LED Lightings Advantages and Disadvantages

LED lighting (the abbreviation of light-emitting diode) is a very hot topic nowadays. It came out firstly in 1962 as a electronic components emitting only red color light. There is not a long time before creation of the first blue LED in 1993. It is regarded as the very beginning of a new era of artificial lighting, which makes the white light possible and then be largely applied for both residential and commercial purposes.

 

At present the white-light LED you can find in the market are mostly made by using a blue-emitting diode and a yellow-emitting phosphor embedded in the epoxy dome.

 

LED lighting offers a huge variety of advantages as the most energy-efficient way so far. However there are also challenges faced by those devices. Here, in no particular order, we list some of the main advantages and disadvantages of LEDs for your reference.

 

1. Long Life

As solid-state light sources, LED diodes have a life time expectation of up to 100,000 hours while LED lighting lamps 40,000 hours due to limitations of power driver nowadays. It is amazing and it indicates, for a typical LED lamp, 4.6 years of continuous operation without relamping, or 9 years of 50% operation.

 

A well-designed LED lighting lamp (eg. a T8 18w LED tube light) can reach 50,000 hours lifespan, which may last longer under a suitable operation temperature and thermal management.

 

By the way, the performance of LEDs degrades over time just like many other light sources, and the term lifespan for a LED lamp indicates commonly the time taken for the LED’s output to fail to 70% of its original value.

 

2. Energy Efficiency

LEDs are the most energy efficient way of artificial lighting and illumination by far. Take a typical T8 18W LED tube light for an instance, it has an estimated energy saving of 60-80% when compared to traditional lighting and conventional light bulbs, which means up to 80% electric fee reduction when retrofitting your inflorescent bulbs with LED lighting products while no loss of quality light.

 

3. Super Brightness

Based on today LED technologies, a LED lamp can make efficacy of about 100lm/w (180lm/w or more on LED chip level whilesal ). It makes great sense when compared with efficacy of 15lm/w from those traditional lighting and conventional light bulbs. Think of a 60w LED flood light bulb, it delivers about 6000lm luminous flux while a 60w incandescent bulb will make only 900 lumens.

 

4. Heat & Thermal Management

As we all know, most conventional bulbs create large amount of heats with 80-90% electric energy be converted into heat energy in the forms of infrared radiation. LEDs do not produce heat in the form of IR radiation, which allows LED fixtures to be positioned where radiant heating would cause particular problems e.g. illuminating textiles and handicraft articles.

 

On the other hand LEDs do produce heat at the semiconductor junction during its operation. If no effective thermal management junction temperature of LED chips will rise till it reaches its critical point and then permanent damage occurs. This is why each well-designed LED lighting product would have a heavy and big heatsink.

 

5. Low Maintenance:

The long lifespan of LEDs reduces the needs to replace failed lamps, and this can lead to significant savings, particularly in relatively inaccessible locations where e.g. lighting fixtures are installed highly to the ceiling of large scale buildings like logistics center or warehouse,

 

6. Flexibility in Design

LEDs can be very small (mm as measure unit), and as electronic components, they can be encapsulated into a huge variety in shape and size to create highly efficient illuminations. Individual LED bead may have one or more chips inside, and it can be dimmed, color-changing or other lighting effects easily with special circuit design. Well-designed LED illumination systems can achieve amazingly uniform lighting ambience, and fantastic lighting effects for both your residential and commercial settings.

 

7. Instant Lighting & Frequent Switching

LED lights bright up immediately and reach its 100% brightness once power on. And as electronic products, LED lights can be switched on and off frequently without affecting their lifetime or light emission. In contrast, traditional lighting may take several seconds to reach full brightness, and frequent on/off switching does drastically reduce operational life expectancy.

  

8. Low Voltage Driven

LEDs are designed as low-voltage driven light sources at first. They need extra power sources to provide constant current for driving, and indeed this make the total efficacy of the LED lamps lower. It is a challenge for LED manufacturers to make AC-driven LEDs which make the totally efficacy hit a a new record in our artificial lighting histories if success.

 

9. Eco-friendly

Unlike most conventional fluorescent lighting bulbs, LED lights contain no toxic materials e.g. mercury. They are 100% recyclable and do help us to reduce the carbon footprint by up to 35%. The long operational lifespan also make LED light a smart way to save our planet.

 

10. Cost

Cost of LED lightings will be the most focused point. In the past two or three years, LED lighting lamp impressed people with a high initial cost while good ROI comparing to those conventional light sources. With the development of LED technologies and what’s more, efforts from LED manufacturers to reduce their production costs while at the same time increasing the light output of their devices, LED lighting lamps are accepted by the market gradually with dramatically lower prices.

 

Also online wholeslae LED lighting shop provides an easy way to access the most saving devices by squeezing out benefits of middlemen.

 

Despite all the points above, LED lighting has more advantages than disadvantages, and with the development of LED technology and efforts from LED manufacturers like us, the LEDs will finally step into our daily lives with more and more advantages and benefits, so make sure your go LED and save both the planet – and your money!