design. Excellent write-up. It will be interesting to see what transpires. I just glued some strips to the granite under-bench in the kitchen. NO problems all Summer.

I just tried those 100 Watt LEDs. WOW! Impressive. With no reflector, it delivered a little more light than a 500 Watt halogen worklight (which has a reflector). Next, I'm putting a lens on the sucker to narrow the beam to 10 degrees.

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Trevor Wilson www.rageaudio.com.au