The Myths of LED Lighting corrected by InStyle LED
There are many myths about LED lighting so today we will take a look at some of those popular myths and set the record straight.
LED’s do not last!
This is an untrue statement but one that is not written very well either as we all know nothing lasts forever, LED’s will not last forever but they will last much longer than the more traditional forms of lighting. LED lights will last much longer because they do not generate that much heat unlike incandescent bulbs which get very hot meaning they burn out and expire quickly.
With an LED bulb that uses a well-designed thermal management system it should last for 50,000 hours which works out to be around 20 times longer than incandescent bulbs and 10 times longer than fluorescent tubes.
LED’s do not produce heat!
LED’s not producing any heat is a very popular myth, but as discussed in the above myth LED’s do in fact produce some heat, just not on the levels of the incandescent or fluorescent lights that get very hot indeed. LED’s do not output infrared which is what makes the light source hot and heats up the air around the bulb and the bulb itself. However the LED’s still creates some heat when the electricity is converted to light, so to to ensure the performance and longevity of the bulb the heat has to be removed. With well designed LED lighting the heat is always drawn away using a thick PCB board or Heat sink.
LED are not bright!
Lets look back 10 years and you asked the question are LED lights as bright then the answer would’ve been no they are not, but today LED’s a very bright if not brighter than their traditional counterpart.
The reason for this myth is that we are used to measuring our bulb brightnesses using wattage (i.e. A 50w bulb is half the brightness as a 100w bulb), so as an LED has a lower wattage this would naturally mean that the light will not be as bright, but this is not true at all. Watts are a measurement of energy consumption and do not give us the amount of light that will in fact be outputted from the bulb, this measurement gauge worked with incandescent bulbs as the only way to increase the light output was to increase its wattage.
LED’s are more energy efficient than other types of lighting meaning they can in fact produce more light per watt of energy, resulting in a low wattage high output bulb.
LED’s do not save energy!
Yes LED’s do save energy, as mentioned above you have to look at the wattage. A halogen bulb uses 50 watts and an average LED bulb only uses about 5 watts, so as you can see this is already a huge saving in the amount of energy that is being used, and if you multiply that with the amount of bulb you use in your house you can see the reduction of energy being used by using the LED lights instead.
Another factor to consider is the efficiency of the light source, which means you have to look at the amount of light that is being produced by the amount of watts that is being used to produce it. which is also known as the lumen-to-watt ratio (lm/w). What this means is that a bulb which can produce more light from each watt will save more energy than one that cannot produce as many lumens per watt. LED’s are much more efficient producing 50 lumens per watt while halogen bulbs only producing 6 lumens per watt, so not only do LED’s use less energy they are much for efficient at the energy into light
