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Behold, the $15 LED bulb
Lighting Science Group teams up with Indian electronics manufacturer Dixon Technologies to unveil the world's first $15-or-less 60-watt equivalent LED bulb.
Tue, Aug 30 2011 at 2:00 PM
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Photo courtesy Lighting Science Group/Dixon Technologies
Even though some LED (or light-emitting diode) light bulbs boast lifespans that last decades while consuming minimal energy compared to old school incandescent bulbs, their price — often hovering around the $40 mark — has remained a sticking point with many consumers. Sure, the savings in the long run are remarkable, but who really wants to spend more than $20 on a single light bulb?
Well, meet the latest creation from the geniuses over at Lighting Science Group: an omnidirectional, 60-watt equivalent A19 LED bulb with a sticker price of $15 or less. That's right, folks — a $15 LED.
Developed in cooperation with Indian electronics manufacturing giant Dixon Technologies, this low-priced, high-performance bulb with a lifespan of around eight years will initially be released in India later this year before making its way stateside and elsewhere in early 2012. The revolutionary bulb is designed to consume 85 percent less energy than standard 60-watt incandescents and 35 percent less energy than CLFs.
Says Atul Lall, deputy managing director of Dixon Technologies, in an official news release:
With 800,000,000 incandescent light bulbs and 300,000,000 CFLs sold in India each year, the market is ripe for these highly efficient, long lasting and nontoxic products. The economic and environmental implications of this partnership are significant: old-style light bulbs use 60 billion units of electricity each year, 7% of India’s total, and our Lighting Science Group Definity® lamps could save over 70% of that, equivalent to 32 coal fired plants with 500MW capacity.
The tag-team effort between Florida-based Lighting Science Group, the same company that teamed up with Google for the Android-controlled LED and is helping to sponsor the U.S. Solar Decathlon, and Dixon will help transform India, a country that relies heavily on coal-fired power plants and plans to build 80 new ones in the next five years, into “an early, large-scale adopter of LED technology" according to Jim Haworth, CEO of Lighting Science Group. Haworth also believes that the 60-watt equivalent bulbs and other LED lighting solutions (street lights, outdoor and industrial fixtures, etc.) produced by his company and Dixon are poised to become “some of the best selling lighting products in the world.”
Read more about this exciting new development here.
Also on MNN:
- What's the difference between CFLs, LEDs and incandescents?
- Which bulb is most efficient, and why?
- And learn more about LED bulbs here
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frankly this whole light bulb scam does not pencil out finacially. for fourty cents i can buy a sixty watt incandescent that generally lasts three to five years ( i know because i'm the one who has to replace them). i can control the amount of energy used by turning off the light when not required. i need a better argument to justify the expense. anybody ?
For every minute the light is on you'll use 80% less energy, so if it's a bulb that gets a decent amount of use you would recoup the cost of the bulb in a few months compared to an incandescent. It's easy to do the math and if you want to test it yourself, buy a Kill a Watt meter or Belkin Conserve Insight. I did it and now have CFLs in every socket of my home except for one- where I'm trying out a $10 LED.
The key is Lumens. How many?
Around 850 lumens.
Why don't you guys quit crying... like most Americans do, and just go buy one and see for yourself whether you like it or not. The worst case scenario is it's not bright enough, and you can put it in a room that don't require alot of light. I never knew our country to be so full of winey babies....
I bought 40W dimmable LED bulbs at my local Home Depot for $8 each a few months ago. Granted, it was a sale price, but $8 none the less!
We replaced the CFLs that the developer put in our kitchen - 6 of them in cans which barely lit up the room sufficiently at night. We replaced them with CREE LEDs and it's like the sun is shining into the kitchen, with much less power usage. LED is the way to go.
All it will really take is for one company to come to market with an inexpensive LED bulb (or many different sizes/shapes of bulbs) to corner the market. Current manufacturers are charging a ton for each bulb but if one manufacturer will come out with a cheap bulb they'll get all the business and force the other companies to make theirs more inexpensively.
I bought one at Lowes- it lasted five days on an intermittent light.
Pretty miraculous, given that the bulbs in the article aren't available yet.
It's a Compact Flourescent Light (CFL), not a CLF
It's the year 2011. Shouldn't we have already mastered this technology by now? And where's my flying car!?
It's Fluorescent, not Flourescent.
Remains to be seen if the light quality is acceptible. That's the biggest problem with all of the low cost LED bulb attempts.
Right, 15 bucks for only 8 years, plus the ecological cost which is....well, that's never mentioned, but is undoubtedly much, much higher than a good old tungsten, glass, and steel bulb.
Lemme guess - you're the guy who complained when they took lead out of gasoline, aren't you? I bet you'd complain even if the LED bulb would cost 10 cents and last forever. I suspect your problem might have little to do with ecological cost and more to do with lack of brightness....
You might want to consider in that impact of that that good old tungsten, glass, and steel bulb(s) over an 8 year time frame requires the power plant to burn about 700 more lbs of petroleum or 1000 more lbs of coal that that LED lamp. (Based on 51 higher watts than LED, 8 hours a day for 8 years = 1191 KWH higher energy of the tungsten bulb; 1KWH requires about .6 lbs petroleum or 1 lb of coal)
Isn't 8 years a pretty brief lifespan for an LED bulb? What gives?
Probably more sloppy reporting.
The company website lists a lifespan of 25,000 hours - typical for LEDs. If left on for an 8 or 9 hour day, this works out to about 8 years.
In real life, the average use in homes is more like 2 to 4 hours per day, so these could last well over a decade under those circumstances.
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