It’s that time of year again when the Christmas tree lights come out of storage and houses all across America are aglow with festive decorative lighting. This year with advances in LED lighting I wondered how much energy could be saved using LED decorating.

**Note: This post sparked some debate so I have edited it to include some real world numbers from our own holiday decorating last year. We used incandescent bulbs last year and I had no idea how much energy they would be using. I will be using figures for LED bulbs from www.HolidayLEDs.com for my calculations.

LED Decorating Can Equal Huge Energy Savings

I found myself asking… How much energy could we save using LED lights for decorating our house?

As I was sat at yet another red light on my way home last night I noticed that the annoying red light was alot brighter than usual, and it seemed to be made of lots of tiny lights instead of the usual single bulb… I remembered seeing some stories about new traffic lights which use light emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of power hungry incandescent bulbs and the one I saw looked liked a group of LEDs.

Once I realized that the red light stopping me from getting home was in fact a new super efficient traffic LED light system I suddenly didn’t mind staring at a red light!

I Love Traffic LED Lights - Red but Green!

This new breed traffic lights is made from groups of LEDs which are literally electric diodes that produce light! They are extremely energy efficient and have a very long life. LEDs are very small (smaller than your little finger tip) so in order to get the required brightness for a street light there have to be lots of them grouped closely together. The old incandescent traffic lights were typically 50 – 150 Watts which means they consumed alot of electricity! There are numerous advantages to using LED traffic lights including;
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Linking in with Martin’s recent post on LED bulbs I recently attended a lecture held by Sandra Rosenthal at Vanderbilt University called “Promise of Nanotechnology: Unique new properties that can be tailored and controlled to solve challenges in our world.” In it, Sandra spoke about research that is ongoing concerning the creation of nano-crystals and there seems to have been some revelations. Now I’m no chemist and when I think of nanotech I mostly think of microscopic robots devouring the Earth so I’ll try to relay what I learned as succinctly as possible.

Let’s start with some basic nano-knowledge (if such a thing is possible). A nanometer to a meter is the same ratio as a meter is to the distance from the Earth to the Sun. So yes, it’s pretty cuss-wordingly small. If you’re looking down a microscope that can see something this small (and I learned these microscopes exist) then you’re pretty much looking at the building blocks of the universe…atoms!

The boffins at Vanderbilt have been creating nano-crystals of various sizes and examining their properties. What they noticed was that the smaller ones emit colours around the ultra violet end of the spectrum and as you create larger crystals the colours shift down the spectrum to the infra-red. In medicine this means you can attach these crystals to specific proteins so that when looking for viruses, tests can be clearer literally days sooner.

But this is all very nice but doesn’t have anything to do with the environment? Well here’s that bit. Currently environmentally friendly LED bulbs emit a rather harsh light but while performing some experiments, Michael Bowers and James McBride of Vanderbilt University accidentally created a batch of nano-crystals containing but 33 or 34 pairs of atoms. When they were illuminated with a laser they emitted a pleasant white light containing pretty much the entire spectrum. So if you were to coat, say a bright blue LED bulb with a thin layer of these crystals you’d have a very illuminating result.

Now for some facts. A standard 40 watt light bulb emits arount 12.5 lumens per watt which makes it about 2% efficient (not very good). Depending on the size, a strip light emits between between 55 and 100 lm/W making them between 8and 15% efficient. Even LEDs are only working around 20% efficiency.

These revelations have opened plans for a new road map that could create new LED based light bulbs running at an efficiency of 90%!! Unfortunately these goals are unlikely to be realised until around 2025 but the subsequent reduction in energy consumption in the U.S. is predicted to save the nation’s household $125 billion!! It could be well worth waiting for.

That being said, the Vanderbilt work was done in 2005 and since then other universities around the world have made similar discoveries and so there now seems to be a healthy race on as to who can turn the science into affordable consumer technology first. In the end the future maybe closer than we think.

Do you wish you could find some of the new LED lighting technology at your local stores? Well we finally found some near our home in Ft Worth, Texas…

On a recent visit to our local CostCo we found LED flood lights available and it was a pleasant surprise to see affordable LED lighting being distributed by a large chain. Maybe we will soon be seeing these super energy efficient bulbs in the local hardware stores as well.

These LED flood lights are made by Lights of America and they contain about 70 individual LEDs to provide a bright white light.

My first observation is that the packaging does not provide much damage protection and I wonder how many of the bulbs get damaged during transport? The second comment is that the packaging seems overly wasteful, the 4 inch bulb is held in a 10 inch by 16 inch cardboard package.

With the above being said we were still excited to try this new LED flood light in our home.

The bulb cost approx $11 and at hopefully if more retailers start to stock LED lights then this price will drop. We installed an incandescent bulb just to get a baseline brightness photograph and a 65W incandescent produced the following brightness;

A 65W incandescent produces a very bright and warm flood light but is very inefficient and our home does not contain any incandescents now but for the sake of a comparison we installed this bulb to show the results.

Now lets take a look at the LED flood light;

The LED flood light is clearly less bright but it only uses 3.5 W, that’s right, just three and a half Watts!

The light was definitely still bright and it highlighted our fireplace and the surrounding area sufficiently but it was also a very cold white light, we might try painting the bulb lens with some stained glass paint just to give the bulb a warmer color. Since the LEDs produce very little heat painting the bulb lens might actually work, in fact we could create any color we want!

We are going to buy more of these LED lights and install them strategically throughout our home, we already have all of our canned lights using 15 Watt CFLs but we can definitely still reduce our energy consumption further if we move to the 3.5 W LED floods, the only question is, can we afford them at $11 per bulb? The Lights of America company claim a 30,000 hr life so any bulbs that we buy will last a long time.

Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to save energy, light your home and add an element of cool technology at the same time?

Well that’s exactly what some of the new LED lighting solutions are offering…  Several companies are working hard to make extremely long lasting and super efficient LED light bulbs more affordable. So where is the cool technology you ask? Well now there are a couple of LED bulbs available which can not only save the environment but mimic it by changing color!

led color lighting - with remote control!

Some of the newest bulbs come with a remote control which allows you to remotely control the brightness and color of up to ten bulbs at the same time… Imagine this, you are sat watching a green television show and you want to instantly fill your living room with green light, a simple click of the remote and you are being lit by the greenest bulbs in town.

The remote even allows you to switch all the lights on and off, you can also select a flash or strobe mode!

You can order these cool and extremely green led lights from The Led Light.com website;

http://www.theledlight.com/remote-controlled-ledbulb.html

Another company offers simpler light bulbs which constantly change color through the entire spectrum of the colors of the rainbow. Simply plug them into a standard bulb socket, switch on the lamp and enjoy the soothing color show.

These auto color changing LED lights are available from C. Crane;

http://www.ccrane.com/lights/led-light-bulbs/color-changing-party-light-bulb.aspx

LED Color Light With Colors of the Rainbow

The LED bulb technology has already reached an advanced stage but prices are high because the large light bulb manufacturers have not yet started to manufacture and sell LED bulbs in large numbers, probably because a typical LED light can last for over 50,000 hrs, that’s almost six years of continuous operation!

So what if you just want a regular light bulb replacement with the benefits of LED technology? There are some very space age looking creations coming our way…