LED Lighting for the home

Following up on my question about using LED lighting in the home, I thought I’d create advice for anyone else who is thinking of installing this type of lighting system in their home.

LED stands for Light-Emitting Diode and is a small but powerful light source. To attest to the power of the LED, it is used in electronic signage, those massive screens that we see at sporting venues, and in our modern flat panel LED screens. Some other funky uses can be seen in the images on the right.

The LED’s come in red, green, and blue lights; but these can be combined to create any other colour such as normal white light which is just perfect for the home!

There are several advantages and disadvantages for using LED lights in your home as opposed to the normal incandescent light bulbs.

Advantages include:

• LEDs are energy savers as they produce more light per watt compared to incandescent light bulbs
  
• As they are energy savers, it means you will spend less on electricity
  
• If you have light dimmers in the house, LED’s won’t change in colour when it is lowered, where as incandescent lights have a yellow tint when they are being dimmed.
  
• Don’t damage as easily if they are dropped on the ground
  
• They have a long usage life cycle – they have 35-50 times more life than incandescents and have between 5000 and 20,000 more life than fluorescent lights
  

Disadvantages include:

• LED’s are currently expensive at the moment as they are new to the market
  
• The performance of the light depends on the temperature of the operating environment. Overheating does lead to failure.
  
• There is a concern that blue and white LEDs exceed the safe limits of ‘blue light hazard’
  
• The state-of-the-art white light spectrum of the white LEDs can maked coloured objects different under the LED.
  
• * Some people say they do not give good area light

My opinion is that these LED lights seem to have good face value, but I would probably wait a little bit until it is more established in the market so prices drop and more research can be done on these lights in order to fix all the current problems and concerns about these lights like the ‘blue light hazard’.