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Happy Earth Day! One small change you can make to improve the earth today would be to switch out your incandescent bulbs with energy efficient LED's.
What are LED's:
LED's are Light-Emitting Diode's formed by the joining of semiconductors. Originally only bright enough to be used as indicator lights, LED materials have advanced enough to the point where they can now be used as a highly efficient lighting source. Why? How? What have you? Read on my interested eco-friend...
1. Save money:
How long do they last in comparison to incandescent bulbs? A regular 60watt incandescent bulb lasts 1,000 hours as compared to a 2watt LED bulb which will last 30,000 hours. Yup, I did write thirty-thousand. If you compare that in nickels, to light an area for 30,000 hours with a 60watt incandescent bulb, you will spend $20 (60 bulbs at $.67 each). The LED will cost you $35 for one bulb BUT ONLY cost you $40 in electricity use over the 30,000 hours while the 60watt bulb will cost you $200 for 30,000 hours of light (at $.10/kWhour). That saves you $159 over the lifetime of the bulb!
2. Improve our Atmosphere, less garbage to landfill:
All that money saved doesn't include how many less incandescent bulbs/packaging you will throw into a landfill. Let's save the landfill space for crap that really needs to go into it. "If every U.S. household replaced just one standard 60 watt bulb with a CC Vivid LED bulb, we could save 24,184,400,000 watts or 24,184.4 mega (million) watts per day. National savings information based on 103,000,000 households with an average use of 4 hrs per day per house. One of the largest power plants in the U.S. could be eliminated as a result of each U.S. household replacing just one standard 60 watt bulb with a LED Light bulb." (source: www.ccrane.com)
3. Health Benefits of LED's:
The use of LED lighting can even improve your health. From ScienceNews.org "Mariana G. Figueiro of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center in nearby Troy, N.Y., uses colored light at night to aid elderly institutionalized patients. An early evening treatment from some 50 blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) coaxes a person's fractured sleep into solid, nightlong slumber. Elsewhere, researchers are experimenting with color-tuned light to perk up the body, improve visual acuity, and even reduce depression. Such techniques all stem from an emerging realization that for the body, light's role extends well beyond vision."
That's three good reasons to switch out your lightbulbs to LED's. If you do one thing this Earth Day 2008, switch out one of your incandescent bulbs with an LED.
TerraLUX LED Lightbulb Upgrades are available at Toolking.com for $14.99
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There are other factors also this article does not mention...the direct nature of LED light, the harshness of it, that there are no good difusers available yet, etc.
Someday LEDs will replace our bulbs, but not for a number of years--don't mislead people on what they can get!