Thursday, March 17, 2011
Another bit on LEDs
Had to go to Wally World the other day(it's frikkin' amazing that there are some things they carry that other places don't) and noticed something: solar-charged LED yard lights. Nothing new about that of itself, but these were small 1-lamp units, spike included, for the grand total of $1. Picked up one to try(hey, it's a gadget!) and not bad at all; even on a mostly-cloudy day charges up, and late as I've been up provided a nice white light. For a buck.
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6 comments:
... and all done for capitalism's sake.
No subsidy, no .gov mandate, no green tax credits - just done to , err, make a buck.
I wish nanny government would just piss off and let the market work.
I'm thinking about them for a future grid-down situation. Out on the porch in the morning, hanging in the living room at night.
Got some 5w LED replacements today for the flush mounted 35w halogens that this house is full of.
The halogens last about 5 minutes, and we've had some CFL replacements fail within 6 months. I'm told it is the poor cooling which kills them.
The LED's are rated for claimed >1,000,000 start cycles and 20,000 hours,
so who knows, I mightn't have to change them for a whole year...
Phelps' point is spot on, with LEDs the house could still be liveable for a short while without mains. They'd certainly be easier for a small generator to run.
Actually, with LEDs being run on DC without inverters in the system (which means separate wiring) you can easily run conservative amounts of light from a car battery or two trickle charged from a small solar cell array (like two or three square feet).
(By conservative I don't mean lighting the place up like now, but better than candlelight. Think Victorian gas lamps.)
Keith, sorry, but if there's a cooling problem the LED's will die faster than anything else.
Depends on how the LEDs are run. Big LEDs need heat sinks, but the main concern is where the AC-DC inversion happens. If it happens in a light can with the LED, then you're wasting a lot of heat there. If the inversion happens someplace else, or even better, never happens because they are being run from a solar charged battery, then there is much less heat.
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