Holy Leprechauns of Light! Images of the Green Team and Top 10 Green Lighting Tips! March 20, 2009

Behold ! Dr Z’s Magical Green Team! Aren’t they cute? Mr Y doesn’t think so.. Bugs Bugs! He hates bugs..These little cuties I found at the end of the rainbow and they know a thing or two about green(enviromentally friendly) lighting. Below is the top 10 green lighting tips. Zoinks!

 Dr Z

www.zbulbs.com

Top Green Lighting Tips

1. CFL: The better bulb
   Compact florescent bulbs (CFLs) are those swirley little guys that look like soft-serve ice cream cones. Actually, they come in a myriad of different shapes, sizes, and colors of light. Economically speaking, they’re a great deal, too. CFLs cost a bit more than an incandescent, but use about a quarter as much energy and last many times longer (usually around 10,000 hours). It is estimated that a CFL pays for its higher price after about 500 hours of use. After that, it’s money in your pocket. Also, because CFLs release less heat, not only are they safer, but your cooling load is less in the summer. CFLs aren’t hard to find anymore, and many cities will give them away for free. Wal-Mart has plans to sell 100 million of them.
2. Get the LEDs out
   LEDs are a definite TreeHugger favorite. LEDs, or light emitting diodes, are a technology that allows for extremely energy efficient and extremely long-lasting light bulbs. LEDs are just starting to hit the consumer market in a big (read affordable) way and still cost quite a bit more than even CFLs, but use even less energy and last even longer. An LED light bulb can reduce energy consumption by 80-90% and last around 100,000 hours. They even light up faster than regular bulbs (which could save your life it there are LEDs in the brake lights of your car). They are almost always more expensive presently, but we have seen the cost go down steadily. It’s no coincidence that the Millennium Technology Prize went to the inventor of the LED.Most LED lamps on the market have the bulbs built into them, so you buy the whole unit. For screw-in bulbs, check out Ledtronics, Mule, and Enlux. For desk lamps, check out a few affordable ones from Sylvania and Koncept. For more designer models, look at LEDs from Herman Miller and Knoll. Vessel rechargeable accent lamps represent some of the interesting new things LEDs can do as well.
3. Materials
   Light isn’t all about the bulbs, though. Having eco-friendly lamps and light fixtures is key to greening your lighting. When scouting for new gear, keep your eyes out for lamps made with natural, recycled, or reused materials. Lights made from recycled materials include metal, glass, or plastic, and natural materials can include felt, cloth or wood. Interesting lamps that use reclaimed materials include these made from traffic signal lenses, and these made from wine bottles. Also, don’t be shy about borrowing ideas for reuse in your own projects (see DIY).
4. Disposabulb
   Fluorescents last a long time, but when they’re dead, they have to be properly disposed of. CFLs, like all florescent bulbs, do contain a small amount of mercury, which means they definitely can’t be thrown in the trash. Every city has different services for recycling, so you’ll need to see what’s offered in your area. LEDs, to our knowledge, do not contain mercury, but the jury may still be out on how to best recycle them.
5. Wall warts
   Power adaptors, or “wall warts” as they’re affectionately called, are those clunky things you find on many electrical cords, including those attached to lamps and some light fixtures. You’ll notice that they stay warm even when their device is turned off. This is because they in fact draw energy from the wall all the time. One way to green your lighting is to unplug their wall warts when not in use, attached lights to a power strip and turn off the whole switch when not in use, or get your hands on a “smart” power strip that knows when the devise is off.
6. Daylighting
   By far, the best source of light we know is (yes, you guessed it) the sun, which gives off free, full-spectrum light all day. Make the most of daylight by keeping your blinds open (sounds obvious but you might be surprised). If you want to go a little farther, put in some skylights, or, of you are designing a home or doing a renovation, put as many windows on the south-facing side of the house as possible (or north-facing if you live in the southern hemisphere). To take it even further, sunlight can be “piped” inside via fiber optics and other light channeling technologies. [for more on light piping, check out: 1, 2, 3, 4]
7. Good habits
   As efficient as your lighting equipment might be, it doesn’t make sense to have lights on when no one’s around. Turn out lights in rooms or parts of the house where no one is. Teach your family and friends about it too and it will become second nature. If you want to get a little more exact, follow these rules:

   Standard incandescent: turn off even if you leave the room for just seconds. Compact fluorescent: turn off if you leave the room for 3 minutes. Standard fluorescent: turn off if you leave the room for 15 minutes.

8. Do-It-Yourself
   We’re always encouraging people to take matters into their own hands. So much great eco-innovation comes when people create the things they can’t find elsewhere. Lighting is an especially accessible and rewarding thing to tackle. For some inspiration, check out the Cholesterol lamp made from cast-off plastic egg cartons, and the recycled Tube Light. Strawbale building pioneer Glen Hunter made some LED fixtures when he couldn’t find any he liked on the market. Eurolite, the company from which he bought the lighting components, liked his designs so much they decided to sell them.
9. Dimmers and motion sensors
   Motion sensors can be a good way to keep lights turned off when they’re not needed, and dimmers can give you just the right amount of life, and timers can be set to turn things on and off when needed.
10. Get green power
    A great way to green your lighting is to buy green power. More and more electric utilities are offering customers a green power option on their bill. Signing up for green power usually means paying a few more dollars a month to support energy in the grid that comes from renewable sources like wind, solar, or biogas. For some more info on how to get green juice, look here, and for the greenest grids in the States, look here. More info is also available in How to Green Your Electricity.

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/go-green/green-lighting/green-lighting-top-tips.html

Another LED article this one from Scientific American! March 20, 2009

Dr.Z

www.zbulbs.com

LED There Be Light

More energy-efficient light-emitting diodes are rapidly becoming the preferred lighting solution worldwide

By David Biello

Torraca is a small village of 1,200 people in Italy. It is also the first place in the world to be totally illuminated by light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Representing a sea change, much like when electric lamps first graced London’s Holborn Viaduct back in 1878, some 700 streetlights (each containing 54 LEDS) now line Torraca’s arteries—and locales around the world, from Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium to the Raleigh Convention Center’s Shimmer Wall in North Carolina, have begun to use LEDs to light up the night.

“There are more than 30 installations like Torraca around the world,” says Mark McClear, director of business development at Durham, N.C.-based LED-maker Cree, Inc., which made the LEDs in Torraca’s streetlamps. “It’s growing weekly.”

The lightbulb of the future may just be a small piece of semiconductor. Rather than heating tungsten to at least 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit  (1,700 degrees Celsius) or exciting fluorescent gases, LEDs can produce lumens with less electricity. Diodes are composed of two conductive materials, such as silicon or germanium; the light-emitting variety uses materials such as gallium arsenide, which releases photons when electricity flows through it.

Such LED technology has been in electronics like calculators for decades, but remains too expensive to replace cheap incandescents. An LED version of a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb, for instance, still costs roughly $80 compared with around $3 for a traditional incandescent.

Cost has been the major obstacle for LEDs, which last up to as 50,000 hours (10 years if used 12 hours a day)—gradually dimming over time—compared with about 800 hours for a typical 100-watt incandescent. “The average bulb is on two hours a day. At that rate, an LED would last 136 years,” McClear says. “If you bought a fixture and only used it two hours a day, it would last longer than your house. It would last longer than you.”

Potential energy savings, however, appear to hold more sway with cities and building owners than cost. After all, some 22 percent of all electricity use in the U.S. is devoted to lighting, according to the U.S. Department of Energy—and switching to LEDs could save $280 billion by 2028. In fact, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., estimate that replacing incandescents with LEDs could save $1.83 trillion in energy costs globally over the next decade and eliminate the need for 280 1,000-megawatt power plants.

“Forcing electricity though a filament and heating it up to the point where it emits light, [is] horribly inefficient, on the order of 95 percent inefficient,” McClear says. “The best LEDs are on the order of 35 percent more efficient.”

Among those dazzled by LEDs: North Carolina State University in Raleigh, which last year installed 730 Cree LED lights in a dormitory building and saved 44 percent of the energy consumed by the fluorescent predecessors per day, according to the university. Discount chain Wal-Mart has replaced fluorescent light fixtures in its freezer sections with LEDs. And the City of Los Angeles plans to replace some 140,000 street lamps with LED fixtures by 2014 at a cost of $57 million, tapping some of its funding from the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.

New LED lights can put out the equivalent light of 100-watt incandescent while only consuming 13 watts of power. They also outlast equivalent compact fluorescent lightbulbs but use 50 percent less energy and skip the toxic mercury required as ballast. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 670 million such fluorescent lights end up in the trash yearly and release some two to four tons of mercury per annum into the environment.

Advances in the underlying technology have allowed Cree, for one, to boost output from a single one-square-millimeter diode to 161 lumens per watt. Partially as a result, the Federal Reserve is using LEDs for its overhead recessed lights and the Pentagon has installed some 4,200 LED fixtures to reduce energy costs and improve light quality, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Potential downsides: individual LEDs must be kept cool, and it may end up that the tiny fans in the multiple LED fixtures used to cool the lights will wear out long before the diodes. But manufacturers, including Brite Components, Cree, General Electric, Lighting Science Group, Osram and Philips say they are working to offset that problem.

Nevertheless, LEDs will not replace all lightbulbs, because they produce light in only one direction, like a laser, rather than illuminating an area. To fill that lighting need, some companies are creating organic LEDs, or OLEDs, that emit light in all directions and are already used in advanced televisions and other screens.

Such OLEDs—diodes made from organic material such as polyacetylene rather than semiconducting metals—may prove an even more intriguing future solution, because they can be crafted into ceiling panels or even windows (they are often translucent) and are potentially even more efficient at producing light (though not yet). BASF and Osram, for example, have achieved a white OLED capable of 60 lumens per watt. Others have achieved 100 lumens per watt in the laboratory, according to Barry Young, managing director of the OLED Association.

Unfortunately, such an OLED light panel at this point would cost at least $75 per square foot ($800 per square meter) and is not commercially available yet, Young says. But he believes the price tag can be significantly reduced by using plastic polymers and other cheap substances in lieu of glass. OLED lights are likely to become available as soon as 2011, according to a report from display consultants at the firm DisplaySearch in Austin, Tex. “It’s likely to last longer [than LED fixtures] because it doesn’t have anything to fail and it also doesn’t have a lot of heat,” Young says. “It won’t generate the kind of heat that you would in an LED from the standpoint of air-conditioning.”

But even Young believes that LEDs and OLEDs will likely coexist, serving different functions: LEDs will likely replace incandescents whereas OLEDs might light the offices of the future in the form of glowing ceiling panels or windows that light up as the sun sets. “It’s happening faster than anybody thought it would or could,” Cree’s McClear says. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to do anything that’s not green.”

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=led-there-be-light