LED Magic: Coming to Your House

Technology always starts out expensive, but demand can work its voodoo on an industry, driving prices down within the reach of normal people. Like us. Since Edison and others gave us the tungsten-vacuum light bulb over a hundred years ago, electric lighting hasn't changed much. Current flows through a filament, heating it to "incandescent" temperatures, and the lights go up. Vacuum inside the bulb keeps the filament from bursting into flame, and the whole affair lasts around 1000 hours of use, either continuous or intermittent.

Fluorescents, arriving some years later, improved on the light bulb in many ways with a conductive chemical coating, again inside a gas-filled chamber, which gives off light as current flows through it. The bulb doesn't get dangerously hot, and it lasts longer than a regular incandescent bulb. Downside? Doesn't like to function in cold temperatures, flickers noticeably as it ages, and typically yields light in a narrow and harsh color spectrum, making you look your worst all day, not just in the morning.

These days we pin great hopes on the LED, a work of genius that emits light at low temperatures when current passes through a semi-conductor, or "Light-Emitting-Diode." With a wide choice of lighting shades and colors, service life approaching 50,000 hours, and power consumption less than half that of regular bulbs, the LED shows every sign of being the future of lighting.

The catch? Right now they're expensive, and lighting manufacturers have been slow to build residential fixtures that feature them. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter and other marvelous things, has become a champion for the LED as light source, installing LED fixtures throughout his getaway home on Little Dumpling Island, off the coast of Connecticut. Question back there? Can he afford it? Oh, yes, in ways the rest of us can't, but ostentation is not Kamen's prime motive. He hopes to see LEDs become a big weapon in the energy wars, and his all-LED home is meant to be part of a very large conversation. So good for him. No, you can't have a tour, but you can check out the lovely photos in the link.

Already LEDs have made inroads into industrial settings, becoming the lamp of choice in traffic signals, heavy truck tail and signal lights, and in your house. Tonight, before you go up to bed, turn off all the regular lights and walk around. Don't get hurt, just prowl carefully and check out the lights that stay on. Your coffee machine, your microwave, your computer, printer, fax machine, phone charger, toothbrush charging station, nightlight, phone cradle, answering machine, security panel, television, tivo, stereo and alarm clock all have LEDs in them, some that never go off. I like to take a second before mounting the stairs to survey all my unsleeping LED indicators. They don't cost me much to run. All my flashlights are now LED-equipped, especially the one I wear on my head at work, and my wife's sneaky midnight reading lamp, that rarely wakes me up unless we both had the garlic bread, is an LED.

There are LED fixtures available to you, but the application doesn't yet support a single fixture that replaces the 75 watt bulb. You can install under-cabinet fixtures in the kitchen, mini-recessed fixtures for accents, and reading lamps that sit on a desk or table. But better times are coming, and that, readers, will be a way for all of us to cut our lighting costs in half. I'm excited, I admit. Now can someone figure out how to dry my clothes with semi-conductors? I'm still waiting.