Chinese manufacturer logo - surfing babies what?! - are you kidding me??

I just got an email in our inbox today. We get spammed about 5x a day from different manufacturers in China trying to get us to sell THEIR LED products. This one was particularly funny since it DID get my attention, but not in a good way, with their attached logo of a chinese baby “catching a wave”. (I can’t make this stuff up people)

The emails generally consist of a Dear sir/madam - followed by extremely broken English, with an attached pricelist asking us to consider them to be our manufacturer.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dear Sir,
This is Vickey  who come from Shenzhen *** ,LTD .I am kindly know you are in the market of LED lights.I would like to indroduce our comapny and products to you ,Hope to we could build business relatioship in 2009.”

I left the spelling errors in there on purpose. Do they REALLY expect us to buy their products, if the first sentence in their email is plagued with grammatical and spelling errors?

There are literally hundreds of new manufacturers in China trying to jump on the LED bandwagon, and make LED light bulbs. The question is what % of them are complete garbage?. We’ve taken the time to contact a number of manufacturers and tested their products thoroughly, before deciding on who to go with which is why we can offer a 2 year warranty and 30 day guarantee.

Once again, buyer beware - there’s a ton of new websites cropping up selling LED lights, at LOW prices. Their manufacturer can very well be the one who can’t even hire someone who speaks english, or uses surfing chinese babies in their logo…would you spend $40-$100 with them?

Anyone else seen some questionable websites? We’ll be happy to scope them out and give you the lowdown.

Announcing our new 3rd Generation LED Light Bulbs

We are extremely excited to announce our newest 3rd Generation LED Light bulbs! After weeks of testing we’ve found the brightest LED bulbs on the planet.

How do we know these are the brightest? We got a bunch of samples from manufacturers from all around the world and put them through weeks of testing. The following are the winners that are not only the brightest but have the best bang for the buck.

2nd generation LED bulbs use a big hunk of metal to cool them. This isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that it makes them expensive - and price is one of the biggest factors in getting people to adopt LED lighting. Our new bulbs are different as follows:

Quanta-18 and Quanta-9 - Uses shatterproof plastic and air-cooling technology to make them feather light and cool to the touch as well as cost MUCH less than comparable 2nd generation LED light bulbs from other manufacturers.

Chromia-6 - No more all metal heatsink - just metal fins that provide much more surface area for cooling similar to those used in the newest computer processors (CPU’s)

Hydralux-4 - This is the first LED bulb in the world to use LIQUID COOLING technology, so half the bulb isn’t covered with the metal heatsink anymore unlike other LED globes, and you get light ALL AROUND, instead of just off the top half.

Check out Eternaleds.com for more detailed descriptions, and as always real-life side by side application photos so you can see how these bulbs compare to their incandescent equivalents!

What can you make for a buck?

Oh how I envy the hope and naivety of the young. Kids that have yet to experience the real world and think that they can save the world by turning garbage into art. In this case, it’s a required part of their curriculum, so it’s for a worthy cause, namely getting them a degree. This is a nice gallery of things that you can make for “a dollar” which you definitely can’t get an led light bulb for at the moment. It’s a good idea, but probably not something that I would spend money on. Though if it is in fact, one dollar, then I guess it would be worth it.

I would have enjoyed doing something like this back when I was in school, but my extent of recycling was turning a juice box into a bomb…It’s like the Zoolander concept brought to life….Mugatu’s Derelict.

Design for a Dollar Challenge [Via Fast Company]

California Edison's Lighting Technology Center

Just paid a visit to California Edison over here in Southern California. They’re one of the few utility companies who are taking an ACTIVE role, in LED technology and have an LED testing lab that has been testing LED MR16 bulbs from about 60 different LED manufacturers for about 6 months now. They’re just about finished and we’ll be getting a copy of the report and we’ll be sure to share the results here on the blog!

I was able to dig a little bit and find out some VERY interesting things they’ve learned so far from the past 6 months:

• The range of quality of bulbs varied WIDELY
• “Warm White” can look very different from one manufacturer to the next
• About 60% of the bulbs purchased have either DIED or been removed from the test (because their light output dropped to less than 70%)
• Some manufacturers offered NO warranty *SCARY*

Overall, it seems that many fly-by-night manufacturers are cropping up (mostly in China), but only a handful are creating quality products - as the saying goes - you get what you pay for…

Image Source: http://www.sce.com

Super cool 21W bulb with an insane heatsink

Sorry guys, for the lack of updates. We’ve been VERY busy looking for some new manufacturers and new products. LED light bulbs and the technology that powers them is changing so fast, I’d almost say that the ones you’ve seen online 1 year ago are already obsolete.

The biggest advance we’ve seen is with heatsinking technology. Since LED dies/chips only get marginally better, the only other thing that manufacturers can do is cluster more LED’s together, and drive them harder.

More power means more heat, so they’re forced to come up with some insane heatsink designs (they’re starting to look like computer CPU heatsinks). I wonder if any CPU heatsink manufacturers are making LEDs……

The guy you see on your left is a whopping 21W LED floodlight that is DIMMABLE and is meant to replace about a 100W incandescent flood. 80% savings and it lasts 10x longer…NICE. Price? Well, let’s see if we can get them over here and we promise you we’ll get the lowest price possible.

So stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated on our status in the hunt for better, brighter LED bulbs. What’s the most common bulb you’d like to replace in your home or store? Floodlights? Halogen or Globes? Leave a comment and let us know…

What if Starbucks switched to LED Lighting?

In a recurring post we plan to do, analyzing the impact of large chain stores on the environment, I thought I’d start off with analyzing how much energy and money my local Starbucks could save by switching over to LED lighting. They have a ton “recessed lights” as well as track lights that could all be retro-fitted with LED spotlight bulbs.

In Summary:

56 bulbs running at 17 hours a day (6am - 11pm):

Total Cost to convert to LED:$5,620

1st Year Savings in Electricity and Bulb Costs: $3372.14

Total Time to Payback: 1.7 years

Total Savings over 8 Years (LED’s last 50,000 hours): $26,347.56

Number of Years until LED’s need to be replaced: 8.1

Total CO2 emissions reduced over 8.1 years: 200,880 lbs.

What if ALL the Starbucks Stores in the US (11,434) switched over to LED lighting:

They would save $38,557,099.98 PER YEAR in electricity and bulb costs and reduce CO2 emissions by about 285,000,000 lbs. PER YEAR.

Anyone work at Starbucks? What an impact Starbucks could have both on the world and on their bottom line…

Click here to see the full report…(first page)

[Click here to see the full article.]

Make: Magazine, one of my favorite mags, and subsequently the website, has a really cool and informative movie on the history of LEDs. Did you know the first LED was actually a rock? Yeah, me neither. They also give a quick tutorial on how LED lights work and how to make a simple circuit. Go check it out and learn a thing or two thing Monday morning. At least you’ll know who Nick Holonyak, Jr. is the next time you Trivial Pursuit.

[Make via Gizmodo]

$75 or $2? How much would you pay?

So with the economy in a downturn, it seems that EVERYONE is cutting down on spending now. Lighting included. By now most people know LED’s are AWESOME in termss of energy savings, money savings, environmental benefits but many still aren’t spending the money.

LED bulbs right now range anywhere from $10 (of the Ebay variety) to $150 across the internet. The ONLY way they’re going to get cheaper is simple supply and demand. If there aren’t enough people buying, then manufacturers won’t be able to sell enough quantities to bring prices down. So it seems the path to adoption is sell to large-scale projects like hotels, office buildings, chain restaurants, that can retrofit their fixtures with bulbs like this LED PAR38 (since they use & save the MOST energy) to bring prices low enough to the point where average homeowners can afford LED lighting.

A couple manufacturers and large distributors I’ve spoken to recently have been focusing on targeting large scale projects, government projects (street lighting, government buildings, universities etc.). This makes sense since they’re not as price sensitive and can actually SEE the savings on their final bill by switching out hundreds, if not thousands of light bulbs that are on typically 12 to 24 hours a day.

Now average Joe-Six-Pack *wink*, by switching out 1 or 2 bulbs or even 10 bulbs in his home won’t really see a huge difference. So it seems the strategy for most people/consumers is to “sit and wait till the price drops”. But to how low? How much would YOU pay?

Powered by rice....kinda.

Imagine a world where you could have a coat or a bag that has solar panels on it that would charge your gadgets while you were using it. What, that’s already been done? Well, sure but what I meant was have it done it a way that doesn’t scream “uber-nerd”. I mean how do we expect Lindsey Lohan to wear something that’s ugly?

Well, this technology may be it. It’s a solar cell that is created using tiny solar cells(1/4 the size of a grain of rice) that can potentially be put into a solution and sprayed on various material like a car, a house, your head, etc. and produces a seemingly unheard of amount of energy for the size/power ratio. Not only that, but they plan to double the power in just a few months. So potentially you could just walk around with one of these LED PAR30 bulbs in your backpack to bring light everywhere you go. I can’t wait for my hawaiian-shirt-powered laptop in the next few years.

[Via Reuters]