The Ecologist has an excellent article that covers many of the key issues about buying the new LED bulbs - see here.Lighting accounts fore about 20% of our household usage and clearly there have been problems with the old high-energy using bulbs but also with some of the newer so-called green bulbs - those compact fluorescent lightbulbs - which contain mercury and need special disposal. So we now have Light Emitting Diodes, or LED lights, which produce light by exciting a very small semiconductor crystal - and have lifetimes up to 50,000 hours in all sorts of colour's and lights...many even look great!!
But costs of £15 to £35 for bulbs is a little off-putting to say the least even with figures showing a single LED bulb, over its lifetime, has energy savings of over £280. Is this another green saving only for those who can afford it? I hope not - prices are coming down all the time.The Ecologist article points to the leading online sales of the bulbs but seems to miss out Stroud's very own online store: www.led-lightbulbs.co.uk/
I have not used them so can't recommend, other than it is good to support local - I am hoping perhaps we can get them along to the next Open Homes installers fair in September? Perhaps a display of what is possible? John Barnes, who has sadly since died, last year had a display of some LED bulbs which were very popular at the fair - he had been intending to open a shop in the high street where some bulbs could be demonstrated
2 comments:
See these links re concerns re mercury of fluorescent bulbs:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-compact-fluorescent-lightbulbs-dangerous
http://www.holistichelp.net/blog/compact-fluorescent-light-bulbs-the-dangers-of-cfls/
The cost of LED lighting has come down a lot since then and should continue to come down.
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