Consumers are beginning to see a marked difference in new lighting technology. The Light Emitting Diode or LED is the newest form of lighting to gain popularity across many sectors of lighting. These are smaller clusters of lights that combine to give off as much or more light than their more antiquated counterparts, with a mere fraction of the heat and energy used.
Many of the early applications of LED lights are in a mostly novel role, such as lighting up electronic devices such as MP3 players and pocket flashlights. The potential of the LED is great, and many of its newer applications are showing its great versatility and power, far beyond merely powering gadgets and other toys.
Currently, the white spectrum of LED light has an operational life of 100,000 hours. This equals out to about 11 hours of continuous use, or 22 years if only used half the time. This means that the incandescent bulb, which has a life of about 5,000 hours is about 5% as long-lived as its LED counterpart. If lighting fixtures are somewhere that makes changing bulbs a difficult or dangerous proposition, then an LED light could almost eliminate the need to change the bulb ever, depending on its application.
For larger applications like businesses and government usage, LED also presents an amazing time savings, which leads to thousands of hours saved shopping for, retrieving, and replacing traditional incandescent bulbs.
LED loses about 20% of the electricity it generates to heat, which means it boasts an 80% efficiency rating. Traditional light bulbs, by comparison, lose 80% of the electrical power generated to heat, which means its only doing 20% or 1/5th of the job you paid for it to do. If an employee only did a fifth of the work you asked them to do, how long would you continue to employ them?
Like any technology in its first stages, it's very likely that the low cost of these LED lights will plummet ever lower as demand leads to increased production of them. Much like with the CFL revolution, these bulbs save so much money and power, people aren't thinking twice about equipping their homes with as many as possible.
The rapidly changing technology market is making more and more room for the amazing benefits of LED technology. It's one lighting innovation that to future generations will seem as basic as well, the light bulb.